Donald Trump, who not that long ago accused China of meddling in U.S. elections, has no such qualms about meddling in the elections of our liberal democratic allies. POLITICO Europe reports:
U.S. President Donald Trump has congratulated Alternative for Germany (AfD) Tuesday for its landslide victory in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the far-right party won nearly 44 percent of the votes on Sunday.
“Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly.” He concluded his message with a German variant of his Make America Great Again acronym, “MGGA!!!”
It is unusual for a sitting U.S. president to comment on German state elections, however the Trump administration has cultivated close ties with the AfD. U.S. Vice President JD Vance met the party’s co-leader Alice Weidel at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 and criticized Germany’s “firewall” against the party. AfD officials visited the White House later that year, and senior Trump allies and administration figures have repeatedly backed the party.
AfD scored a historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt’s state election on Sept. 6, winning 43.8 percent of the vote, more than twice its 2021 result. It grants the party 39 of the 83 seats in the state parliament, leaving it three seats short of an outright majority and raising the prospect of Germany’s first far-right state government since World War II.
The right-wing party advocates a sharply restrictive immigration policy, alongside a nationalist and socially conservative agenda. It also opposes further military support for Ukraine, calls for an end to sanctions on Russia and closer ties with Moscow.
Trump’s praise has already sparked a backlash in Berlin. Dirk Wiese, the chief whip in the Bundestag of the center-left Social Democratic Party, the coalition partners of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, said Trump’s comments were “not acceptable.” He added: “I don’t think we can put up with that, at least as the federal government.”
It shouldn’t be surprising that Trump himself is now praising the AfD, given that Elon Musk has publicly backed the party as well. But it’s a stark reminder of how deeply we have separated ourselves from our erstwhile European allies—not to mention our own bedrock liberal commitments.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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