What the AfD and Spain’s Socialists Have in Common

The demand from the hard right Alternative for Germany that our troops withdraw from the country’s territory suggests that anti-American fervor is growing. The demand comes even as leftist lawmakers at Madrid prevent American planes from flying over Spain. Some 40,000 American troops are stationed in Germany across a dozen military sites. Spain has set itself against both Israel and America and what it calls an “illegal war.”The Red-Brown alliance is revving up again. The AfD, while intermittently signaling support for President Trump in the past, has come out against the war on Iran and maintains its close ties to Moscow. The party’s co-chairman, Timothy Chrupalla, says of President Vladimir Putin, “He hasn’t done anything to me.” One German observer, Fillip Piatov, writes in the Wall Street Journal that the party has “never fully forgiven America for World War II.”All of this marks the lack of wisdom in, say, Vice President Vance’s elevation of the AfD after the Munich Conference last year. And Elon Musk’s fervent support before that. Now the party derides Chancellor Friedrich Merz as a “U.S. vassal” who is guilty of “pathetic submission.” No such stinging words are directed at the Islamist theocracy at Tehran or at the authoritarians at Moscow or Beijing. That’s not even bringing up Nazis. The AfD, though it is gathering electoral strength, is merely an opposition party. More significant is the hostility from Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, who increasingly styles himself a leader of the anti-American bloc as well as an implacable foe of the Jewish state. Spain’s defense minister calls the war “profoundly illegal and profoundly unjust.” Earlier this month Spain, in a fit of pique, withdrew its ambassador to the Jewish state. El País reports that the blocking of air space by the Spaniards “complicates” America’s military planning. Earlier this month Mr. Trump declared that “Spain has been terrible” and vowed to cut off all trade with the country. While that has not come to pass — yet — a wider rift is likely looming as Spain forges ahead with its resistance politics. No shock, then, that Mr. Chrupalla explicitly referenced Spain’s stance in his own anti-American stemwinder.The bad news is that the anti-American factions appear to be enjoying momentum. In Germany, the “Brandmauer,” or firewall against the far-right — a cornerstone of politics in the decades after World War II — appears to be crumbling. Two weeks ago Mr. Sánchez’s Socialist Party, as Politico puts it, “defied the polls to secure a surprisingly good second-place finish in Sunday’s regional election in Castilla y León.”We grasp that Mr. Trump’s war against Iran is not popular among all Americans, let alone Europeans. Sovereign countries elect their own leaders to pursue their own interests. A worldview, though, so implacably opposed to Washington and Jerusalem is bound to attract a coalition of those hostile to the very values that animated the fighting of the war that liberated Europe from the tyranny of fascism — and the one that saved it from the iron fist of the left.

What the AfD and Spain’s Socialists Have in Common

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