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At least someone in Berlin knows the true enemy
An AfD co-leader has stated the obvious – that pouring money into the Ukraine war is killing the German economy. But will anyone listen?
By Tarik Cyril Amar | January 30, 2026
Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, has given a speech to which every observer of Germany should pay close attention. And not simply because of Weidel's inherent political weight.
She is among the country's most important politicians and with serious prospects for very high office: if her New-Right party breaks through to leading a Berlin government, Weidel is the most likely chancellor. Next to her co-chairman Tino Chrupalla, she is the only real opposition that matters inside the current German parliament.
What makes this particular Weidel speech, delivered in the city of Heilbronn while campaigning in state elections in the classically 'West German' Land of Baden-Württemberg, especially noteworthy is its unprecedently outspoken, bracingly combative, and, stirringly logical and honest take on one specific topic, namely Germany's masochistic relationship to Ukraine.
Not that there were no other topics. Indeed, Weidel started what was a gleefully pugnacious 'Rundumschlag' (German for onslaught) where you would expect, the absolutely dismal state of Germany's once proud and now relentlessly tanking national economy. She reminded her large audience that Germany's industrial sector is bleeding jobs and companies; national insolvency statistics are a horror and won’t stop breaking abysmal records; and the traditional parties have nothing to offer but same-old-same-old.
And yet, as most right-wing politicians – whether traditional or insurgent – former business consultant Weidel is not at all original with her own suggestions either. She complains that producing things in Germany is so expensive that the country's economy as a whole has been losing international competitiveness. True enough.
Read more Zelensky must pay for blowing up Nord Stream – AfD co-leader
But things get more debatable when Weidel starts explaining the causes of the national malaise. Costs that are too high include, in her view, taxes in general, payroll taxes, and social security payments. This is a classical conservative position: if anything is wrong with capitalism, it’s that those at the bottom of the income and power pyramid still have it too good. Cut the state down and rely on the market's miraculous powers – pretty much the essence of Weidel's extremely tired recipe for the future.
In that respect, Weidel's talk had nothing to offer that isn't already generously supplied by the grindingly repetitive rhetoric of the current centrist Berlin government under mainstream conservative and sour-schoolmaster-in-chief Friedrich Merz. In essence, 'shut up, work harder, ask for less. (At least if you aren't rich like me and my chums).'
With so little of that sounding like a genuine alternative from the 'Alternative for Germany,' can the AfD really succeed in breaking the traditional parties' stranglehold by winning another – at least – ten or so percent of the national electorate? In a country where even the government admits that 17.6 percent of its citizens must get by without "important goods and social activities due to poverty." In a society where 2.2 million children are officially categorized as at risk of or in poverty? Where income inequality has been growing ever worse, with Germany's five wealthiest families now boasting combined fortunes of €250 billion, which is more than the poorer half of Germans – over 40 million people – combined? Where, finally, working hard is not even a halfway reliable way to achieve success? More than half of private fortunes are now inherited or gifted (usually to circumvent inheritance taxes, low as they are) and that share rises to between 75-80% among the rich.
Weidel's criticism of Berlin's – and the EU’s – current economic suicide non-strategy is often refreshingly on point, but it's also the very easy part. Yet cosplaying as yet another 'iron lady,' promising more blood, sweat, and tears for those who are already getting plenty of all that, may well get the AfD stuck where it is now at less than 30% in Germany as a whole, weaker in the West and doing better only in the East. Weidel and her solidly neoliberal wing in the AfD would do well not to be too sure of themselves yet.
Please go to RT to continue reading.
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The British commercial proxy war on Russia is to destroy Russia's energy capabilities:
Britain and France Played Central Role Facilitating Ukrainian Attack on Russian Energy Infrastructure - Moscow
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