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World

Leaked AfD emails show decade-long courtship of Trump and Maga allies

Leaked AfD files show a decade of efforts to court Trump and Maga allies, including a 2016 congratulatory telegram.

AI News Feed · 2026-10-23 20:10

The trove shows senior AfD officials agonising over the wording of the telegram, which included the wish that Trump’s “hopes as a person be fulfilled”. Then leader Frauke Petry proposed “an official and brief congratulatory telegram to the future US president” in an email to the party’s federal board on 10 November 2016. Eleven of the board’s 13 members replied, all in favour. Current leader Alice Weidel wrote “Yes:-)”, while Beatrix von Storch, now deputy leader of the party’s Bundestag group, wrote: “Couldn’t be more of a yes.” Board member Dirk Driesang added that Trump should also receive, “by post (?)”, the party’s manifesto in English. The telegram went out on 11 November under Petry’s name and was released to the press.

The documents also show AfD officials quickly moving to requests for support from the White House on policy issues after Trump first won the 2016 election, and a burgeoning political courtship between senior figures including Weidel and key Trump ideologue Steve Bannon.

The data was provided to reporters by the transparency organisation Distributed Denial of Secrets and covers more than 420,000 emails, along with documents and personnel records, from the party’s foundation in 2013 to the present, with most coming before 2019. The AfD said in a statement on Monday that a hosting provider used by the party had been attacked at the end of September and that “only a few mailboxes” had been copied. It told the news agency dpa that most of those mailboxes had not been used for years, and party sources were quoted as saying the published material appeared to be authentic.

The AfD became a home for anti-immigration voters after 1.2 million refugees arrived in Germany in 2015 and 2016. It entered the Bundestag in 2017 with 12.6% of the vote, came second in the February 2025 federal election with 20.8%, and now leads national polls at about 30%. In September it won 43.8% of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, and it is now trying to form Germany’s first far-right state government since the second world war. Trump hailed the win in Saxony-Anhalt in a post on his Truth Social, concluding his message with a German version of his Make America Great Again acronym, “MGGA!!!”

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency monitors the party as a suspected rightwing extremist organisation, and state agencies classify five of its regional branches as confirmed extremist. Its leader in the central Thuringia region, Björn Höcke, was convicted in 2024 of knowingly using a slogan of the SA, the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing. AfD politicians also attended a meeting with extremists at which a mass-deportation “masterplan” was discussed. Its 2025 election programme calls for lifting sanctions on Russia and repairing the Nord Stream gas pipelines programme. Nearly all of Germany’s other parties have kept a “firewall”, refusing to govern with it.

Media outlets including the Guardian have reported on apparently friendly contacts between the party and the US state department during Trump’s second term. Mainstream German politicians greeted Trump’s 2016 election with scepticism. Then chancellor Angela Merkel offered Trump “close cooperation” only “on the basis of … values” including respect for human dignity “regardless of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views”. Then defence minister Ursula von der Leyen called the result a “huge shock”. The next day, vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel reportedly called Trump the “forerunner of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international” and counted the AfD among its forces.