Security conference in Munich: These parties are undesirable

The AfD and the BSW are again not invited to the Munich Security Conference (MSC) this year. Conference director Christoph Heusgen justified the decision in an interview with the fact that both parties did not correspond to the basic principle “Peace Through Dialogue, Peace by dialogue” of the conference.

“Both the AfD and the BSW left the German Bundestag when Ukrainian President Wolodymyr Selenskyj spoke,” said Heusgen. “This is the opposite of dialogue and the like I don’t want to experience at the conference. That is why I decided not to invite no politicians from AfD and BSW this year.”

Selenskyj spoke in the Bundestag in June 2024. The majority of the AfD parliamentary group and the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) remained demonstratively far from the speech. The AfD parliamentary group leader Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla said at the time that Selenskyj should be given “no stage for reconstruction”. The BSW accused him of promoting “a highly dangerous escalation spiral”.

Heusgen also justified the exclusion of the AfD with the fact that parts of the party are classified by the constitutional protection as secure right -wing extremists. “In my view, an invitation would therefore not be in the spirit of the founder of conference Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, who belonged to the resistance group of July 20, 1944,” he said.

From Kleist it belonged to the group around Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who planned the failed attack on Adolf Hitler in 1944. In 1963, the publisher organized the first “international military class”, which was later renamed several times and is now called Munich Security Conference.

It is considered the world’s most important expert meeting on security policy and will take place this year from February 14th to 16th in the Munich Hotel Bayerischer Hof – a week before the Bundestag election. Olaf Scholz (SPD), Friedrich Merz (CDU/CSU), Christian Lindner (FDP) and Robert Habeck (Greens) are expected of the Chancellor and top candidates. Representatives of the left are also invited to the conference.

“I am pleased that there will be numerous important foreign policy voices in Munich from federal politics,” said Heusgen. “Shortly before the election, our guests from all over the world will be interested in which course Germany will take to security policy.”

For a long time it was common for politicians to be invited to the conference in the Bundestag. Heusgen had already deviated from this practice at his premiere as a conference manager in 2023 and had not invited AfD politicians. A year later he stayed with it and did not invite the BSW either.