“We refuse to listen to a speaker in camouflage,” AfD national leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla said in a statement, referring to Zelensky’s iconic war gear. “He is only in power as a war president and a beggar. But Ukraine does not need a war president now, it needs a peace president, ready to negotiate so that the dying stops and the country has a future.”
Only four of the AfD’s 77 parliamentarians were present, while the ten parliamentarians from the BSW, a new party founded by former left-wing icon Sahra Wagenknecht combining left-wing economic policies and conservative cultural positions, did not attend the meeting. event. Both parties support much more pro-Russian policies and oppose military support for Ukraine.
“President Zelensky is currently contributing to a very dangerous spiral of escalation and accepting the risk of a nuclear conflict with devastating consequences for the whole of Europe,” a BSW statement said. “He should therefore not be honored with a special event in the German Bundestag.”
Parliamentarians from all other parties enthusiastically applauded Zelensky’s speech. Most Germans support additional European arms supplies to Ukraine, according to a recent poll, although 32% are opposed.
At the same time, the AfD and BSW performed relatively well in the European elections. The AfD received 15.9 percent of the national vote in Germany, placing itself in second place, while the BSW received 6.2 percent. In the states of the former East Germany, the AfD comes first with almost 30 percent of the vote, while the BSW comes third with around 14 percent.
“With the BSW, Putin now has the second largest party in Germany that follows him without reservation,” Marie-Agnès Strack-Zimmermann, the leading candidate for the pro-business German Free Democrats in the European Parliament, wrote on X.
Politico
