Speaking at a party congress in Saxony on Saturday, co-leader of Germany’s far-right AfD party, Tino Chrupalla, urged Berlin to begin removing US forces from Germany, in light of recent weeks’ escalation in conflict between the USA and Iran.
Currently, 40,000 American troops are stationed in Germany.
This si America’s largest military presence in Europe, going back postwar arrangements, and now essential in NATO’s defense against Russia.
Additionally, The AfD’s party program also calls for the withdrawal of all allied troops and nuclear weapons from German soil.
US forces in Germany are concentrated mainly in the western and southern states of Germany. A major hub for American operations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa is, in particular, the Ramstein Air Base in Rhineland-Palatinate.
It looks like the German people agree with this decisive stance, because it is in Rhineland-Palatinate that AfD doubled its previous share of votes last week, winning 19.5%. Judging only from what we have seen from the inhabitants of Luna and Deveselu, whose quality of life has dramatically dropped in recent weeks, with no reaction of support from the Romanian government, this demonstrates that most civilians fear both for their own safety and disapprove of remotely killing from European soil. As such, this creates an unprecedented divide, blurring the lines between partisan persuasion and common sense.
But Chrupalla himself is an odd out one in his own party (which MAGA openly supports, though allegations have been made that it might have been sponsored by Putin) in his advocacy of German foreign policy with explicit distancing from NATO, which he considers a mere agent of Washington’s interests.
