Tehran recruits AfD MP into the transnational anti-sanctions coalition
Iran's Arabic-language state broadcaster Al-Alam gave prominent play on 7 June 2026 to a German Bundestag member, Steffen Kotré, who argues that German industry is being held hostage to American sanctions discipline. According to Al-Alam's reporting — which itself sits inside Tehran's long-running campaign to delegitimise Western sanctions architecture — Kotré told the channel's interviewers that German firms would resume trade with Russia tomorrow if Washington permitted it, and that four years of EU-aligned sanctions have accelerated a catastrophic industrial decline in Europe's largest economy.
The statements are not the position of the German government, which continues to back the EU sanctions regime against Russia over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But they are a useful window onto a real, internal German debate — one that Iranian state media is happy to amplify because the politics align. Inside the Bundestag, a minority bloc led by the AfD and parts of the BSW continues to push for sanctions relief as the country's export-led economy struggles with high energy costs, weak Chinese demand for capital goods, and a domestic manufacturing contraction that began before 2022 and has deepened since.
The messenger
Who is Steffen Kotré, and what is the Al-Alam platform doing by carrying him?
Kotré is a Bundestag member for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) from Chemnitz, elected to the federal parliament in 2017 and returned in 2021. He sits on the Bundestag's economic affairs committee. The AfD as a whole is classified by Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a suspected extremist organisation, though the parliamentary party itself is not under formal ban. Kotré's foreign-policy positions — sceptical of Ukraine military aid, hostile to Russia sanctions, sympathetic to the Trump-era NATO burden-sharing framing — make him a natural interview subject for outlets that share those positions.
Al-Alam is the Arabic-language sister channel of Iran's English-language PressTV, both operated by the state broadcaster IRIB. Its editorial line, like PressTV's, frames Western sanctions as a tool of US hegemony that harms third-party countries. That an AfD MP — a minoritarian but electorally significant voice in German politics — is given prime slots on the network tells the reader something about who is being recruited into the broader anti-sanctions coalition: not just illiberal nationalists in Europe, but the authoritarian-capital axis from Moscow to Tehran that finds the AfD's economic arguments useful for its own purposes.
What the sanctions actually do
The German-Russian commercial relationship that the sanctions dismantled was a structural feature of the post-Cold War European order.
Before February 2022, Russia was Germany's largest single supplier of pipeline natural gas, and German industry was a major buyer of Russian oil, coal, and metallurgical inputs. Russian gas flowed into the German grid primarily via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, with Nord Stream 2 completed but never entering commercial operation after Germany suspended the certification process in late February 2022. The EU's subsequent sanctions package — adopted in stages through 2022 and 2024 — prohibits most direct imports of Russian seaborne crude, refined products, and pipeline gas, and restricts dual-use and military exports.
Kotré's framing — that German companies would resume trade tomorrow if American pressure were lifted — is partially correct in identifying the United States as the enforcer of the wider sanctions regime through secondary-sanctions threats and dollar-clearing leverage. It is incorrect in implying that the EU sanctions would fall with the American ones. Brussels has its own legal architecture, and the political coalition supporting the package in Berlin, Paris, and Rome is broader than the Washington-Brussels relationship. The sanctions are not reversible on American wish alone.
The industrial decline — real, but framed selectively
The German economy is in trouble. The framing of that trouble, however, is the contested part.
Destatis and the Bundesbank have confirmed a contraction in 2023 and 2024, with industrial output falling sharply in chemicals, basic metals, and automotive supplier chains. The IFO business-climate index has been below its long-term average for most of 2024-25. The causes are multiple: an energy-price shock from the loss of cheap Russian pipeline gas; a manufacturing recession in China that has reduced demand for German machine tools and autos; the structural transition away from internal-combustion platforms that has caught German OEMs flat-footed against Chinese EV makers; and demographic pressure on a workforce already dependent on immigration to fill skilled trades.
To pin all of this on Russia sanctions is a stretch. The same industrial sectors that Kotré blames on sanctions were already losing competitiveness against Chinese and Korean rivals before 2022. The energy shock, in turn, was caused by Russia weaponising pipeline flows in retaliation for sanctions — the causal arrow runs through Moscow's coercion, not through the sanctions themselves. The more honest framing is that German industry was already vulnerable, the war made the vulnerability acute, and the alternative to the shock — continued dependence on Russian gas — would have left Berlin permanently exposed to Moscow's leverage.
Stakes — who wins if the sanctions conversation moves
Kotré's arguments are a minority view inside the Bundestag. The CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens, and FDP all back continued sanctions enforcement; only the AfD and the BSW consistently vote against further packages. But the constituency he speaks for — energy-intensive Mittelstand firms in Saxony, Thuringia, and the Ruhr — is real, and the AfD's vote share in the former East has crossed 30% in regional elections.
If the anti-sanctions minority grows, the political space for a Berlin-led sanctions rollback opens. The German economy's gravitational pull on EU policy is large enough that a German pivot would force a wider European debate. Moscow's interest in that outcome is obvious. Tehran's interest — which is what brought Kotré onto Al-Alam in the first place — is more indirect: a weakening of Western sanctions discipline on Russia loosens the doctrinal and legal scaffolding on which European sanctions enforcement against Iran also rests. The infrastructure of compliance, the SWIFT exclusions, the dual-use export-control regimes, all share legal DNA.
The AfD's economic arguments are not invented. The industrial data behind them is real. But the audiences being recruited by those arguments — in Moscow, in Tehran, and on Iranian state media — are not German workers in Chemnitz. They are the authoritarian-capital bloc that finds the European centre's Ukraine consensus politically and economically costly, and that would like to see it break.
Where the wires treat AfD statements on Russia as domestic news, Monexus read this one as foreign policy: an Iranian state broadcaster recruiting European minority voices into a transnational anti-sanctions coalition. The same Kotré quote, if carried by Reuters, would be a Berlin story; on Al-Alam, it is a Tehran one.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/s/alalamarabic
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steffen_Kotr%C3%A9
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_during_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany