Interview: Bundestag Member Dr. Rainer Rothfuss

The Mood of the German Voters Is
To Abolish the European Union

The following is an edited transcript of The LaRouche Organization’s (TLO) interview with Dr. Rainer Rothfuss on Feb. 13, 2025. Dr. Rothfuss is a member of the German Bundestag (National Parliament), a leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, and a candidate in the Feb. 23 Bundestag election. The interview was conducted by TLO’s Harley Schlanger. Subheads have been added.

Harley Schlanger: Rainer, thanks for taking the time to join us; I know you’re very busy with the campaign. At the moment, the AfD is in second place in the polls, at 21% to 23%, despite a vicious campaign of slander against you. How do you see the election shaping up, and what is the mood of the voters?

Dr. Rainer Rothfuss: Well, I think we are in historical times of the post–World War II Germany, Bundesrepublik Deutschland, because the times of crisis which have evolved since, I would say, at least 15 years ago, have been brought to a certain peak through the war in Ukraine. People are now waking up more and more to this, I would say, theater play that has been displayed by the established parties. And people now see that the media—which has always reported nicely, positively, left out criticism, largely, about the government policies developed in the past—has cheated them. The Alternative for Germany, which was founded 12 years ago in 2013, is now starting to be understood in its harsh criticism of those policies.

That’s a time for change; we can really sense it, we can feel it, we can see it, we can hear it. When we go out and talk to the citizens, we have far better responses; when we talk in public we have far greater audiences. So, the growing numbers in terms of survey results are substantiated by what we see, what we hear in our conversations with citizens on the streets. It’s a time of change, and that’s very promising. It makes it fun to work politically in these times.

Schlanger: Given the state of the economy, it’s not surprising that people are starting to pay attention. You have the problems of deindustrialization, inflation, energy prices. But when you listen to the other candidates, they have no program. I had the misfortune of watching the so-called debate between Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Christian Democratic Union (CDU) candidate Friedrich Merz the other day, and they’re sticking to the same program that got us into this mess—blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin, sticking to the war, the Green policies, the immigration policy which has failed. So, how is your party different? And is this why you’re being slandered?

Rothfuss: Our criticism can be summarized, I would say, in the following image: Germany is like a huge tanker, a huge vessel going in one direction. At the moment, our vessel called Germany is going through a certain canal. It cannot turn around inside this canal, and the fact that we have been brought into this canal without any options to change direction is the fault of the established parties with their major decisions. One of the major decisions, which I would call the left border of this canal, is that we have been brought into conflict with Russia, and also with China. So, we have isolated ourselves inside Eurasia, and have decided to stay only with the West—with Brussels and with Washington. But not the Washington we are having right now under United States President Donald Trump, but the globalist Washington.

The right border of this canal is established by a Green policy that believes in the paradigm, in the religion of CO₂ damaging our climate and our planet. All the other established parties are caught in this canal, and they cannot change the direction of this vessel.

We, the Alternative for Germany, say neither one border nor the other makes sense; let’s blow them away and steer the direction of our vessel Germany into a more promising direction. That’s why they cannot present us any really game-changing options inside their policy framework which is limited in the already described way. That makes us the real alternative; we are the Alternative for Germany by name, but that makes us the real alternative: We want collaboration and integration inside Eurasia; not, of course, becoming enemies of Western Europe and the United States. We are perfectly able to still keep working together. But we also want to blow away these limitations we have set for ourselves as consumers; limits set to the development of our economy, believing that only climate neutrality can save the world. This really makes us the alternative which promises a greater future than what we have to expect if we keep on this course inside this limited canal.

A Path Toward Peace

Schlanger: You mention that part of the boundary of the canal is the Ukraine war; the decision of NATO, the U.S., the UK, to carry out a campaign to weaken Russia. It appears as though the other parties intend to stick with this NATO policy. Do you think Germany is going to continue to support this U.S.-NATO war against Russia? What do you think could be done to change this?

Rothfuss: We have to wait and see what Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will present to the world as a solution for the Ukraine war. Germany does not really have the capacity of changing this greater course at the moment. Of course, an Alternative for Germany–led government would be very important to serve as a bridge between East and West; we could make a difference. But at the moment, Germany doesn’t have that much relevance.

But if we came to power, we would immediately pave the ground for peace talks. We would offer Berlin also as a conference venue, although it doesn’t matter if we take Vienna or Geneva. What matters is that there is the willingness to look at the mistakes we, the West, have made to bring us into such a deadly conflict, which has driven us to such a dead-end road in terms of Eurasian integration. At the moment, I think we can also analyze, that part of our crisis is not only related to the weakness of the economy. There are different signs of the crisis, such as the knife attacks on our streets; the terror attack on our Christmas market. Another sign is that people are fed up with this war in Ukraine, the policies for which have not shown any progress toward peace, toward settling this conflict.

So, I think the German population at large also tends to look at other options leading toward diplomacy; settling the conflicts of interest, and not following any longer this warpath which has been promoted a lot by former U.S. President Joe Biden, by the EU institutions, and by the leading government Social Democratic party (SPD), and also the Merz CDU party, of course—the guy who is supposedly going to win the next election, and who for sure will form the new government with his party. Maybe not with his hat on top of the government—who knows?—but at least the CDU will for sure try to continue on this warpath. But the population is limiting its support more and more, and giving the AfD more support for their path of peace and diplomacy.

