Germany’s Chancellor has accused JD Vance of interfering in his country’s elections, after the US vice president called on Europe to bring down far-Right firewalls.

“We won’t accept it when outsiders intervene in our elections on behalf of this party,” Olaf Scholz said at the Munich Security Conference, referring to Alice Weidel’s far-Right Alternative For Germany [AfD] party. “We rejected this clearly… we decide ourselves what happens in our democracy.”

Mr Vance had called on EU leaders to end their “firewall” policy – of not cooperating with the far-Right – during a speech at Munich Security Conference which left those in the audience stunned.

After his speech, the US vice president held a meeting with Ms Weidel on the sidelines of the conference, having snubbed a meeting with the German Chancellor.

Friedrich Merz, the frontrunner in next week’s elections and leader of the centre-Right Christian Democratic Union [CDU], also criticised the speech by Mr Vance and urged him to stay out of German domestic politics.

“We respect the presidential elections and the congressional elections in the US. And we expect the US to do the same here,” the CDU leader said.

Mr Merz then alluded to Donald Trump’s recent decision to ban the Associated Press from the White House and Air Force One, after it refused to use his preferred term “Gulf of America” for the Gulf of Mexico.  “[We] would never kick out a news agency out of the press room of our chancellery,” said Mr Merz.