Ten years after Britons voted to leave the European Union, a senior member of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) expressed regret over Brexit on Tuesday, while denying that many in the far-right, anti-EU party had welcomed the move at the time.
“It is regrettable that we have lost the British," said Bernd Baumann, the AfD's first parliamentary secretary. "They really do belong in Europe."
When asked about many senior AfD politicians having euphorically welcomed Brexit at the time, Baumann insisted: "Well, we didn’t exactly cheer Brexit on, or anything like that."
"We are by far the greatest supporters of Europe," said Baumann, whose party was formed in 2013 by opponents of the euro. The AfD, now Germany's biggest opposition party, has since shifted its focus to reducing migration.
Baumann said there was a difference between the EU and Europe.
He described the EU as "an organization within Europe which we consider to be inefficient and unworkable, and which we want to reform at its core. The other is Europe. Europe, the European peoples, the European nations. We are Europeans."
A majority of Britons voted in favour of leaving the EU in a referendum in 2016.
Senior AfD member Beatrix von Storch welcomed the move shortly after the United Kingdom formally left the bloc in January 2020, describing it as "a triumph of democracy."
"Brexit is proof that votes can bring about change," she wrote on X at the time.
When the UK also left the EU single market and the customs union at the end of 2020, Alexander Gauland – AfD co-founder and parliamentary group leader at the time – hailed a "successful Brexit."
"The UK has now regained its full sovereignty and can, in competition with an EU that is increasingly paralysed by bureaucracy, prove that, in its current form, the EU is anything but the only option," he said.
