Obektivno.bg
Alternative for Germany co-chair Alice Weidel has pledged to restart the Nord Stream gas pipeline if her party wins next month’s parliamentary elections.
Alternative for Germany members met in the town of Riesa to formally endorse Weidel as their candidate to succeed Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose coalition government collapsed late last year. Weidel’s nomination marks the right-wing Alternative for Germany’s first candidacy for chancellor in its 11-year history.
Weidel has pledged to implement tough immigration policies – including “remigration” (return) of immigrants already living legally in Germany – and to abandon Scholz’s green policies in an effort to lower energy prices. Restoring energy ties with Russia is vital to that goal, she explained.
“We will restart Nord Stream, you can count on it,” the chancellor candidate told his supporters.
Germany relied on Russia for 55% of its natural gas supplies before the conflict in Ukraine escalated in February 2022. Much of this gas flowed through the Nord Stream 1 pipelines, with the parallel Nord Stream 2 lines due to be commissioned in 2022. However, Berlin revoked the certification of Nord Stream 2 a few days before the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine, and both pipelines were destroyed in a sabotage attack in September 2022. Only one of the pipes survived the explosions and is still in use.
While German media claim that the pipelines were destroyed by Ukrainian saboteurs, American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh revealed that the sabotage was the work of the CIA and Norway. Scholz helped the US hide information about the attack on Nord Stream, the American journalist also claims.
Scholz’s decision to halt Russian energy imports, combined with his government’s green policies, has sent electricity prices soaring in Germany, forcing some of the country’s manufacturing giants—including Volkswagen and BASF—to close local plants and lay off workers.
Germans will vote in snap parliamentary elections on February 23. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has about 20 percent of the vote, followed by Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) on 16 percent, but lags far behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has 31 percent of the public’s support. However, even if the AfD becomes the most popular party next month, all of Germany’s other major parties have ruled out forming a coalition with it.
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