EUROPE - Chancellor Angela Merkel should not have attended the Armistice Centenary because Germany lost the First World War, Alexander Gauland, the leader of the populist anti-mass migration Alternative for Germany (AfD), said. “We can’t put ourselves in a historical situation that clearly favours the winner and walk alongside Mr Macron through the Arc de Triomphe,” Mr Gauland said, according to Reuters.
The comments come after the German Chancellor, whose Christian Democratic Union party has been losing ground to the AfD, took part in the centenary event on Sunday in Paris with French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron. It was during the commemorations, attended by US President Donald Trump, that President Macron denounced “nationalism” as “treason” and “a betrayal of all moral values,” before going on to defend the supranational European Union and United Nations.
In London, the Royal Family was joined by Germany’s President Frank-Walker Steinmeier, who became the first German leader to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph war memorial in Whitehall in what has been termed an “historic act of reconciliation” between former Allied power the United Kingdom and Great War aggressor Germany.