Olaf Kosinsky via Wikimedia Commons
The Far-Right Alternative for Germany Seeks Friends in Washington
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
Non-Resident Senior Fellow
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger is non-Resident Senior Fellow at AICGS.
How Compatible is the AfD’s Foreign Policy with American Interests?
Before Friedrich Merz became the chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), he articulated a number of goals, and one of the most important was that the CDU would once again score 40 percent of the vote at the national level, while cutting the support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in half. Forty percent would reflect the heyday of the big-tent parties; however, those days are history.
Today, Friedrich Merz is not only the CDU chairman but also the chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. His CDU, along with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), together gained only 28.6 percent of the vote in the February 2025 elections. They finished first, but the win was anything other than brilliant, and well below Merz’s 40 percent goal. And the AfD? They received 20.8 percent, more than double their 2021 result, and they are now the biggest opposition party in the Bundestag. Their radical rhetoric, style, and political opinions have not hindered their public support. If anything, one has to assume the opposite. And the fact that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic security service, classified the party as “confirmed right-wing extremist” in May has not scared voters off: polls in the fall of this year placed it at around 26 percent, essentially level with the chancellor’s CDU/CSU, which has not gained voter sympathy since taking office in the spring. The AfD’s rise continues, and with that, the upcoming year becomes a little clearer.
At the same time, senior figures in the AfD are seeking to elevate their relations with the United States. The Deputy Caucus Leader of the AfD in the Bundestag, Markus Frohnmaier, who previously traveled to Crimea and talks of a Moscow visit, is now looking intently westward. He visited Washington in the fall to continue building contacts with the Trump administration and with the president’s MAGA base. Frohnmaier met with senior officials from the State Department and the White House. And a visit by AfD co-chair Alice Weidel may be taking shape: the Florida Republican member of Congress Anna Paulina Luna has invited her and a delegation of AfD leaders to Washington as early as December.
The AfD Sees Itself on the Verge of a Breakthrough
In 2026, new state parliaments will be elected in five federal states, including the east German states of Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Polls suggest that the AfD in both states might achieve 40 percent of the vote, if not more. This could put them in a position to win an absolute majority of state legislative seats in one or both places and gain actual governing power at the state level for the first time. The AfD would no longer be a new-right phantasm, but rather the power-political reality in Europe’s largest and most important democracy. This would be a nightmare for the old big-tent parties: the center-right CDU/CSU and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).
The right-wing cause benefits significantly from circumstances that also have national foreign policy repercussions: many voters in the eastern German states reject immigration (illegal, irregular, or even legal), they oppose military support for Ukraine, and they have sympathy—to say the least—for Russia. The AfD, whose real rise in the mid-2010s was due to the so-called refugee crisis, has never hidden its pro-Russian leanings but has rather flaunted them. For example, AfD politicians have visited Russian-occupied Crimea (to say nothing of their admiration for the People’s Republic of China). Last year, an internal paper for the party even expressed “Begeisterung für Diktaturen”—that is, an “enthusiasm for dictatorships.” This from the largest opposition party in the Bundestag.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the AfD has repeated the Russian justifications that place the blame on the West because NATO enlarged eastward. AfD politicians are content to be Putin propagandists and to this day demand an end to the sanctions against Russia. A few years ago, some of them attended the Russian Embassy’s Victory Day celebrations in Berlin.
There have been repeated accusations that the AfD lawmakers have worked to advance Russian interests. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) recently condemned such behavior in strong terms: “The AfD openly shows its closeness to Putin and behaves like a German Putin party.” This attitude could suggest more than mere sympathy. Experts have for some time cautioned that the AfD may be abusing the parliamentary inquiry process—both in state parliaments and the Bundestag—to gather information about critical infrastructure in Germany. Some AfD politicians and their staff have been under criminal investigation.
Regarding a planned trip to Russia by the deputy AfD caucus leader Frohnmaier, CSU General Secretary Martin Huber accused him of treason this October. Interior Minister Dobrindt echoed that charge, saying, “The AfD defends Putin’s war of aggression, ignores violations of international law, and calls itself patriotic. But real patriots love their country without questioning other nations’ right to self-determination.” This harsh criticism is not surprising, considering the internal political rivalry between the CDU/CSU and the AfD.
The AfD’s Pro-Russian Foreign Policy and the Struggle to Moderate It
As the AfD attempts to engage the Trump administration and the Republican MAGA movement, AfD circles are talking about a “reprioritization” of their foreign policy away from close alignment with Russia and President Putin. AfD trips to Moscow must now be approved by party leaders, for example. There are at least two reasons for this foreign policy shift. The first being that the party sees Donald Trump as an ideological ally on key issues: anti-woke, anti-migration, anti-EU, and opposed to decarbonization of energy. Because Trump is in power, the anti-Americanism common in eastern Germany has been quietly shelved. A new transatlantic network—the “other transatlantic alliance”—is emerging. Journalists Annett Meiritz and Juliane Schäuble described this in their September 2025 book, The Alliance of the New Right – How the Trump Movement Is Conquering Europe.
The second reason relates to party membership trends. From September 2023 to July 2025, AfD membership grew from 34,000 to 64,000—nearly doubling in two years. Many of the new members come from western Germany. Since the growth in the west is bigger than in the east, this could shift the internal balance of power, as Justus Bender noted in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The internal workings are changing due to western members being less enamored of Russia and less hostile toward NATO. If the AfD is serious about grasping political power, it cannot alienate these westerners, yet it also cannot afford to lose the pro-Putin base in the east. This creates a challenging balancing act on the far right.
