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’.

The British government has accused the EU of double standards after Ireland promised to send asylum seekers to Britain despite France’s refusal to take back migrants crossing the Channel.

The row erupted after Irish ministers said they would prepare emergency legislation to send back refugees from Britain to avoid deportation to Rwanda.

But Conservative ministers have dismissed the proposal as a ‘losing proposition’ because they are unable to send asylum seekers arriving in small boats across the Channel back to France.

A British government source told The Telegraph: “We will not accept the return of asylum seekers from the EU via Ireland until the EU recognises that we can send them back to France. We are fully focused on implementing our Rwanda plan and will continue to work with the French to stop boats crossing the Channel”.

Yesterday the Daily Mail reported that international students, workers and visitors were seeking asylum to stay in the UK through the ‘back door’.

Figures obtained by the newspaper show that 21,525 asylum claims were made by visa holders in the year to March 2023, an annual increase of 154 per cent.

London-Paris readmission deal invalid

On Monday, the Home Office will begin detaining asylum seekers for deportation to Rwanda. The government hopes the first flights will take place in the summer.

Last week, Foreign Secretary David Cameron said a readmission deal with France to help crack down on people-smuggling gangs and stop people making the dangerous journey across the Channel would be “impossible” after Brexit.

According to the minister, the current situation means that the agreement in place when he was Prime Minister, which saw migrants returned to France on arrival in the UK, cannot be repeated.

Ireland: Asylum claims rise because of Rwanda plan

Last week, Irish Deputy Prime Minister Michael Martin said that the UK’s Rwanda policy was affecting Ireland “because people are afraid to stay in the UK and are seeking asylum in Ireland instead”.

Following Harris’ comments, Irish Justice Minister Helen McEntee appeared on national broadcaster RTE on Sunday to discuss the plan to send asylum seekers back to Britain.

Irish Taoiseach Simon Harris has asked for the proposals to be put to his cabinet this week as he faces mounting public pressure over rising immigration figures.

Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, is expected to meet senior Irish officials on Monday to clarify London’s position.

Pre-Brexit asylum structure no longer in place

Before Brexit, the return of migrants to EU countries was governed by the Dublin Convention, under which migrants could be returned to a safe third country through which they had passed before reaching their destination.

This meant that asylum seekers travelling from the UK to Ireland or migrants arriving in the UK from France could be returned if it could be shown that they had passed through a safe third country, i.e. the UK or France.

However, the UK abandoned this practice when it left the EU and no follow-up agreement was signed during the Brexit negotiations, meaning that there is no formal readmission agreement between EU countries and the UK.

There was, however, a post-Brexit agreement between the UK and Ireland that allowed Ireland to return asylum seekers to the UK.

However, the Irish High Court ruled last month that the Irish government’s declaration of the UK as a ‘safe third country’ to which it could return asylum seekers was unlawful because of the Rwanda Bill. The government’s emergency bill seeks to overturn this ruling.

European stock markets had their worst day in nine months as a wave of selling that began with fading hopes of a rapid cut in US interest rates spread across the globe.

Indices in Europe and Asia fell sharply, following steep falls on Wall Street on Monday after strong US retail sales figures showed the Federal Reserve may cut interest rates less this year than previously thought.

Across the region, the Stoxx Europe 600 fell 1.5 per cent, its biggest one-day drop since July last year. Energy groups, banks and miners represented in the commodity-heavy index led the declines in Europe, while London’s FTSE 100 fell 1.8 per cent, its worst day in nine months.

Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 index closed down 0.2 per cent, while the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 0.1 per cent after steeper falls in the previous session. On Friday and Monday, the S&P 500 recorded its worst two-day losing streak since the regional banking crisis in March 2002.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng, South Korea’s Kospi and Japan’s Topix all lost more than 2%, while China’s CSI 300 fell 1.1%.

Emerging market currencies also weakened against the dollar on expectations of fewer US rate cuts, prompting intervention by Asian central banks such as Indonesia and South Korea.

As changing interest rate expectations hit currency markets, the Indonesian rupiah fell 2 per cent against the dollar to 16,176 rupiah, its lowest level in four years.

Bank Indonesia Governor Perry Warjiyo said on Tuesday that the central bank had stepped in to support the rupiah, which has fallen about 5 per cent this year and is one of Asia’s worst-performing currencies.

The Indian rupee also fell 0.2 per cent against the dollar to a record low of 83.64 rupees, while the Malaysian ringgit traded near a 26-year low, down 0.3 per cent, a day after the country’s central bank said it would “manage risks from increased financial market volatility”.

The Korean won also fell 0.9 per cent to a 17-month low, and the finance ministry and the Bank of Korea said in a joint statement on Tuesday that they were ‘closely monitoring foreign exchange movements and supply and demand with special attention’.