Germany's western city of Koblenz, near Frankfurt, is the meeting place of two grand rivers, the Rhine and the Mosel. With a name originating in the Latin confluens, or confluence, Koblenz will be the meeting place of European far-right leaders this Saturday.
Hosting the event is Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) co-leader Frauke Petry and her new husband, party MEP Marcus Pretzell. Guests include French presidential hopeful and Front National (FN) leader Marine Le Pen, Dutchman Geert Wilders, whose Party for Freedom (PVV) is leading polls ahead of March elections, and Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League.
Hours after Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, European far-right leaders see a mutual benefit in presenting themselves in public as a united front opposed to the EU’s current form, to its open borders, to its currency and to its approach to the refugee crisis.
With a focus on public speeches and little time for talks, however, critics say Saturday’s meeting is more a political stunt for a group of canny operators who, politically and culturally, are as divided as they are united.
While Le Pen, Wilders and Salvini have met in the past, Saturday’s event marks a public premiere for Petry and Le Pen. The two met for a private dinner during the summer, although when news of the meeting leaked, the French politician attempted to deny it ever happened.
Mutual wariness
The reason for their mutual wariness is clear. The four-year-old AfD is hoping to score at least 14 per cent in Germany’s federal elections in September with a programme of “targeted provocation”. The latest example of this strategy came earlier this week, when regional leader Björn Höcke earned applause from the AfD youth wing for suggesting that Germany had been crippled by its “laughable policy of coming to terms with the past”.
Coming exactly 75 years after the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin, which agreed the details of the Holocaust, Höcke’s provocation was very targeted indeed.
Of course, France’s FN is no stranger to such controversy. Last year, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen was fined €30,000 for dismissing the Shoah as a “mere detail of history”. But the FN is 40 years older than the AfD and under the new management of Le Pen’s daughter Marine.
She is anxious to maximise her presidential appeal and middle-class vote by distancing herself from the FN extremist positions of her father’s era.
Policy cracks
At a joint press conference in Koblenz, however, Europe’s far-right party leaders will need rolls of rhetorical wallpaper to cover their policy cracks. FN economic policy, for instance, has strong protectionist overtones, while the AfD’s liberal economic policy betrays its origins as an anti-bailout party. There is disagreement, too, on whether the EU should be reformed or abolished.
However, the AfD is a party in flux and Petry and Pretzell are determined to capitalise on German unease with globalisation and the migration crisis. They favour following Le Pen’s economic policy makeover and the Wilders strategy on Islam, blurring the line between the religion and Islamist violence.
But other senior AfD figures, who opposed closer co-operation with Le Pen and Wilders’s MEPs in the European Parliament, are wary of Saturday’s meeting. They believe the AfD’s growing conservative and liberal voter base are far more wary of Le Pen and Wilders than they are weary of chancellor Angela Merkel.
Given the political temptation in the air, it might be an idea to move today’s far-right Koblenz “confluence” summit a short journey upstream to the Lorelei rocks. There Petry, praised by her new husband for her “demonic beauty”, could play the mythical siren who lures doomed travellers on to the rocks.
