The German far-right AfD party, long rejected in its country, is rallying support in Washington, taking advantage of ties with MAGA movement figures who rose to senior positions in the Trump administration.
Classified as extremist by Germany’s domestic intelligence service and ostracized by the main parties, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has met with US State Department officials in recent months — a rare move for a far-right opposition party in an allied country — according to a current and former US official and a German government source.
The rapprochement reflects a growing alignment between the AfD and part of Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, which has expressed support for the party’s complaints about political repression in the country and its hard-line stance on immigration.
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At a private reception in Manhattan earlier this month, an operatic tenor serenaded AfD parliamentarians Jan Wenzel Schmidt and Kay Gottschalk with the taboo first verse of Germany’s national anthem: “Germany, Germany above all, above everything in the world” — lyrics the Nazis used to assert German superiority.
Fresh from a meeting with a high-ranking U.S. Foreign Service official, Schmidt joined the chant with his hand over his heart. He later denied to Reuters any link between the lyrics and the Nazis.
The private reception in Manhattan, organized by the Young Republican Club of New York, sheds light on the AfD’s efforts to build international legitimacy and challenge what it calls undemocratic exclusion at home.
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“We no longer have democracy,” Gottschalk told attendees. “You can’t say what you think or what you like.”
The AfD’s growing ties in Washington come as the party surges in German opinion polls, threatening Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives just before a series of state elections next year that polls say could give the AfD its first state premier.
“It is a calculated opportunity to (…) attract attention and achieve a proximity to government power that would be completely unthinkable in the concert of European or other states,” said Oliver Lembcke, political scientist at the University of Bochum, referring to the series of AfD meetings in the US.
The State Department did not comment, but pointed to a photo on the X of Darren Beattie, a senior Foreign Service official, meeting with Wenzel Schmidt and his colleague Markus Frohnmaier.
The State Department official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said: “When you have an organization that is outside the mainstream, they crave the stamp of legitimacy that engagement with American diplomats has historically given them.”
Many Germans are alarmed by the AfD, whose rise evokes unsettling parallels with the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, when authoritarian rule was established by legal means.
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Germany’s other parties refuse to work with their parliamentarians.
This pact — known as a firewall — is undemocratic, argues the AfD. Members of the far-right party say they want to raise awareness about what they see as the worsening state of democracy in Germany and gain high-level support abroad.
So far, they have faced difficulties. The AfD is shunned by many of Europe’s other far-right parties after a series of scandals and inflammatory comments. But with Trump’s return to the White House, the AfD has found a sympathetic ear.
