Reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice has distanced his party from Alternative for Germany (AfD) which has surged to become the country’s second-largest party, the strongest showing for the far right there since the Second World War.
AfD leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, speaking to the media in Berlin, said it was time the media stopped “pulling their leg” by associating the party with fascism. Weidel predicted her party would take over the mainstream conservative CDU, the Christian Democrats, in elections in the next few years to “bring order to Germany”.
Weidel said she missed a call of congratulation from X boss Elon Musk overnight and has received congratulations from Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban. But there was no such congratulation from Reform UK, who are keen to present themselves as a centrist party.
Weidel once claimed immigrants were made up of “burqas, girls in headscarves, knife-wielding men on government benefits and other good-for-nothing people”. Meanwhile, Björn Höcke, AfD leader the state of Thuringia, has twice been fined by a German court for using a banned Nazi slogan. “Everything for Germany” was a slogan of Nazi stormtroopers and engraved on their daggers.
Asked what lessons Reform had taken from the AfD’s success in German elections, Tice told The i Paper: “None.”
“There are elements of the AFD which in a sense are acceptable to people and there are elements of it that frankly are completely unacceptable, and I think that we just focus on what we’re doing well. I’m not really interested in other parties. I just know that our policies are what works for the British people and that’s what any British political party should be doing. What’s right for Britain, the UK, how do we make people better off? That is the critical thing,” he said.
Asked if the two parties are ideologically aligned, Tice replied: “No, absolutely not.”
“We see ourselves as a UK-centric, common-sense party that’s got solutions for the UK,” he added.
Friedrich Merz’s CDU won Germany’s election, well ahead of rival parties but short of the 30 per cent vote-share they had expected. The AfD is celebrating a result of 20.8 per cent. Merz’s party has repeatedly ruled out entering a coalition with the AfD.
Once a full breakdown of votes is clear, the AfD is expected to have performed well with younger voters in the 18-24-year-old category, with the left-wing party Die Linke also picking up a significant chunk of the youth vote.
Tice said Reform UK, which some polls suggest is performing well with younger voters, is benefiting from dissatisfaction with both Labour and the Conservatives.
“The reason that we’re attracting lots of young voters is because young people in the UK realise that the two main parties have let them down, that actually they’ve got a really bad deal, the cost of housing, the taxation, the cost of energy, all of these things, the pressure on public services for them, and they’re saying, what’s in it for me?”
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