The odd couple: German far right shows unlikely affinity for Communist China

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.”
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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.

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