Afrasianet - Let's step away from the noise of what happened to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office of the White House, to recall and analyze an incident days earlier in which J.D. Vance, the vice president, was also the hero of the United States.
In Munich, on the podium of the Great Hall of the Bayerische Hof Hotel, US Vice President Trump J.D. Vance stood up and gave a lengthy and condescending speech.
He spoke to Europeans as a teacher and reproached their democracy, which "muzzles voices and faces the prospect of its collapse from within." Voters in your countries didn't go to the polls, Vance said, to give you a mandate to open the floodgates and flood the continent with refugees. America will do exactly the opposite, in the man's words.
In order to inform them, beyond any doubt, that America's policy toward Europe was going in a direction they were not familiar with, he used an expression from the origins of American culture:
"There's a new sheriff in town."
The term predates the nineteenth century, and is meant to say that the mostly notorious town is about to undergo a fundamental change in politics, and that cruelty is imminent.
Most Americans remember the ethereal expression from the classic Blazing Saddles, or flaming saddles, from the seventies. Authorities are sending a new black sheriff – against rules and expectations – to a notorious town. The Sharif, in a comical context, will restore the prestige of power, and discipline sinners of every kind and kind.
Europeans breathed a bit of air when Germany's defense minister followed him on the same podium, making it clear that the US vice president's speech was "unacceptable."
The next day, Chancellor Olaf Scholz stepped up and said, "We will not accept outsiders interfering in our democracy, in our elections, or in the formation of democratic opinion in favor of that party. German politics is determined by Germans and no one else."
As is the custom of every German politician, Scholz referred the country to the lesson of its own history, and to the fascist ideology that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) still holds in its political genes.
Germany received a special share of the US vice president's speech, which lasted for more than half an hour. His mockery of the "firewall" seemed annoying to Germany's centrist parties trying to isolate "that party" through a firewall criminalizing rapprochement with it. On the sidelines of the conference, Vance went to meet with Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, and avoided Germany's chancellor.
The "American Sheriff" did not delay long, as he announced from Washington his absolute recommendation for what was stated in the speech of his deputy in Munich.
The cultural level in Germany, in the various local media, saw what was happening as a rift that could no longer be repaired. Half an hour of listening to the press summary on Radio Deutschland, seven in the morning, is enough to see the Western rift and even predict its outcome.
German democracy is locked in a tough battle with right-wing radicalism, with the AfD coming second in all opinion polls. According to a 2024 Pew Center study, 26% of Germany's "men" are satisfied with the party.
The centrist parties are trying to take the monster out of the game, and Friedrich Merz, Germany's chancellor-in-waiting, has already promised his voters that he will push the AfD to the margins of political life, "where it should be," in his words.
The moment of rapprochement – perhaps unintentional, that occurred recently between the Christian Democrats and the ultra-Orthodox Alternative for Germany (AfD) during the vote on the Meretz asylum project – sparked a wave of dust throughout Germany.
Even the Church, distancing itself from political strife, joined the debate and protested in firm words against what happened. Feinberg, a Jewish-German centenarian and Holocaust survivor, returned to the German presidency the Medal of Honor awarded him in recognition of his efforts in education. On many platforms, the 99-year-old said that the approach of one centrist party, the Christian Democrats, to the AfD took him back to the early days of 1933.
The German state has spared nothing in the confrontation with the far right. In a number of German states, the entire party was placed under the control of the Constitutional Protection Service (State Security), and the party's "Alternative Youth" wing was classified as an extremist entity.
In June last year, the Interior Ministry banned Compact magazine, known for its extremist rhetoric. An unusual precedent in relatively young German democracy, before which the Federal Administrative Court, August 2024, stood bewildered.
The court suspended the Interior Ministry's decision, saying in a statement: "There is evidence that the magazine's content violates human dignity, but preserving press freedom is a priority," Reuters reported at the time.
For Vance and the Maga Stars (Make America Great Again), this atmosphere of conflict is a violation of free speech, rejected by the American taxpayer.
The American is a Democratic citizen who does not accept that his soldiers go to protect a system that violates freedoms and undermines shared values, as Vance hinted after returning from Munich. Vance himself, as many American writers have ridiculed, refuses to recognize the results of the 2020 election, and does not see the storming of the Capitol in Washington in 2021 by Trump supporters as a threat to democracy.
The sudden love between the radical AfD and the Trump administration is not marred by the party's platform to expel U.S. troops from German soil and make the country free of peace-threatening U.S. nuclear weapons, as the party's 2024 platform says.
The AfD has been asserting this demand since 2016, and the idea of distancing Germany from American hegemony is at the heart of its nationalist discourse.
