Several members of the anti-immigration AfD party have been invited to the United States to meet with members of Donald Trump’s Republican party. Lawmakers from other parties say the trip misuses taxpayer money for ‘anti-Germany diplomacy’.
Several members of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) are set to travel to the United States this week to meet with members of US President Donald Trump’s Republican party.
The AfD’s deputy chairman Markus Frohnmaier has said he will fly to the US on Thursday. He is to be joined by at least eight other AfD members of the Bundestag in a bid to bring their party closer to Trump’s MAGA movement.
Their trip – funded in part by German taxpayer money – comes just a week after the US government released its latest National Security Strategy, which made clear that under Trump’s leadership the US seeks “strategic stability” with Putin’s Russia and is “at odds with” European officials, including those in Germany.
Why is the AfD deepening MAGA connections?
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement is largely aligned with the AfD in terms of policies. They both position themselves as strongly opposed to immigration, and see themselves as opposed to (even oppressed by) left-wing democratic forces.
The AfD has already received support directly from Trump’s inner circle: Vice President JD Vance had made a show of warmly greeting the party’s co-leader Alice Weidel during his visit to Germany in February, and tech billionaire Elon Musk, who was working closely with Trump at the time, hosted Weidel on a livestream chat in the run up to the German federal election.
AfD leaders have emphasized the importance of Trump and his team as partners. The party’s other co-leader Tino Churpalla had already travelled to the US to attend Trump’s inauguration, while party vice presidents Kay Gottschalk and Beatrix von Storch have also made trips to the US this year.
This week Frohnmaier is set to first meet US Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who is considered a rising star within Trump’s inner circle. Luna, a Republican from Florida, told Germany’s Die Welt newspaper last month that she anticipated hosting about 40 AfD politicians in the country.
Taxpayer money
Along with their other appointments, the AfD parliamentarians are to attend the annual gala of the New York Young Republican Club where Frohnmaier is to be presented with the club’s Allen W. Dulles Prize.
According to reporting by Politico, his invitation notes that the prize is offered in recognition of the “courageous work” of the AfD in an “oppressive and hostile political environment”.
The invitation adds, “Our club continues to call for a new bourgeois order in your country…”
Tickets to the gala cost between $799 and $30,000 dollars, and this should be paid by the attending members themselves.
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However, hotels and flights for their trip can be expensed to the Bundestag, i.e. paid for from German taxpayer money.
Members of the conservative Christian Union parties (CDU/CSU), which currently lead Germany’s federal government coalition, are calling for a closer examination of the trip and its use of state funding.
Alexander Hoffmann, the chairman of the CSU group in the Bundestag, told Der Spiegel said that the trip was “anti-Germany diplomacy.” He added that it would difficult to stop legally, but called on the Bundestag administration to examine how it might “prevent the abuse of foreign travel”.
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Activists protest against the perceived support of the US and Russia by the far-right AfD party in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, on February 20th, 2025. (Photo by David GANNON / AFP)
State-funded self-sabotage
Hoffman was joined by other high-ranking members of the CDU party in sounding the alarm against what they see as a direct threat to the European Union and European democratic governments.
Knut Abraham, who was previously stationed at the German Embassy in Washington and now sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag, told Spiegel that this “diabolical cooperation between the AfD and Trump’s MAGA people” is working toward the destruction of the EU.
Roderich Kiesewetter, chairman of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said that the AfD is working to “undermine our democracy”, and added that he “continues to believe a review procedure [for a party ban] makes sense”.
German leaders from various parties have previously called for a ban on the AfD as a political party, which can be applied if the Federal Constitutional Court rules that a party demonstrates an anti-constitutional attitude in a militant and aggressive fashion.
But so far Chancellor Friedrich Merz and other leading CDU members in his cabinet have not supported bringing a ban procedure, insisting instead that the party needs to be defeated at the ballot box.
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