My first reaction on hearing that Jacob Rees-Mogg had retweeted a video by the populist German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was: “Well, that figures.” And not just because the AfD is the nasty party in German politics and because Rees-Mogg represents the faction that wants the Conservatives to remain the nasty party in Britain. One of the driving forces behind the AfD is a very German inferiority complex regarding the second world war. Rees-Mogg, with his foppish retro look and accent, embodies the Britain that German nationalists think they lost the war to. A Britain they despise, envy and admire in almost equal measure.

What binds Alice Weidel to a party of older white males is her almost pathological hatred of foreigners

I’ve known Alexander Gauland, who leads the AfD in the Bundestag together with Alice Weidel (more about her in a moment), for years. When he was just a disgruntled ex-civil servant and journalistic has-been, we used to meet fairly often for dinner, and that continued into the early years of the AfD’s rise to power. Over the second or third glass of wine, the tweedy Anglophile would steer the conversation to the woman who would occupy a special place in his version of hell: Margaret Thatcher. Gauland could never forgive the grocer’s daughter for destroying the Britain he admired, where people knew their place and a paternalistic old boys’ club presided over genteel decline. Modern Britain – a multicultural, multiracial, capitalist meritocracy – is everything Gauland doesn’t want Germany to become.

Weidel, whose speech Rees-Mogg retweeted, is superficially the antithesis of Gauland. She worked for investment bank Goldman Sachs before going into politics, and looks the part, with her smart business suits and crisp white blouses. A devotee of the ultra-liberal economist Friedrich Hayek, Weidel is openly gay and lives with a Sri Lankan-born film producer and their two adopted sons in Switzerland, presumably for tax reasons. What binds her to a party of older white males who defend “traditional family values”, distrust the finance markets and dislike all kinds of immigrants is Weidel’s almost pathological hatred of foreigners – except for her partner and the Syrian refugee who, according to a report in Die Zeit newspaper, they employed illegally as a housekeeper.

On New Year’s Day 2018, Weidel wrote on her Facebook page: “The year begins with our authorities surrendering to the imported, marauding, groping, beating, knife-wielding migrant mobs … The German police communicates in Arabic, although German is the official language of our country.”

And in an email obtained by my newspaper, Die Welt, Weidel described Arabs, Sinti and Roma as “cultural aliens” who were “flooding” Germany at the behest of the “pigs” in government, who were “puppets of the victorious powers” of the second world war. Rees-Mogg might want to read that last bit again.

The thing about nationalists in Germany is that they are a mirror-image of nationalists in the UK. European Research Group propagandists sometimes compare the European Union to the Fourth Reich, and quote their fathers or grandfathers who died on the beaches of Normandy (as if remainers’ grandparents hadn’t fought in the war). Scratch a functionary of the AfD, and more often than not you’ll find that they believe the allied re-education programmes after 1945 stripped Germans of their national pride in order to make them the prey of Anglo-American (and by implication Jewish) “globalists”.

Jeremy Corbyn needs to get behind the people’s vote to fight the far right | Rachel Shabi Read more

There’s a darker side to this slightly Fawlty Towers-esque obsession with the war, and that is an abiding anti-westernism. The “victorious powers” in rightwing code are the western powers, never the Soviet Union. The AfD consistently toes Moscow’s line when it comes to foreign policy: AfD politicians defended Russia’s invasion of Crimea and acted as “independent observers” during the referendum that rubber-stamped the annexation. They demand rapprochement with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and a less active role for Nato.

Since the AfD sees the EU as a bulwark of the “globalists”, they want it to be replaced by a Gaullist “Europe of Fatherlands”, bound together only by free-trade agreements, a stance that has been applauded by the Kremlin, whose media outlets such as Russia Today, plus swarms of bots and trolls, often support the AfD’s positions.

So when Weidel criticises the EU for being too hard on the UK during the negotiations, what she, Gauland and their fellow Brexit-enviers are really afraid of is the opposite: that by giving the British government just enough rope to hoist itself by its own petard, Brussels has shown the rest of Europe the folly of separatism in an age of cooperation.

• Alan Posener is a correspondent and commentator for Die Welt and Welt am Sonntag in Berlin