Nor are Trump's promises to impose tariffs on European exports that could profoundly damage the European economy. A form of extreme love that is hard to imagine outside of suspicion, hatred and distrust of the democratic system.
The AfD is not a homogeneous entity in the philosophical and cultural sense. It is akin to a crowd of angry people, most of whom live in the east of the country. Overall, 54% of German voters do not trust political parties, a survey by Germany's Forsa Foundation revealed last year. This percentage is lower than the results of a poll conducted by the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, among voters from France, Germany, Italy and Poland, where the results said that 60% of respondents do not trust political institutions. The same percentage, sixty percent, She saw democracy as a low-efficiency system.
There is a lot of data that the radical right relies mainly on an "ideology of fear" that is not concerned with facts, but with feelings and public mood.
Populism offers alternative realities, i.e. illusions. Because political liberalism distributes promises, and economic liberalism distributes inequality, a vast space arises between politics and economics.
Within that space, populism invests in the ideology of fear and in the production of alternative truths. A study of a sample of 1,000 young Germans between the ages of 16 and 25 found that anxiety levels were higher among people who identified themselves as far-right, as opposed to those who said they belonged to the democratic center.
Europe is sliding into an internal culture war, and one of the consequences of that war is that centrist parties have become more radical in the hope of winning voter favor and avoiding departure.
In the midst of existential struggle, as seen by the centrists, the radical Alternative for Germany (AfD) has managed to jump on the firewall. Although the political firewall remains, albeit less solidly than before, the party's presence in public life has become a natural event that appeals to one in four Germans.
How can a democratic institution criminalize a party that represents a quarter of the population? The centrist parties are faced with this new reality and have little left at their fingertips. There are dangerous signs coming from the past.
Elections to the Thuringian state parliament on December 13, 1930, gave the Nazi Party (NSDAP) the opportunity to participate in a regional government for the first time in its history. Last summer's elections in the same state gave the Radical Alternative for the Alternative for Refugees (AfD) the highest percentage of votes.
Following the red Trumpian conferences, far-right leaders met in Madrid a few days ago and held their conference under the banner "Make Europe Great Again MEGA". Once again, the European right repeats: Europe is under a cultural threat, and the continent must crumble to preserve its cultural identity. But it must also erect barriers between its States, and each State must manage the security of its borders. That is, Europe will become great, pure and divided at the same time.
The German right is inspired by the Trumpian tale and sees everything possible. At an election rally in Saxony-Anhalt, a short time ago, the AfD hosted Elon Musk on a big screen. Musk spoke to his hosts saying they were Germany's only hope, as he does on his X account. The euphoria of the moment took him to call on the "Germans" to get over the "knot of World War II". I understood his advice – It won unprecedented applause – as a direct target of the Holocaust, the sacred sanctuary of German politics. The Maga clique gives European right-wing parties a certificate of good conduct, and this is the real threat seen by centrist parties, not Vance's claims.
At the lower levels within the AfD's constituency there is "right-wing extremism, manipulation of history, and distrust of the democratic system," noted journalist Jessica Berka reporting for the BBC on the party's youth. Holocaust denial, praise for Hitler, and hatred of "those on top" are the daily stuff of the party's youth.
According to a survey by the German newspaper Die Zeit, more than 80 percent of Radical Party members do not have a high school diploma. There is a widespread sense of resentment, fear and uncertainty, and as a result, a segment of those who have lost faith in the democratic institution and the efficiency of the liberal state rushes to the group that succeeds in capitalizing on their discontent.
Germany's politicians claim that their country represents the world's last "green meadow" of democracy, and that their democratic institutions are protected by the lessons they have learned from history.
It is a belief that Trump, Musk, Vance and the rest of the Maga clique do not share, nor even the illiberal forces sweeping the lost continent. It seems that the "Maga clique" is trying to impose a new order on all of Europe aimed at dismantling it from within, as a unified force, through a policy of "divide and rule," as Steve Walt, a professor of international studies at Harvard University, argues in an article in Foreign Policy magazine.
The Trumpian experience is likely to open the door to an American era of extremism, isolationism, and political "masculinity." Europeans are aware of the reality and danger of this possibility, and that they must not think about what they will do to win Trump's favor, but what they have to do to manage their continent.
Serious challenges, the gravity of which is real at all levels. Interestingly, European peoples, faced with Trump's shock, turned their cards and found no other trick than the Middle East's long-ironic ploy: boycotting American goods. A poll in recent days said 60% of Germans refuse to buy Elon Musk's Tesla cars, and 60% of Britons said they would buy Chinese electric cars. A higher percentage of Europeans said they would not buy U.S. goods.
Things are falling apart in the Western world, which has never ceased to claim that its model of politics and culture represents the end of human perfection.