The AfD has provoked an angry backlash in the Bundestag with its rhetorical praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a speech on the budget of the Foreign Office on Wednesday, AfD lawmaker Jürgen Koegel referred to the Kremlin chief as “respected President Vladimir Putin” and said that Russia posed no threat of war to NATO. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD), responding to the AfD parliamentary group, said: “Your ties to Moscow are literally treacherous, treacherous in every respect.”
Russia is waging war against the Ukrainian civilian population and poses a “threat” to Germany and Europe, the minister said. “This danger is concrete, it is serious and it is acute,” Pistorius added. “And the only ones who deny this, who on the contrary even speak of ‘respected President Putin,’ who call him a friend, who want to leave NATO and thereby put all our security and the lives of many people at risk, that is the AfD,” the minister said. “You should be ashamed,” he added, addressing the AfD.
CDU lawmaker Jens Spahn also sharply criticized the AfD’s remarks. “With what you are doing here and the way you are speaking, ‘respected President Putin’, you are ultimately Putin’s vassals,” Spahn said. “That is treason against the fatherland and nothing else.” Putin is a man “whose soldiers rape people every day in Ukraine, abduct children and engage in arson,” Spahn said. The Kremlin chief is also “the man who orders murders in Germany and attacks against Germany.”
Spahn said the comments by AfD lawmaker Koegel were incomprehensible. “I don’t know what is going on in your heads,” he said. Following the AfD’s electoral success in Saxony-Anhalt, the party is “obviously completely carried away by overconfidence,” Spahn speculated. In this overconfidence, he said, the AfD is “letting its mask fall quite clearly.”
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