The European Union should set up its own version of Elon Musk’s Doge agency to cut red tape that prevents member states from defending their borders, Germany’s AfD party has said.

Markus Walbrunn, an MP for the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD), said “sclerotic” Brussels bureaucracy was holding back efforts in Germany and other EU states to adopt much tougher measures on migration, such as the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. 

“Not just Germany, but the entire European Union, which suffers from bureaucratic sclerosis, urgently needs a radical reduction in unnecessary regulations and laws,” Mr Walbrunn, an MP in the Bavarian state parliament, told The Telegraph.

“This of course also applies to the areas of asylum and migration. The repatriation of illegal immigrants on a large scale must finally be possible.”

Asked whether the AfD views Mr Musk’s Doge agency as a possible model for this, he said: “Absolutely.”

Doge is a semi-official organisation created by Mr Musk, the tech billionaire, to help the Trump administration radically cut red tape and excessive US government spending.

An acronym for the Department of Government Efficiency, the name also appears to have been inspired by Mr Musk’s favourite dog-themed cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.

Polling in second place in Germany, the AfD is on course to become the country’s main opposition party after elections on Feb 23.

Under the co-leadership of Alice Weidel, a 46-year-old economist and fluent Mandarin speaker, the AfD has also formed a close relationship with Mr Musk, who gave an endorsement speech at its campaign launch in east Germany.

Mr Musk has claimed that “only the AfD can save Germany”, and has described Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, as an “incompetent fool” over his response to recent terrorist attacks in the country by rejected asylum seekers.

Like other Right-wing populist parties in Europe, the AfD is staunchly opposed to mass migration and Islamist radicalism.

But some of its senior members have also been embroiled in recent scandals over playing down SS war crimes, using Nazi slogans in speeches and allegedly taking suspicious payments from Russia and China.

The party is classified by the German domestic intelligence services as a suspected extremist group, a charge that the AfD strongly denies.

As a result, the leaders of Germany’s traditional parties, such as the centre-Right Christian Democrats and centre-Left Social Democrats, have flatly ruled out forming a coalition with the AfD because they consider it to be too extreme to govern.

Despite this, Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader, relied on AfD votes to pass a non-binding motion in the German parliament earlier this month as he sought to tighten migration laws.

Mr Scholz, the German chancellor, accused Mr Merz of making an “unforgivable mistake” by working with the AfD, as he warned that the Brandmauer [firewall], Germany’s policy of not cooperating with the far-Right, was about to break.

Critics also warned that Mr Merz’s AfD-backed proposals, such as the de facto closure of German borders to asylum seekers, would be a clear violation of EU asylum rules.

Mr Walbrunn said the row over Mr Merz’s motion on migration, and a similar, legally binding motion which was voted down in parliament, showed that the CDU chief was a “weak” leader.

“He is powerless and leads an internally divided party. He will not be able to implement political reforms on migration and economic policy with his desired Left-wing coalition partners. That would only be possible in a coalition with the AfD, which Merz rules out,” he said.

The AfD is not the only party expressing interest in a Doge-style organisation to cut red tape in the EU.

Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, has written to Mr Musk with a request to extend Doge’s remit to look at alleged misuse of US aid funds in Slovakia.

“It is indisputable that financial resources from USAid were used in Slovakia for political purposes, with the aim of distorting the political system and favouring certain political parties,” he wrote, referring to the United States Agency for International Development.

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has also suggested that Europe needs to significantly cut back on bureaucracy to make it more competitive, though he is no fan of Mr Musk.

“We have to focus on killing some crazy regulations, simplification of the current environment. Europe has to simplify its rules, make it much more business friendly, and synchronise with the US. Everything which is a killer for competitiveness of the European industry has to be reassessed, postponed or cancelled,” Mr Macron told CNN.

Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, told The Telegraph’s Daily T podcast: “If you remember in my campaign launch speech, I said that we need to reboot [and] rewire the state. This is what we have to do.

“I’m looking very closely at what they are doing in Doge.”

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT

Men make up 70% of supporters of Germany's far-right AfD

More than 70% of supporters of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in 2024 were men, according to a major study released on Wednesday.

In a survey carried out between March and June 2024, the University of Leipzig found that 70.6% of AfD supporters were male.

This represented the highest ratio for any German party, above the pro-business Free Democrats and The Left, both on 62%.

In contrast, women made up a far greater proportion of the Greens' voter base, with only one-third of the party's supporters (33.6%) being men.

The analysis of 2,500 German residents' voting preferences, released less than two weeks before the country heads to the polls, found that AfD supporters were primarily of middling income or unemployed. Relatively few had a high level of education.

The Greens represented a polar opposite, with 53% of supporters being highly educated and 44% enjoying a monthly household income above €3,500 ($3,630).

The research emerged from a major study on authoritarianism carried out by the university in eastern Germany last year.

It found that 22% of AfD voters have a closed, extremist right-wing world view, compared to only 2.5% of those backing the country's most popular parties - the conservative CDU/CSU alliance and the centre-left Social Democrats.

The AfD, which is under investigation by domestic intelligence services as a suspected extremist group, is polling in second place on more than 20% of the vote.

The study found that the main difference between CDU/CSU voters and AfD supporters was the desire for a strong authority that supporters identify with.

Some 27% of AfD backers favour the position, with only 14% of the centre-right bloc's voters doing so.

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT