German far-right leader hails Brexit as ‘model for Germany’

The far-right Alternative for Germany party will push for a Brexit-style referendum on membership of the EU if it comes to power, its leader Alice Weidel said, hailing the UK’s exit from the bloc as “dead right,” Report informs via The Financial Times.

“It’s a model for Germany, that one can make a sovereign decision like that,” she said in an interview with the Financial Times.

Weidel, party leader since 2022, said an AfD government would seek to reform the EU and remove its “democratic deficit”, including by curbing the powers of the European Commission, an “unelected executive”.

“But if a reform isn’t possible, if we fail to rebuild the sovereignty of the EU member states, we should let the people decide, just as Britain did,” she said. “And we could have a referendum on ‘Dexit’ — a German exit from the EU.”

The idea breaks a big taboo in Germany, where mainstream parties are devoutly pro-European. Also, the German constitution places tight restrictions on national plebiscites, and even if one were to be held, polls suggest a large majority of Germans would vote to remain in the EU. However, among AfD voters support for the EU is weakest.

Weidel was speaking against the backdrop of a big surge in support for the AfD, which is at 22 percent in the polls — ahead of all three of the parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s shaky coalition, the Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals.

It is expected to win crucial elections in September in the eastern states of Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia — though with all the other main parties refusing to strike coalition deals with the AfD, its path to power is unclear.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has designated large sections of the AfD extremist and has put several of its officials under surveillance. Still, the party has benefited from public anger with Scholz and his poor management of a worsening economy.

But in recent days it has found itself at the eye of a storm over reports of a controversial meeting last November between AfD lawmakers and the Austrian far-right radical Martin Sellner that discussed a “remigration” plan to forcibly remove millions of people with an immigrant background from Germany — including citizens holding German passports.

Anti-AfD demonstrations have been held in a number of German cities, with politicians sounding the alarm of the danger the party poses to Germany’s democratic institutions.

The AfD was set up in 2013 by conservative economists angered by the eurozone bailouts during the sovereign debt crisis. But it gradually shifted rightward, riding a wave of anger at former chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy to forge a fiercely anti-immigration, anti-establishment platform.