Munich Security Conference Bans Germany’s Left and Right-Wing Populist Parties

Members of Germany’s top two populist parties, the AfD and BSW, have both been banned from this year’s Munich Security Service, which ironically justified the decision by claiming that populists did not believe in “peace through dialogue”.

The paramount annual meeting for the global military-industrial complex on the international conference calendar hosted every year at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich has said that the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the leftist-populist BSW party of Sahra Wagenknecht will not be welcome to attend, NTV reports.

Munich Security Conference (MSC) leader Christoph Heusgen, a former diplomat and advisor to ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, claimed that the two insurgent parties were not committed to the principle of “peace through dialogue” despite the AfD and the BSW being the only major parties in Germany to consistently call for peace talks to end the war in Ukraine.

“Both the AfD and the BSW left the German Bundestag when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke,” said Heusgen. “That is the opposite of dialogue; I don’t want to experience it at the conference. This is also why I decided not to invite politicians from the AfD and BSW this year.”

While it was tradition of the conference that all parties in the German parliament receive an invitation, Heusgen broke with that tradition in 2023 by not inviting the AfD, as well as not inviting members of the BSW last year.

Heusgen went on to justify his decision to ban the AfD from attending the conference by noting that sections of the party have been classified as right-wing “extremists” by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

“In my opinion, an invitation would not be in the spirit of the conference founder Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist,” he said, referencing the former Wehrmacht officer who was a member of a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler in 1944 and who later founded the MSC in 1963.

However, there may be other motivations at play behind the decision to bar the two largest populist parties in the country from attending one of the top international conferences.

The MSC will be held between February 14th and the 16th, one week before German voters head to the polls for a federal election.

While AfD chancellor candidate Alice Weidel and BSW leader Sahra Wagenknecht have been barred, other establishment candidates will be given a large platform at the event, including current Chancellor Olaf Scholz, leading candidate Freidrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Green candidate Robert Habeck, and Free Democrat leader Christian Lindner.

Despite often being branded as “far-right” or “extremist” by the legacy media, the AfD has firmly cemented itself as Germany’s second-largest party on a sovereigntist platform of taking back control of the nation’s borders and the mass deportation of illegal migrants from the country. Similarly, the leftist-populist BSW party has also advocated for cutting migration into the country, arguing that it negatively impacts wages and benefits for the native working class.

The AfD and BSW have both set themselves in opposition to the continued financing of the war in Ukraine, both calling for a negotiated settlement. While rhetoric has shifted since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has vowed to help end the war, calls for a peace deal have long been derided by the establishment as being akin to appeasement.

Weidel said last month that the AfD has “huge hopes” for the Trump administration and said that she is hopeful that he “puts an end to this terrible war in the Ukraine because the European member states are not willing or capable” of ending the war.

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