A Munich Security Conference (MSC) without AfD and the Left’s Sahra Wagenknecht Bund (BSW) in attendance is nothing new this year. The Bundestag members of both parties will therefore not receive an invitation to the conference in February in the Bavarian state capital.
The justification of conference leader Christoph Heusgen is extremely unpalatable: In an interview with the German Press Agency, he said that both parties – the only ones in the Bundestag who want to end the Ukraine war through diplomacy and dialogue, not by further arms deliveries – do not conform to the conference’s fundamental principle of “Peace through dialogue, peace through dialogue.” This is said by the leader of a conference where, every year, Western arms lobbies, militarists and NATO war hawks get together, who have never taken the principle of “peace through dialogue” seriously.
And because he is likely aware of the thin ice he is treading on, Heusgen had to go to great lengths to somehow disavow the dialog willingness of AfD and BSW – in the people’s parlance, one would say “an den Haaren herbeigezogen”:
“‘Both AfD and BSW have left the German Bundestag when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke. That is the opposite of dialogue and I don’t want to experience that on the conference either. That’s why I’ve decided not to invite politicians from AfD and BSW this year,’ Heusgen said.”
Selensky had spoken in the Bundestag in June 2024. The majority of the AfD Bundestag faction and the BSW members of parliament demonstratively stayed away from his speech. The AfD faction leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla explained then that one should not give Selensky a “platform for reconstruction blackmail.” The BSW accused the Ukrainian government of “highly dangerous escalation spiral” promotion.
However, how one evaluates the absence of the members of parliament, they did not refuse dialogue, as Selensky did not come to the German parliament to discuss, but to advocate for more money for his country.
For a long time, it was customary for members of parliament from all represented parties in the Bundestag to be invited to the conference. Heusgen had already deviated from this common practice as conference leader in 2023 and did not invite AfD politicians. A year later, the former foreign and security policy advisor to Chancellor Angela Merkel did the same and did not invite the newly founded BSW either.
Heusgen justified the exclusion of AfD by saying he did not want to “roll out the red carpet” for a “right-extremist party.” The exclusion of BSW the previous year was not justified in content, but formally: “The members of the Bundestag from BSW are not elected as BSW politicians, but as the Left.”
Months later, Heusgen admitted the real reason he did not want AfD and BSW there: the two parties are “Putin’s allies who act in his sense.” AfD and BSW were already excluded last year because they took the motto of this year’s event seriously: Peace through dialogue – which they naturally also want to conduct with Russia.