Sergei Lavrov praises AfD and BSW

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Lerato Khumalo

“A lot of sensible stuff”

Kremlin Minister Lavrov praises two parties ahead of the federal election

Updated on January 14, 2025 – 4:49 p.mReading time: 2 minutes

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Sergey Lavrov: The AfD and the BSW have taken a shine to the Russian Foreign Minister. (Source: IMAGO/Kirill Zykov/imago)

Sergei Lavrov finds praise for the AfD and BSW. At the annual press conference, he emphasized the “reasonable” views of both parties.

Before the federal election, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov praised the AfD and the BSW as defenders of German national interests. There was “a lot of sense in their statements,” said Lavrov in Moscow at his big press conference at the start of the year.

Like the Rassemblement National in France, the AfD is a party that is established in parliament and has a growing electorate. He also explicitly mentioned the name of BSW founder Sahra Wagenknecht several times during the press conference.

“They want the national self-determination and identity of the Germans and French to be restored because they believe that the Brussels bureaucracy has usurped a large part of it,” said Lavrov, referring to the right-wing parties in Germany and France as well as the BSW . He could not say that the parties’ programs were destructive.

He emphasized that AfD representatives also appear on Russian talk shows and advocate for better relations between Moscow and Berlin. They pointed out, for example, that the “Anglo-Saxons”, as Lavrov described the British and Americans, had always tried to prevent an alliance between Germany and Russia. Lavrov also received AfD co-chair Tino Chrupalla in Moscow in 2020.

Lavrov and representatives of the Moscow power apparatus are always happy to hear when the AfD and the BSW speak out in favor of resuming Russian gas deliveries. The issue also plays a role in the election campaigns of both parties. The Russian minister said that the AfD and BSW in Germany pointed to “de-industrialization” and increasing poverty.

Putin had also already praised the AfD and declared that Moscow was ready to cooperate with those forces that advocated normal relations with Russia. “We see no signs of neo-Nazism in the AfD’s actions,” said the Kremlin leader last year at the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg.