The decision to invite German politician Alice Weidel to speak at the recent CPAC gathering in Hungary was an important step on the road to breaking the elite establishment’s dominance in Europe. Weidel is the leader of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the main opposition party to Berlin’s ruling coalition, headed by Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The AfD offers the best hope of fundamentally changing the direction of Germany.

Merz and his Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) are nominally a center-right political force in Germany, but the chancellor has decided to run the national government in coalition with the left-wing Social Democrats. Instead of trying to lead Germany in a new direction, particularly on key issues like migration and the priorities in the European Union (EU), Merz has thrown himself into maintaining the establishment’s so-called political “firewall” that isolates the AfD and protects Berlin’s politically corrupt status quo. 

For too long, European and Anglo-American conservatives have been reluctant to partner with Weidel and her AfD, keeping them at arm’s length at international conferences and cooperation activities. This was a mistake that CPAC Hungary has now finally corrected. Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the CPAC organizers should be congratulated for recognizing that the AfD is an authentic European conservative party despite an intense campaign by German elites and their media allies to demonize it as “far right” and “undemocratic.” 

By inviting Weidel to speak at CPAC Budapest, conservatives are making clear that Merz and his CDU/CSU leadership are part of the problem. They are the unauthentic conservatives who have failed to adapt to new times and new challenges. When he was running for office, candidate Merz duplicitously pledged on the campaign stump to advance conservative principles on debt, borders, immigration, and crime. Merz specifically promised the voters to keep in place a constitutional amendment against deficit spending while also announcing his firm commitment to closing the national borders to illegal immigrants. 

These were the AfD’s bread and butter themes, and there was a glimmer of hope that Merz might actually build bridges toward Weidel. But after the balloting was over, Merz reached back to the old Berlin ruling establishment: he embraced Social Democrats as coalition partners and onboarded ideas from the Greens. Merz’s personal vision of Germany and Europe is hopelessly intertwined with the failing status quo that dominates in EU institutions in Brussels, and he has shamelessly partnered with Germany’s left to keep the rotten structure in place. 

As Weidel said in her CPAC Budapest remarks: “Politics have turned Germany into a danger zone. Its people suffer from mass migration, exploding crime rates, high taxes, energy prices, inflation, and the destruction of wealth. That is why they voted out the old left-green government only to get a government that continues down the same disastrous path.”

In her hard-hitting speech, Weidel denounced the Berlin establishment’s lawfare campaign, explaining that Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is dedicated to discrediting the AfD and creating a phony legal predicate for banning it outright as a political party. It is a German version of the lawfare playbook that the Biden administration used to try to take down Donald Trump. And it is being directed against the AfD with unthinking Teutonic rigor and the usual blindness of German officialdom.

Weidel spoke in English and clearly relished being among international friends at CPAC. She also displayed her political toughness: “Influential politicians in Germany have their minds made up to ban the strongest opposition political party, the Alternative for Germany. They would eliminate a political force that will soon form the government in several East German (states); furthermore, they want to ban a party that has caught up with and overtaken the Chancellor’s party itself. It is grotesque, it is authoritarian, and yet this is the path they pursue—but they will not prevail.” 

At issue is not only the future direction of Germany, but of Europe itself. Most Anglo-American conservatives believe, rightly, that Europe and its historic treasures are worth defending as the homeland of our shared Western civilization. While we quarrel about U.S.-European defense burden-sharing and dispute transatlantic trade issues, we recognize that our common civilization will be fundamentally diminished if the globalist left-wing agenda ultimately prevails and remains deeply entrenched on the old continent. 

We must cooperate with our friends to help topple the current political stewards of Europe, who hopelessly carry the same intellectual Marxist baggage of self-loathing about national identity as do their woke cousins in America. The EU political class would happily throw out Europe’s Hellenic heritage to permanently install modern Greece’s values of wokeness and socialism.

The EU elite in Brussels is determined to remake the European identity via mass migration, just as the Biden administration sought to blot out long-standing American values through the same tactic. Today, the foreign-born U.S. population is now over 15 percent of the total, unprecedented in modern times, and, while the statistics are muddled, the figures in both France and Germany are also approaching the same level and growing. 

Germany’s Green party wants to see the country disappear in a global wave of non-European migrants. As the party platform explains: “Our land is more diverse than ever. This diversity is a key strength of our society. More and more people [in Germany] with different perspectives and experiences are actively contributing to negotiation processes on how we want to live together as a community.”

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To upend the EU’s priorities in Brussels requires changing the German national government in Berlin. It is Berlin, through its checkbook and political pressure, that ultimately conducts the music that comes out of the EU. The plan to end the Brussels agenda, with all its meddling in European national politics, such as the recent elections in Romania, requires winning the battle for Berlin. 

That is why lifting Alice Weidel and her AfD cause is so vital. Vice President J.D. Vance, speaking at the Munich Security Conference back in February, rightly condemned the undemocratic firewall that keeps the AfD and its more than 10 million voters marginalized in Germany’s national politics. Under President Trump, Washington is rightly out of the business of managing domestic politics in other countries. But American leaders do closely observe and can express their opinions, in private and when necessary, in public, on what our putative allies say and do. That is called diplomacy. 

It is true that Anglo-American conservatives, because of history and language, often have a hard time finding common cause with their German counterparts. We must remember that Weidel is fully in step with, say, Nigel Farage and other consequential European conservative leaders who recognize that the out-of-touch political elites in Berlin, Brussels, and Paris are actually climate extremists and woke radicals on a mission. Unlike Merz, Weidel is part of the solution. Let us continue to welcome her and other thoughtful AfD colleagues into our public square. Three cheers for the Hungarians and CPAC Budapest.