US President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday lashed out at Germany in unusually strong terms after the US ally designated the far-right AfD party as an extremist group.
Vice President JD Vance, who had defiantly met with the AfD leader during a visit to Munich in February, drew an analogy to the fall of the Berlin Wall, a triumphant moment that has united Germany and the United States.
“The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt — not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment,” Vance wrote on X Friday.
He described the AfD, which like Trump has campaigned against immigration, as “the most popular party in Germany.” It came in second in February elections.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also used heated language to denounce the action by Germany’s domestic intelligence service, which gives authorities greater leeway to monitor the group.
“Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition,” Rubio wrote on X. “That’s not democracy — it’s tyranny in disguise.”
“Germany should reverse course,” said Rubio, who is also Trump’s national security advisor.
“What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD — which took second in the recent election — but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes,” Rubio said.
Germany’s foreign ministry hit back at the criticism by Rubio, saying the designation was made after an independent investigation, and noting the country’s Nazi past.
“This is democracy,” the German Foreign Office said in English-language X response to Rubio.
“We have learnt from our history that right-wing extremism needs to be stopped.”
Such public spats would have been unthinkable under most US administrations.
But Trump and his aides have repeatedly singled out Germany for criticism, denouncing former chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcome a decade ago to refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war and other conflicts.
Trump has sought to use executive authority to deport migrants en masse, rounding up people without waiting for courts and sending some to a crowded, maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
Vance used a February speech to the Munich Security Forum to denounce the ostracization of the AfD and then met its leader Alice Weidel.
The BfV domestic intelligence agency, which had already designated several local AfD branches as right-wing extremist groups, said it decided to give the entire party the label due to its attempts to “undermine the free, democratic” order in Germany.
The Trump administration has also defended French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who was banned from standing for office after being convicted over misuse of European Parliament expenses.
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