Weidel says Simion's voters are plundering Germany, Romanian sovereignists stay silent

On October 28, Alice Weidel, co-chair and chancellor candidate of Germany's far-right AfD, wrote on X that an increasing number of migrants from Romania are plundering the German social system, from child benefits to basic services and healthcare. As an example, she cited Magdeburg, where, according to her, spending on immigrants from Romania has grown twentyfold, to three million euros a year, and she closed the post by saying that a turnaround in migration policy is only possible with the AfD. All this is said by a politician who herself largely lives in Switzerland, and whose partner, Sarah Bossard, was born in Sri Lanka and was adopted as an infant by a Swiss pastor couple.

Weidel was referring to a documentary made by journalist Jana Gareis for the public broadcaster MDR. The film was shot in the poor neighborhoods of Magdeburg, Halle and Hagen, as well as in Romanian villages that immigrants come from, and examines the consequences of free movement within the EU for cities and local residents. The documentary shows legal loopholes and the helplessness of local authorities, but it does not claim that Romanians living in Germany are living off the system en masse. According to official statistics, about 904,000 Romanians live in Germany, most of them working in industry, agriculture and services, and paying taxes and social security contributions to the German state.

The irony of it all is that it was precisely the Romanian diaspora in Germany that voted with the greatest enthusiasm for Weidel's Romanian ideological counterpart, George Simion. In the first round of the 2025 presidential election, the AUR chairman received the highest share of any country in Europe among voters abroad in Germany, 74.3 percent of the 163,000 valid votes. In September, Simion was still celebrating the AfD's success in state elections, and although he said he did not personally know Weidel, he did not deny the ties between the two parties. Now that their German ally is calling their own voters plunderers, Simion has made no public statement; perhaps he is still waiting to see what Moscow will say.

From AUR, only lawmaker Andrei Gușă reacted, and even he did so cautiously. He said Germany has the right to pursue a sovereign and conservative migration policy and to crack down on fraud, but it has no right to stigmatize Romanians. The sharpest response came from USR chairman Dominic Fritz, who was born in Germany; in a German-language video, he reminded Weidel that hundreds of thousands of Romanians work legally in Germany, paying taxes and social contributions — in other words, paying into the very system they are allegedly plundering. According to Fritz, thousands of Romanian doctors work in German clinics, trained at Romania's expense, and if Weidel's voters ever need care, there is a good chance they will be looked after by a Romanian woman whose own children are being raised back home by their grandparents in the meantime. He also had a message for AUR: in his view, Romanian sovereignists flatter their German friends while those friends vilify the diaspora.

The figures don't support Weidel's argument either. Germany is Romania's most important trading partner and one of its largest investors: trade between the two countries amounted to 42.6 billion euros in 2025, of which German exports accounted for 22.8 billion euros and imports from Romania for 19.8 billion. Romanian factories mainly supply German industry with auto parts, electrical equipment and cables, meaning that German car manufacturing relies to a significant extent on Romanian labor and Eastern European markets.

The case shows well what happens when sovereignists from different countries get in each other's way: German national interest turns against the Romanian guest worker, while Romanian national interest suddenly falls silent. Meanwhile, Weidel also spoke out on the war: on October 22, she said in an interview that the West must take Russia's security interests into account and must force Zelensky into peace with Putin. An apology, which Fritz demanded of her on Tuesday, has not come so far.

Fallow