Schlanger: Friedrich Merz, who you’re talking about, has been talking about increasing military spending; he has come out in favor of supplying the Taurus missiles to Ukraine. He seems to be quite a war hawk. Do you think there’s any connection between that and his role as the chairman of Germany’s BlackRock for six years before his candidacy?

Rothfuss: For sure. The profits of the defense industry have grown dramatically, not only in the U.S., but also in Germany. War is an excellent business. And rebuilding a destroyed country is an excellent business. People who have died in that war—probably one million already—do not count in terms of economic profits. So, I think that plays a greater role, but we also have to see that it’s not fair to assume that only the personality of Friedrich Merz is key in this respect. It’s the CDU which has always been more pro-war than other parties in Germany. If we remember the 2003 intervention in Iraq, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, leading the SPD—the Social Democratic government at that time—rejected joining the U.S. in bombing Iraq, despite having joined the bombing of Yugoslavia four years earlier.

So, we see that, at that time, 2003, the CDU already was in opposition to that more neutral approach in Iraq of Gerhard Schröder and the SPD. And CDU leader Angela Merkel at that time travelled immediately to Washington to underline that, with a CDU government, we would never have abstained from bombing Iraq along with the U.S. This is the same pattern that we see nowadays again, that the Taurus delivery—the cruise missiles that can also reach the Kerch Strait Bridge and “ministries in Moscow,” as Roderich Kiesewetter said (a prominent figure inside the CDU). This debate about delivering Taurus missiles, which Olaf Scholz rejected, displays the same pattern. The CDU is always leaning more toward aggression, toward war, than toward diplomacy.

Challenges for an Independent Germany

Schlanger: Rainer, you’re a former professor of geography and geopolitics, so I know you will be very familiar with this next subject. Helga Zepp-LaRouche from the Schiller Institute has called for a break from the ideology of the British imperial geopolitics of confrontation with Russia and China over the future of Eurasia. She, in fact, has said that the solution would be to cooperate with the BRICS and the Global South. Do you see a possibility for Germany to do this? Would this be in the interests of the German economy, to look for cooperation rather than war?

Rothfuss: Yes, for sure. I wrote this book, Europe at the Tipping Point, in which I analyzed the potentials of more intensively collaborating and integrating Eurasia—also involving China as a partner—which, of course, also presents some challenges and dangers to a free Western Europe. But they can be overcome, according to my analysis, if judged properly and countered properly. In that book, I already wrote as a major outcome, on the back cover, that Germany should become more independent inside the Western bloc and consider accession to the BRICS association. Becoming, for example, a BRICS partner country, because Germany is in the very special situation of being an industrialized country without having access to resources within Germany necessary for our own production, and needing access to markets around the world. So, the collaboration, the openness toward the rest of the world is of tremendous importance for us.

The United States, in comparison, has access to large resources, energy resources, inside the country. It has a large internal market, which could also be used to foster economic growth. But Germany is more dependent than anybody else, any other country in the world, on good relationships inside Eurasia and with the whole world. So, the BRICS association would be, in my view, an alternative also for the very strong limits that the EU cooperation sets for Germany at the moment. It may not replace the EU all of a sudden, but in the long term, it could widen our alternative perspective for international cooperation because the EU, for example, has dictated that by 2035 there shall be no more production of combustion engine cars, and this is the core strength of our industry. It would strip us of our main industrial strength and make German industry collapse completely. That’s why we need to reject this EU policy and have alternatives for international collaboration with regard to this EU diktat that we are subject to at the moment.

A New Security Architecture

Schlanger: Well, you anticipated my final question, Rainer. In the name of democracy, the European Union is meddling in the politics of countries such as Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. The question I have for you on the future of the EU and NATO is, how would you change the security architecture to take into account the developments in Eurasia?

Rothfuss: I think the United States should really keep a very close eye on the developments in Europe, inside the EU structures. And should the EU continue to abuse regulations like the Digital Services Act, to censor media like X—X has already been severely threatened—and even to argue for the cancelling of elections, as has happened in Romania, then the United States should exert as much pressure on the EU as needed to change this course. We are too weak as individual member states; and at the moment, the strongest member state, Germany, is not under control of free speech, or a loving government like we would present it.

Therefore, we need this external support to exert pressure on the EU to respect the basic rules of democracy, of free speech, of respecting election results. Should those basic rules not be obeyed, then such threats as made already by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, that he questions NATO, because the EU and the United States are no longer defending the same values—for example, if they censored X in the EU, as they already have censored Russian TV—then making good on those threats is the right way to go forward. That would make clear to the EU that they are on the wrong path, and should NATO be broken apart, that would heal this insanity of EU Commissioners—I would even say dictators, since they have not been elected for what they decide and what they are doing. It could help to open up Europe again toward the world.

We need a new security architecture; we cannot just split NATO and say the EU forms its own NATO now, and continues following the same path as in the past, of building up tensions with Russia. We need a new security architecture that reflects the progress made already in Eurasian integration. So, we need a security architecture which foresees all the mechanisms of solving tensions, conflicts of interest with Russia, instead of just resorting to aggression and even to war.