The far-right Germany political party German Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, has tried to enlist support from President Trump and his MAGA allies for over a decade.
The Guardian, citing a data leak from the AfD, reports the party has lobbied Trump going back to his election in 2016, with the party debating on how to word a congratulatory telegram. The final message included the wish that Trump’s “hopes as a person be fulfilled.”
The leaks comprise over 420,000 emails, documents, and personnel records from the AfD since 2013, though the info thins out after 2019. They were given to reporters by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a hacker activist group.
After Trump’s election, the AfD didn’t just congratulate him, but asked that he support its efforts to remove the “enemy state” clause from the U.N. charter, a post–World War II vestige that allows action against “any state which during the second world war has been an enemy of any signatory.” The clause is irrelevant today, but the AfD, alone among German political parties, sees it as an attack on German sovereignty.
AfD leaders also sought to make contact with Richard Grenell, who during Trump’s first term was ambassador to Germany, but was unsuccessful, and pursued contacts with former White House adviser Steve Bannon, according to the leaks.
The party holds hardline anti-immigration and Islamophobic views, and some of its members have displayed sympathies and connections to Nazism. The party’s leader in the Thuringia region, Björn Höcke, was convicted of using a banned slogan from the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing in 2024. AfD is currently leading national polls with 30 percent support in Germany’s multiparty democracy, and in September, it won 43.8 percent of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where it is trying to form Germany’s first far-right state government since the Nazis.
German intelligence labels the AfD as a suspected domestic extremist organization. Germany’s leading political parties refuse to govern or form any coalitions with it. That hasn’t stopped Trump and his MAGA allies from praising the group. Vice President JD Vance, as well as numerous State Department employees, have frequently met AfD politicians, including the party’s leader, Alice Weidel.
The party’s deputy leader, Beatrix von Storch, and her husband Sven were at Trump’s “Make America Great Again Victory Rally” just before his inauguration last year, and she bragged in a newsletter that she met Steve Bannon and Donald Trump Jr.
Trump celebrated the AfD’s September win in Saxony-Anhalt on Truth Social, posting, “Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night. They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly. THEY ARE ON THE RISE, and not going to take it anymore! MGGA!!! President DJT.”