Germany's Afd Is The Key To European Defense

European liberals were battered by the populist wave that began last year with Geert Wilders's surprise election victory in the Netherlands. It continued through last September's state elections in Germany, the local elections in the Czech Republic, the Freedom Party's first-place finish in Austria, and the collapse of the French government. But even so, the continent's liberals will fight to the last Ukrainian to keep their political privileges.

If their proxy war collapses, European liberals know their figurative heads will roll. They have no plan except to keep the war going as long as possible. And they are doing this by trying to gaslight Americans through a targeted campaign of misinformation. The British Ministry of Defense and the Pentagon, for example, allege that Russia has taken 600,000 casualties in the Ukraine War, and is losing 1,000 to 2,000 soldiers a day in the present fighting. The spurious 600,000 figure even found its way into a Trump social media post last week.

The most comprehensive database on Russian casualties,
Mediazona , counts 82,000 Russian dead, which it calculated by scraping information from death announcements and social media posts. A statistical estimate of excess deaths would bring the number to 120,000. Assuming three wounded for every soldier killed, Russian casualties are likely somewhere between 246,000 and 360,000.

A retired senior US officer who tracks Ukraine war casualties observes:

Russia has had about 9,000 desertions in the course of the war. More than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers face
official charges of desertion , and the actual number is double that. Forty-thousand Ukrainians have been killed or wounded defending
an incursion into Russian territory near Kursk, according to NATO intelligence sources - and the country has already lost half of the territory it gained in the August 2024 raid.

Europe's sovereigntist parties know this and want to stop the war now. The AfD wants to stop weapons deliveries to Ukraine and advocates a negotiated solution. It is excoriated by the establishment press as a neo-Nazi throwback, and quarantined by legacy parties with a fraction of its voter base. The Greens, represented by Annalena Baerbock and Economics Minister Robert Habeck, are ironically Germany's most vociferous war hawks. Though they won't fight for their own country, they want to fight the war to the last Ukrainian.

President-elect Trump sent shockwaves through the European Establishment last February when he told a South Carolina rally,“NATO was busted until I came along. I said, 'Everybody's gonna pay.' They said, 'Well, if we don't pay, are you still going to protect us?' I said, 'Absolutely not.' They couldn't believe the answer.”

Trump said“one of the presidents of a big country” at one point asked him whether the US would still defend Ukraine if they were invaded by Russia - even if they“don't pay.”

“No, I would not protect you,” Trump recalled.“In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

That provoked a storm of opprobrium against Trump, who stood accused of inviting Russia to invade Western Europe. But that's not what he said: Trump maintained that Europe should defend itself. It used to. In 1989 Germany fielded 12 battle-ready divisions, 3,000 main battle tanks, and a formidable conscript army that could stand off the Warsaw Pact. It doesn't have a single battle-ready division today. And Angela Merkel's government eliminated conscription in 2011 at the peak of post-Cold War complacency.

Germany needs military conscription, and the only German political party that clearly proposes reviving it is the AfD. Its position paper, available on the party website, states:

The AfD, like the ruling parties of Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia, is not afraid of fighting. It opposes the Ukraine War because it is pointless and unwinnable. Germany's Greens, by contrast,
oppose conscription - in Germany, that is. They're all for conscription in Ukraine. Germany's Social Democrats and Christian Democrats meanwhile think it might be a good idea to revisit the idea of conscription sometime in the future, but they won't do anything now - or in any relevant time horizon.

Some Brussels hawks have floated the idea of
European conscription
to provide soldiers for Ukraine, a proposal denounced by Hungary's Foreign Minister, who declared,“We do not want Hungarian young people dragged into the Ukrainian-Russian war front. This is not our war.” National conscription to defend national homelands is another matter.

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Maligned as an extremist fringe group, the AfD stands to receive 20% of the vote in Germany's February 23 national elections. Its candidates won about 30% of the vote in three East German states that went to the polls in September. Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats are running at just 17% of the vote, and the Greens, who had 20% of the vote in Germany's last national election, are at just 11.5%. The AfD supports tight controls on immigration, tax cuts and an immediate end to the Ukraine War. Its view of Ukraine is the same as that of Hungary's Viktor Orban, whom Trump has consulted repeatedly.

The AfD is the most popular party among Germany's 18-24 year-olds. Its message is that it's alright to be proud of being German. Maximilian Krah, a European Parliament member now running for a Bundestag seat, delivered that message on TikTok.“One in three young German men doesn't have a girlfriend. Are you one of them?” he asked in one video.“Don't watch porno, don't vote for the Greens, get out into the fresh air.... Real men have ideals, real men are patriots - and that's how you find a girlfriend.”

Real men, the AfD avers, are willing to defend their country. If the United States wants partners instead of puppets, it will find them among Europe's sovereigntist parties.

This article was originally published by The American Mind , a publication of the Claremont Institute.

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