This struggle over the party’s foreign policy direction is not yet resolved, and perhaps is unresolvable because of the internal party power balance, so it repeatedly boils over, as it has again this November. The catalyst was another planned Russia trip by two AfD members of the Bundestag. They planned to take part in a conference and meet with Dmitriy Medvedev, the former Russian president and now deputy chief of the Russian Security Council, a particularly belligerent anti-Western voice. The AfD’s co-chair, Alice Weidel, vehemently criticized the planned trip and said that there was great displeasure in the AfD caucus. One of the AfD Bundestag members dropped the travel idea, but the other, Steffen Kotré, stuck to his plans and visited Sochi along with other AfD politicians. The party’s other co-chair, Tino Chrupalla, expressed astonishment at the uproar. But not only that: Chrupalla relativized the threat from Russia—President Putin had not done anything to him, and there was no threat to Germany from Russia, he said. With a mixture of cynicism and naivete, Chrupalla added that Putin had not even threatened to attack Germany with nuclear weapons. Brushing off the Russian threat in this way does not come across well in western Germany. This disagreement highlights the split in the party leadership on a key issue.
As the AfD attempts to engage the Trump administration and the Republican MAGA movement, AfD circles are talking about a “reprioritization” of their foreign policy away from close alignment with Russia and President Putin.
Alice Weidel’s base is in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, a center of Germany’s industrial economy. Her strategic goal is to make the AfD fit to govern and to create conditions in which the party can exercise power at the national level. Tearing down the “firewall” that the CDU and CSU have built against cooperating with the AfD is a prerequisite for achieving this goal. At the national level, the AfD could only govern in a coalition with the CDU/CSU, and only if the Union parties abandoned their categorical “no” to cooperation. That is unlikely to happen for the foreseeable future. Tino Chrupalla, by contrast, comes from eastern Germany, and he services his constituencies with pro-Russian appeasement rhetoric. This east-west contrast in the AfD is reflected in its leadership.
What Does the AfD Seek in Washington?
If, and when, AfD leader Alice Weidel travels to Washington, her main priority would be in the White House, with the hope to meet with Vice President J.D. Vance. From the AfD’s perspective, that would be an extraordinary coup: the photos from such an encounter would be an implicit seal of legitimacy and could boost the party’s prospects in next year’s state elections and counter the perception that it is internationally isolated. Weidel has already met Vice President Vance before, in February 2025 in Munich. The two have similarities. The vice president is the figure in the Trump administration who is the greatest enthusiast for culture-war issues. He accuses Europe of repressing the right to free speech, by which he means the speech of right-wing and far-right actors. This aligns perfectly with the AfD’s narrative. Leaving aside whether such statements have any truth, these themes showcase the ideological links the AfD leadership seeks to exploit. Another example was the participation (by video) of Elon Musk in an AfD party conference earlier this year. This was before the billionaire leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency fell out of favor with the White House, and it gave the AfD a major publicity boost. Vance has further flattered the AfD—only strengthening its victim narrative—by claiming that “bureaucrats” want to destroy it because it is Germany’s most popular party. A year ago, Musk went so far as to declare that only the AfD could “save Germany,” a gift of a ready-to-use campaign slogan.
A major topic on which the AfD and the Trump administration clearly agree is “Europe,” meaning the European Union. The AfD opposes a “centralized federal state,” strongly resents “globalists,” and has not ruled out a German exit from the EU. According to its 2023 platform, it calls for an orderly end to the “experiment” with the single currency. In place of the EU, it envisions a “confederation of European nations.”
President Trump has never thought highly of the EU, as everyone knows. He has repeatedly claimed—contrary to the actual history of European integration and America’s role in it—that the EU was created to harm the United States. Trump sees the EU not as a partner, but as an ideologically driven project working against American taxpayers’ interests in trade and defense. From his perspective, how can the AfD be useful? By sowing discord within the EU, deepening mistrust, and pushing euroskepticism to an extreme. Brexit activists successfully did this ten years ago in the United Kingdom, and with it, the EU was weakened, and their own country was gravely damaged.
The AfD’s admiration for dictatorships applies to China as well, even though it lacks the same cultural-historical resonance as Russia has in eastern Germany. China is viewed with great indulgence; the AfD supports Beijing’s claim to Taiwan, and China’s media system is described as “exemplary.” In the AfD’s worldview, it is the German media that are tightly controlled, but not in communist-ruled China. While Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution concludes that China represents one of the top sources of economic and espionage activity, the AfD’s 2024 European election platform calls for “offensive” participation of Germany in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Interestingly, Italy, under right-wing nationalist Prime Minister Meloni, has withdrawn from that project. According to the AfD, though, Germany should pursue its “realpolitik interests,” which in this case means nothing other than submitting to Beijing’s global geoeconomic design.
Clues to the stance toward China can be found in the biography of the co-chair, Alice Weidel. She spent several years in China working for a financial institution, wrote her doctoral dissertation on its pension system, and speaks Mandarin. She enjoys some popularity in her former host country. Chinese interested in foreign policy see her as a potential savior, who could rescue Germany from decline. Kremlin supporters, too. The Trump administration seems to see Weidel and her culture warriors in the same way. All sides may think they are right about the AfD, but for quite different reasons, unless an even more curious alliance is taking shape among all of them.
This article was translated from German by Halle Foundation/AGI Intern Livia Baker-McKee.
