A trove of more than 420,000 emails and documents leaked from Germany's Alternative für Deutschland reveals a party that saw Donald Trump not as a passing phenomenon but as a strategic partner from day one. Provided by the transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets, the data spans 2013 to the present, with most material predating 2019. The AfD has acknowledged a hosting provider was breached in late September and that published material appears authentic. The earliest courtship efforts are almost comically revealing. When Trump won in November 2016, the AfD federal board scrambled to send a congratulatory telegram while mainstream German politicians — Merkel offering conditional cooperation, vice-chancellor Gabriel calling Trump a "forerunner of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international" — kept their distance. All eleven responding board members voted yes. Current leader Alice Weidel replied "Yes:-)". Deputy leader Beatrix von Storch wrote: "Couldn't be more of a yes." The party's second inauguration telegram escalated from flattery to transactional diplomacy. Board member Dirk Driesang pushed to include a request that Trump support removal of the UN charter's "enemy state" clauses — provisions written in 1945, declared obsolete by the General Assembly in 1995, but totemic on the German right as symbols of constrained sovereignty. Georg Pazderski, then the party's Berlin leader, objected to the tone: "You don't address the president as Mr Trump, he is Mr President. It looks like a begging letter." The request survived anyway. Beyond the telegrams, the documents trace a deepening relationship between senior AfD figures and Trump-world operatives, notably Steve Bannon. The leaked material shows AfD officials quickly pivoting from congratulations to concrete policy asks after Trump's 2016 victory. These were not casual diplomatic courtesies but deliberate bridge-building between two movements that recognized shared ideological infrastructure. The AfD's trajectory since these early contacts has been one of accelerating political power. From 12.6% in the 2017 federal election, the party reached 20.8% in February 2025, now leads national polls at roughly 30%, and won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt in September — a result Trump himself celebrated on Truth Social with "MGGA!!!" The party is now attempting to form Germany's first far-right state government since World War II, even as Germany's domestic intelligence agency monitors it as a suspected rightwing extremist organization and five regional branches are classified as confirmed extremist. The leak illuminates a pattern that extends well beyond Germany. Far-right parties across the West have spent the past decade building institutional connective tissue — shared messaging infrastructure, elite-to-elite relationship networks, and policy coordination channels that operate beneath the level of formal diplomacy. The AfD's 2025 election programme calling for lifting sanctions on Russia and repairing Nord Stream pipelines reflects policy preferences that align not just with Moscow but with a specific vision of transatlantic realignment. What the emails demonstrate most clearly is intent. This was not an organic convergence of political sympathies. It was a deliberate, documented, internally debated campaign to position the AfD as Trump's European partner — complete with English-language manifestos sent by post and requests for UN charter changes bundled into congratulatory notes. The "firewall" maintained by nearly all other German parties against governing with the AfD now faces a party that has spent a decade building alternative alliance structures outside the traditional European diplomatic framework.
