The Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is second in the polls in Germany, has once again declared that it wants to abolish the EU in its current form and turn it into a confederation of nation states with limited power, as it kicked off the European Parliament (EP) elections on Saturday 27 April.
“The AfD wants to strengthen our national sovereignty and limit the power of the EU to what is necessary and useful,” Marc Jongen, AfD candidate for the EP and a leading figure in shaping the party’s ideology, told Euractiv.
According to Jongen, the EU is turning into a “European superstate” that “will no longer be a democracy and will turn Germany into Europe’s permanent trustee”.
Maximilian Krah, the party’s candidate for the European Parliament, whose deputy was recently arrested for allegedly ‘spying for China’, did not attend the meeting.
It then emerged that the public prosecutor’s office in Dresden was investigating Krah on suspicion of receiving illegal Russian and Chinese payments. Krah rejected the allegations as ‘unfounded assumptions and insinuations’.
Strengthening national sovereignty instead of ‘Dexit’
Recently, the party seems to have moved away from the idea of Germany leaving the EU (Dexit). Instead, the AfD has defined new strategies for ‘rethinking Europe’ and creating a ‘European confederation of nations’.
According to its election manifesto, the AfD wants to work with the Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the EP, which includes Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) in France and the League in Italy, against the ‘steady erosion of the sovereignty of nation states’.
“We are not anti-European, […] but we don’t want this EU anymore,” said co-president Tino Chrupalla on Saturday.
Yes to the single market, no to harmonisation projects
The party’s basic concept is to abolish most of the EU’s harmonisation projects while preserving the EU’s single market, which is profitable for Germany. The campaign claims that the current EU will be replaced by a new European Economic and Interest Community without ‘the EU’s drive for further centralisation and paternalism’.
In the medium term, the party aims to ‘abolish the undemocratically elected European Parliament’.
Until the EU is transformed into the confederation of nation states it seeks, it proposes that legislative power should be transferred to the European Council and decisions should be guided by national parliaments.
Exit the euro, return to the deutschmark
However, the dismantling of the EU was not the main theme of the conference. Opposition to climate change, migration and gender policies were the main focus of the meeting.
The AfD wants to restore ‘the self-determination of EU member states in asylum and migration policy’ and favours European coordination and shared costs for the protection of external borders for a ‘Fortress Europe’.
Opposition to the euro and the eurozone continues to underpin the AfD’s monetary policy, which it describes as a “failure”. “A new Deutsche Mark can regain its higher purchasing power compared to other countries,” the party’s manifesto reads.
Good relations with Eurasian Economic Union and Belt and Road
The party also sees the EU and German climate change targets as a nuisance and a danger to the German economy. They are sceptical about the consequences of excessive CO2 emissions and the idea of climate change, and advocate the abolition of all European and national climate protection measures.
In foreign policy, the MEPs, led by Maximilian Krah, want to rebalance towards Russia and China in return for the ‘greater sovereignty’ that Germany has gained vis-à-vis the US. Economic sanctions against Russia would be lifted and Germany’s relations with the Eurasian Economic Union would be expanded.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) also finds strong support in the programme. The AfD says it is ‘committed to Germany’s proactive participation in shaping the programme on the basis of equality’.
