The co-president of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) Alice Weidel said in an interview with the Financial Times on Monday that the British referendum on leaving the European Union is a good example that Germany could follow.
She said that her party wants, if it comes to power, to reform the EU and reduce the power of the European Commission, and if that doesn’t work, then it sees the possibility of declaring itself in a referendum, as Britain did.
“It’s a model for Germany that someone can make such a sovereign decision,” Weidel said of Brexit.
According to her, they would hold such a referendum on Dexit, as she called it, if they could not implement the changes that the AfD is striving for. Among other things, the party is working to reform EU institutions in order to limit the power of the European Commission and eliminate, in their opinion, the current democratic deficit.
With his statements, Weidel represents a completely different point of view from the majority of other German parties and German citizens, who mostly support EU membership.
In recent years, the AfD has scaled back its initial Euroscepticism and focused primarily on opposition to migration. According to recent polls, the party is supported by around 22 percent of respondents, which puts it ahead of the ruling Social Democrats (SPD), which enjoy support of 16 percent.
The next big test will be the European elections in June.
The AfD made headlines again in recent weeks when a secret far-right meeting in Potsdam, attended by members of the AfD and at least two representatives of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, became public knowledge. The meeting discussed mass deportation of migrants, i.e. remigration.
Since then, protests against right-wing extremists have been regularly held in German cities, where hundreds of thousands of people gather. The protests, which were supported by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier among others, were held this weekend as well. According to the data of the German police, 910,000 people gathered at them, and the organizers registered 1.2 million participants, Hina reports.
