Russia builds contacts with Germany’s AfD

Russia is building closer official ties with the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in response to expectations that populists will attract more support in European elections this year.

Talks between Frauke Petry, chairman of the AfD, and Vyacheslav Volodin, the Speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, in Moscow at the weekend heralded “more regular exchanges as these parties look set to become part of the political mainstream in Europe”, Pyotr Tolstoi, one of Mr Volodin’s deputies, told the FT.

Ms Petry’s trip means the AfD’s contacts with Moscow are becoming similar to those of France’s Front National, whose leader, Marine Le Pen, has usually been received by Mr Volodin or his predecessor on occasional visits to Russia.

Mr Volodin, who was in charge of domestic politics as deputy head of the administration of President Vladimir Putin until he ran in September’s Duma elections, is one of the most powerful men in Mr Putin’s ruling United Russia party and is seen by some as a potential future presidential candidate.

Since being founded four years ago the AfD’s popularity has soared, particularly because of opposition to chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open door” policy for refugees in 2015. The party is now represented in 10 of Germany’s 16 regional parliaments and is expected to win its first representation in the Bundestag this year.

“We understand that the AfD has a lot of opponents in Germany, but it looks like a growing number of people in Europe do support such parties that the media calls populist and there is a fair chance that they will be represented in the federal parliament after the upcoming elections,” Mr Tolstoi said. “If 10 or 15 per cent of the people support such parties, you can no longer assume that they are fringe. They are growing, and we need to understand how and why. They may well be part of future parliamentary exchanges, so we better get to know them.”

However, he added that it had been decided the AfD would build closer inter-party ties and exchanges with Russia’s nationalist Liberal Democratic party because “they are ideologically closer” than the AfD and United Russia.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the firebrand nationalist and LDPR founder who is one of the key figures in the opposition loyal to Mr Putin, said he and Ms Petry had discussed plans to organise annual meetings of “centre-right” parties like theirs. “Parties in this spectrum are rising, and we need to support them,” he said.

The LDPR and the AfD also plan exchanges between the parties’ youth wings. “Our parties share many views — on migration, on other values, and it is necessary to guide the youth in the correct direction,” Mr Zhirinovsky said.

Ms Petry’s trip will go down well with the 2.5m so-called “Russia-Germans”, descendants of farmers who moved east centuries ago and returned to their ethnic homeland in Germany after the fall of the Soviet Union. Many still speak Russian, watch Russian television and admire Mr Putin. Polling data show they also tend to support the AfD.

The AfD last month brought together Europe’s leading populist parties in a rally in the German city of Koblenz, where Ms Petry was joined by Ms Le Pen, Geert Wilders of the Dutch anti-EU, anti-immigration Party of Freedom, and Matteo Salvini of the Lega Nord.

“With the Koblenz meeting Petry showed she had interlocutors in the EU; now she’s showing she has them in Russia, too,” says Hendrik Traeger, a political scientist at Leipzig University. “It’s good PR for her.”

He said it was also a way for her to stamp her authority on the party. “But her critics will be angry that she did this without consulting them,” he added. “There is a lot of mistrust of Petry in the AfD and this could actually increase as a result of her trip.”

The Russian lawmakers said expectations for an improvement of relations with Europe with the help of the AfD were modest.

“If parties like the AfD are gaining support, maybe that can help overcome the crisis our relations are in, but people in Europe need to understand how far we are apart,” Mr Tolstoi said. “Values like those the AfD, the FN, the Lega Nord stand for may be perceived as extremist in Europe, but in Russia such values are seen as normal.”