Last week, Vice President J.D. Vance met with Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-chair Alice Weidel, a political leader in that party who has downplayed the significance of the Holocaust and whose party has been described by many as a neo-Nazi organization.

The meeting took place while Vance visited the country, where he also spoke at a security conference taking place in Munich, issuing demands for other countries to be more open to far right political movements.

AfD is designated as a “suspected extremist” organization by Germany’s government. The party is vehemently anti-immigration, particularly toward Muslim people. Its leaders have also espoused antisemitic viewpoints and have downplayed or outright denied the Holocaust.

Weidel is among them. Recently, she has complained about the Holocaust being “politically instrumentalized” against her political party. She also described efforts to maintain the educational history of Holocaust as “pesky,” and visibly rolled her eyes at discussion of the historical event that involved the mass killing of millions of people by the Nazi regime.

At the meeting between Vance and Weidel, the two discussed the war between Russia and Ukraine, German domestic policies, and also restrictions within the country against ultra-nationalist political parties being able to take part in elections. Vance also met with other political leaders in Germany, but his meeting with a member of the AfD is notable because of how far to the right the party is — and how giving them attention could be an attempt by the Trump administration to legitimize them.

Although AfD is

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