The head of Germany's populist party AfD has met with high-level Russian politicians in a secretive meeting in Moscow. Petry's office refused to clarify who else attended the talks.
Image: Getty Images/T. Lohnes
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Frauke Petry, the prominent co-chair of Germany's nationalist AfD party, met with senior Russian politicians in Moscow at the weekend.
In a statement issued on Monday, the office of the populist politician said she traveled to Moscow to discuss cooperation between German and Russian regional assemblies. She also met "on the sidelines" with Duma speaker and Putin confidant Vyacheslav Volodin as well as deputy speaker Pyotr Tolstoy.
Volodin, President Vladmir Putin's former chief of staff, is widely seen as one of Russia's most influential officials, helping direct parliament's work and engineering elections.
Vyacheslav Volodin, a close ally of Putin, attended the meeting with PetryImage: picture-alliance/dpa/V. Sharifulin
Tolstoy is well known for hosting a number of political talk shows on Russia's state-owned Channel One. The great-great-grandson of novelist Leo Tolstoy holds pro-Kremlin views and has been criticized by the country's opposition for airing misinformation and propaganda on his programs, particularly about Ukraine and the West.
Duma statement
A statement released by the Duma said the delegation traveled to Russia at the invitation of Moscow.
Pyotr Tolstoy, from the United Russia party, is known for appearing in a number of talk showsImage: picture-alliance/AP Images/A. Zemlianichenko
"During the meeting they discussed issues of cooperation between regional parliaments, inter-party cooperation, as well as the development of contacts for youth organizations," the Duma statement said.
The Duma said the meeting was attended by Tolstoy, the vice speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament Vladimir Zhirinovsky, chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs Leonid Slutsky, and Paul Zavalny, the chairman of the State Duma Energy Committee and the coordinator of the parliamentary group for relations with the Parliament of Germany.
Zhirinovsky is a flamboyant ultranationalist leader of the pro-Kremlin Liberal Democratic Party of Russia known for populist, nationalist rhetoric.
The AfD and Moscow
Petry's office did not confirm who else took part in the delegation but according to party travel information seen by German press agency dpa, Julian Flak, chair of the AfD's "Bundeskonvent," an executive committee dealing with organizational, policy and financial strategy, also went to Moscow.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky is an eccentric veteran nationalist who is famous for his outlandish viewsImage: Reuters
There is no evidence that Russia financially supports AfD, unlike France's far-right National Front, but the AfD and other populist groups forged closer ties with Moscow in recent months and its politicians are often cited by Russian media outlets such as Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin-backed TV channel which has operated a German website for the past two years.
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
Image: Britta Pedersen/dpa/picture alliance
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
Image: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images
Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
