By Sarah Marsh, Paul Carsten and Maria Tsvetkova
BERLIN/NEW YORK (Reuters) -Germany's far-right AfD party, long shunned at home, is courting support in Washington, leveraging ties to MAGA personalities who have risen to senior roles in the Trump administration.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD), classified as extremist by Germany's domestic intelligence service and ostracised by mainstream parties, has held meetings with senior U.S. State Department officials in recent months — a rare move for a far-right opposition party in an allied country, according to a current and a former U.S. official and a German government source.
The outreach reflects a growing alignment between the AfD and parts of Trump's MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, which has voiced support for the party’s complaints about political repression at home and its hardline stance on immigration.
At a private reception in Manhattan earlier this month, an opera tenor serenaded AfD lawmakers Jan Wenzel Schmidt and Kay Gottschalk with the taboo first stanza of Germany's national anthem: "Germany, Germany above all, above all in the world" -- lyrics the Nazis used to assert German superiority.
Schmidt, fresh from a meeting with a top U.S. foreign service official, joined in the singing with hand over heart. He later denied to Reuters any link between the lyrics and the Nazis.
AfD FINDS SYMPATHETIC EAR IN WASHINGTON
The private reception in Manhattan, hosted by the New York Young Republican Club, underscores the AfD’s efforts to build international legitimacy and challenge what it calls undemocratic exclusion at home.
“We have no democracy anymore,” Gottschalk told attendees. “You can’t say what you think or what you like.”
The AfD’s growing ties in Washington come as it surges in German opinion polls, threatening Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives ahead of a series of state elections next year that polls suggest could give the AfD its first state premier.
"It's 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 AfD's series of meetings in the U.S.
The State Department did not comment but pointed to a photoon X of Darren Beattie, the senior foreign service official, meeting with Wenzel Schmidt and his colleague Markus Frohnmaier.
The State Department official, who requested anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to media, said: "When you have an organisation that's outside the mainstream, they crave the imprimatur of legitimacy that historically engaging with American diplomats has offered them."
Many Germans are alarmed by the AfD, whose rise evokes unsettling parallels with the Nazi Party’s ascent in the 1930s, when authoritarian rule was established through legal means.
Germany's other parties refuse to work with its lawmakers by giving them influential positions in parliament or forming coalitions.
That pact – known as the firewall – is undemocratic, the AfD argues. AfD politicians say they want to raise awareness about what they view as the worsening state of democracy in Germany, and gain high-profile backing abroad.
So far, they have struggled. The AfD is shunned by many of Europe's other far-right parties after a series of scandals and inflammatory comments. But, with the return of Trump to the White House, the AfD has found a sympathetic ear.
AfD WIELDS US TIES TO COUNTER POLITICAL ISOLATION AT HOME
In February, U.S. Vice President JD Vance shocked European leaders by accusing them of censoring free speech, repressing political rivals and failing to control immigration.
Vance then met with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel in a sign of support shortly before federal German elections, where they came in an unprecedented second place.
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the party's classification as extremist was tyranny in disguise.
"The AfD pounces on it whenever these comments come out, and they use it to pressure the government," the German government official said. "This is a problem because outwardly we want and need good relations with Americans, and this sabotages it."
The AfD's grievances include wire-tapping by authorities, moves to bar AfD members from the civil service and undemocratic attempts to exclude them from power, they told Reuters.
German intelligence earlier this year found the AfD to be "extremist" in part due to racist and anti-Muslim views. The designation allows the state to recruit informants and intercept communications and allows authorities to bar members deemed disloyal to the constitution from the civil service.
AfD politician Joachim Paul said the State Department had invited him to “explain the situation of the opposition in Germany” after he was barred from running for a mayoral position. German authorities had cited doubts about his loyalty to the country’s constitutional order.
Paul said the U.S. officials he met in Washington were well-informed and told him they would follow his case. However, he added, they stopped short of offering direct assistance.
AfD BUILT U.S. CONTACTS YEARS BEFORE TRUMP RE-ELECTED
The foundation for the AfD's ties with the U.S. government was laid in the years running up to Trump's re-election.
The New York Young Republican Club has for years cultivated contacts with far-right European parties.
Some former club members went on to hold senior positions in the Trump administration. Former club president Gavin Wax, who visited the AfD in Berlin in 2023, became chief of staff to the U.S. Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, who until recently was Beattie. Beattie, now the department's Senior Bureau Official in Public Diplomacy, is on the club's advisory board.
Before joining government, Wax met with right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at a May gathering of nationalist parties in Budapest also attended by the AfD's Weidel.
"In previous administrations, whether Democratic or Republican, the State Department didn't swing too much left or right," said the former State Department official. "Now that's changing."
Frohnmaier, one of the AfD lawmakers photographed meeting Beattie, welcomed the U.S. interest in the party's challenges.
It is "our duty to raise awareness among democratic partners abroad about these developments, so that the anti-democratic forces in Germany encounter resistance from all sides," he said.
(Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova in New York, Sarah Marsh and Paul Carsten; Additional Reporting by Andreas Rinke in Berlin, Editing by William Maclean)
