German Chancellor’s pushback at Vance brings US-Euro tensions into the public at Munich

Scholz took a direct shot at US Vice President JD Vance's comments at the Munich Security Forum, to applause from the audience.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz received rapturous applause from European officials in a fiery speech at the Munich Security Conference that took issue with controversial claims from US Vice President JD Vance surrounding alleged democratic infringements across Europe, hate speech and supposed mistreatment of the far-right, Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. “We will not accept that people who look at Germany from the outside intervene in our democracy, in our elections and in the democratic opinion forming process in the interest of this party,” said Scholz. “That is just not done, certainly among friends and allies. We resolutely reject this.” He went on, “as a strong democracy, we are absolutely clear that the extreme right should be out of political control and out of political decision making processes and that there will be no cooperation with them….I think there is strong consensus between all relevant parties in Germany” on the matter. “Where our democracy goes from here is for us to decide” Scholz added.German elections are set to take place next week after the collapse of Scholz’s three party coalition, with polling indicating that the AfD, whose critics have compared them to neo-Nazis, is on course to return the second largest vote, behind the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Scholz’s Social Democratic Party of Germany is sitting in third place. Scholz’s comments came the day after Vance appeared at Munich and gave a speech blasting European politicians for what he called suppressing far-right parties in their countries — in essence, using the security forum, which is traditionally a home for cross-Atlantic coalition building on defense issues, to attack America’s allies.