German far right shows an unlikely affinity for Communist China
- China has embraced the relationship with the Alternative for Germany party, which sent a high-ranking delegation to Beijing and Shanghai in June
- The party, which has defended Beijing’s actions in the Taiwan Strait and its human rights record, has been accused of homophobia, racism and neo-Nazism
Germany’s “most China-friendly party” wants its government to stop meddling in Beijing’s “internal affairs” on human rights.
It demands that Berlin’s ruling coalition stop “fuelling provocation” in the Taiwan Strait. It panned the new German China strategy as “an attempt to impose green-woke ideology and US geopolitical interests”. It wants closer ties with China instead of the “virtue signalling” of de-risking.
It is also Germany’s fastest-growing political party, and its identity might be surprising.
Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far right party, is currently polling at 21 per cent nationally, just five points behind the Christian Democratic Union, the party of Angela Merkel, and three points ahead of the Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Founded in 2013 in opposition to EU bailouts of the likes of Greece and Portugal, its popularity has been bolstered through hardline anti-immigrant and anti-green positions, at a time when Germany languishes in recession and struggles to tamp down persistent inflation.
As its popularity soars, the party’s murky ties with fringe elements have brought accusations of homophobia, racism and even neo-Nazism. The AfD has been widely criticised for echoing Russian propaganda throughout the war in Ukraine.
“It’s quite a young party, only 10 years old,” said Benjamin Hoehne, a professor of political science at the University of Munster who specialises in populist movements.
“So it’s in a consolidation, institutionalisation and professionalisation process. There are competing wings, but we see a strong tendency that the far right wing within the AfD has captured the party as a whole.”
On foreign policy, however, the self-anointed “most exciting right-wing party in all Europe” is making moves on an unlikely bedfellow: the world’s biggest Communist Party.
“The AfD seems to be the most friendly German party to China,” said Gu Xuewu, the chair of international relations at the University of Bonn. “And Beijing might have realised it too.”
In a historic first, the AfD sent a high-ranking delegation to Beijing and Shanghai for a week-long visit in June. Lawmaker Peter Felser went on the trip and said it was “highly successful and positive”.
“We had the opportunity to talk to significant representatives of business, science and politics,” Felser said, while declining to name people the delegation met with.
The party headquarters did not respond to requests for a list of meetings. The Bundestag does not require detailed disclosures about who its members meet on foreign visits.
“It was particularly impressive to learn how well informed the people we met were about the situation in Germany and especially about the recent successes of our party,” Felser said. “We are looking forward to further developing these contacts.”
Also travelling were Alice Weidel, the AfD co-chair, and Peter Bystron, the party’s foreign policy spokesman.
A fluent Mandarin speaker, Weidel lived in China for six years, completing a doctoral thesis on the Chinese pension system and working as a Goldman Sachs and Bank of China economist.
Her background, as part of the global financial elite the AfD typically rails against, jars with the traditional view of the German far right – as does her personal life.
Weidel lives in Switzerland in a civil partnership with a Sri Lankan-born woman and two adopted children. This does not stop her, however, from toeing the party line on social issues. She has opposed same-sex marriage and branded immigrants as “illiterate”.
Chinese state media did not report the AfD visit, suggesting it was not something the government wanted to publicly promote.
Perhaps the highest-profile nod the party has received in Chinese officialdom came from former deputy foreign minister Fu Ying, who criticised its absence from last year’s Munich Security Conference.
“Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was not invited to the meeting, and even the Alternative for Germany party, which held a different position, was turned away. Such an arrangement made the meeting a place for one side to express its emotions and attitudes,” Fu wrote in The Paper, a state-affiliated newspaper based in Shanghai.
For the AfD, however, the trip was an important step towards securing international legitimacy.
“They’re getting something from China that they haven’t necessarily had before, except for Russia, which is international recognition,” said Katja Drinhausen, a scholar of China’s governance system at the Mercator Institute for China Studies.
“They’re being treated as not just equal [to the more established parties], but welcome representatives of Germany in a way that maybe many of them haven’t really experienced before.”
Beijing has, however, given the AfD ample airtime to promote views on German-China relations that closely align with its own.
Along with Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, two Irish members of the European Parliament’s Left Group, the most prominent MEP on Chinese propaganda organs is possibly Maximilian Krah, the AfD’s lead candidate for next year’s European elections.
They, too, are unlikely fellow travellers, but their alignment evokes a phenomenon known as the horseshoe theory, popularised by the French political philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye. It suggests that despite ostensibly coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, the far left and right agree on many issues.
Last year, in remarks that could easily have been made by either Wallace or Daly, Krah told the Global Times, a nationalist paper affiliated with People’s Daily, that “decoupling from China would serve only the interests of America and damage our own industry severely. This is not about democracy or human rights, it is about the future conflict between Washington and Beijing.”
Earlier in the year, he told Guancha, a platform popular with Chinese nationalists, that the country should not “seek reconciliation” with the West on the issue of human rights.
“There are so many outstanding scholars in China, and I know you are studying the theories of the great German jurist Carl Schmitt. It seems to me that studying his views will lead you to the right conclusions,” said Krah, in remarks that would be unlikely to be echoed by the left, referring to the prominent Nazi who helped facilitate Hitler’s rise to power.
Krah did not respond to an interview request, but his views have upset some of the party rank and file.
“I never joined the AfD to lick the boots of some Communist Party. That is, for me a total no go,” said Nicolaus Fest, an AfD member of the European Parliament. “I’m not a big fan of regimes from the other side of the political spectrum either.”
The AfD’s surge in the polls comes amid soaring inflation, rising illegal immigration and political polarity that has deepened through the pandemic and Ukraine war, which has seen continental Europe take a bracing turn to the right.
Other right-wing populists, such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Spain’s Vox Party, have criticised Beijing on issues from Taiwan to zero-Covid.
The AfD stands out for its broadly pro-China stance. Experts and insiders suggest this is due to a mixture of economic factors and the magnetism of illiberal regimes to far-right thinkers.
“I would say there is a kind of fascination in the AfD towards non-democratic systems, to say it in a diplomatic way, because we can also see delegations and visits to Russia, of MPs from the Bundestag and state parliaments” said Hoehne, the academic.
China may be Communist, but its world view appeals to some right-wing hardliners, said Drinhausen. “At its core, the Communist Party is conservative,” she said.
“The hard leftists within China are in many ways much closer to European conservatives when it comes to top down governance, strong leaders in strong positions, putting the economy first, thinking about the collective good, having this nationalist streak, and being quite anti-woke and anti-individual,” she said.
“So there’s in a sense politically more overlap between the AfD and the CCP than the Left Party and the CCP.”
Felser, the AfD lawmaker, said: “There is no left-right ‘conflation’ because in our view foreign policy and international trade should not be subject to ideology at all.
“There are about 5,000 German medium-size enterprises actively engaged in China. For our nation, having positive economic relations with China is a matter of realism, pragmatism and national interest and not a question of moral attitude,” he said.
As for China, building a relationship with the fastest-growing party in Europe’s most powerful economy is an easy choice.
“For the Chinese Communist Party, it doesn’t really matter if it is right or left, or black or white. They reach out to all parties across the political spectrum,” Drinhausen said.
“They cultivate contacts in the hopes that even fringe groups come to power one day, become the mainstream and make policies in their countries. And as it’s looking right now with the AfD that they have made a fairly good bet.”
Additional reporting by Xinlu Liang