The leaked archive

The AfD data leak on Trump contacts, provided by the transparency organisation Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), contains more than 420,000 emails together with documents and personnel records. It reaches from the party's foundation in 2013 to the present, with most of the material dating from before 2019.

The AfD said on Monday that a hosting provider had been attacked at the end of September and that only a few mailboxes had been copied. Party sources, however, said the published material appeared authentic.

What the files document above all is the party's long courtship of Trump. The first concrete example comes from the days after his 2016 victory.

The 2016 congratulation telegrams

In spring 2016, then AfD leader Frauke Petry had already called Trump a refreshingly alternative proposition, and the day after his election she said the result was encouraging for Germany and for Europe.

That put her party at odds with the German government of the time: on 9 November 2016 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. Defence minister Ursula von der Leyen called the result a huge shock, and vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel reportedly described Trump the next day as the forerunner of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international.

Inside the AfD, the mood was different. On 10 November 2016 Petry emailed the federal board proposing an official and brief congratulatory telegram to the future US president. Eleven of the board's 13 members replied, all in favour. Alice Weidel, the party's current leader, answered Yes:-). Beatrix von Storch, now deputy leader of the Bundestag group, wrote: Couldn't be more of a yes. Board member Dirk Driesang suggested Trump also receive the party's manifesto in English, by post.

The telegram went out on 11 November 2016 under Petry's name on behalf of the federal board. It told Trump: We are confident that you will readjust the transatlantic relationship and end the wars in Syria and Ukraine by mutual agreement with Russia.

A second message followed ahead of the inauguration. On 11 January 2017 Driesang proposed adding to it a request: Please support us in our efforts to remove the enemy-state clause from the UN charter.

The clauses, written into the charter in 1945, exempt action against any second-world-war enemy state from its normal rules. The general assembly declared them obsolete in 1995 and resolved to repeal them, but the text has never been amended, since changing it requires ratification by two-thirds of member states and all five permanent security council members. The AfD's Bundestag group demanded deletion of the clause in a 2020 motion that called it a relic of the past; every other party voted the motion down.

According to the leaked federal office record, the board adopted the enemy state request on its call of 16 January 2017. Not everyone was happy. On 19 January 2017 Georg Pazderski, then the party's Berlin leader, objected that the clause did not belong in a congratulation letter.

Frohnmaier and the US contacts

Another senior figure runs through the archive: Markus Frohnmaier, who entered the Bundestag in 2017, is a deputy leader of the AfD's parliamentary group and sits on the foreign affairs committee. He previously led the youth wing Junge Alternative, which Germany's domestic intelligence classed as confirmed extremist in 2023; it dissolved in March 2025 and a successor organisation, Generation Deutschland, was founded in November 2025. At an October 2015 rally in Erfurt, Frohnmaier told the crowd that when we come, there will be a clear-out, there will be a mucking-out.

In April 2019 the BBC and partners reported on 2017 documents in which Duma staffer Petr Premyak proposed support for Frohnmaier's candidacy to a senior Putin administration official, saying: We will have our own absolutely controlled MP in the Bundestag.

Frohnmaier denied any such dependence: his lawyers said he was never under the control of any third party, and he told the BBC the documents were fake.

Five weeks later, on 13 May 2019, his parliamentary assistant wrote to a Gmail address in the name of Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum, asking him to arrange a contact at the US Embassy so Frohnmaier could meet the ambassador. The leaked archive holds no reply from the Pipes address and no record of a meeting. Pipes responded in an email: I received that request. I did not pass the request to anyone at the US Embassy in Berlin.

Pipes said the Southern Poverty Law Center distorts his views, summed up by his adage that radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution. He also said that in Berlin in 2019 he constantly argued with AfD members, encouraging them to adopt an anti-Islamist rather than an anti-Islamic outlook, without success.

The embassy itself was hardly hostile terrain at the time. Then US ambassador Richard Grenell told Breitbart in 2018: I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders. His praise for Sebastian Kurz as a rock star prompted calls from German politicians for his expulsion. Grenell later served as acting director of national intelligence in 2020 and ran the Kennedy Center until stepping down in March.

Where the AfD stands now

The party that once pleaded for a telegram has grown into the strongest force in German polling:

• It entered the Bundestag in 2017 with 12.6% of the vote, becoming a home for anti-immigration voters after 1.2 million refugees arrived in Germany in 2015 and 2016.
• It 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 Saxony-Anhalt and is trying to form Germany's first far-right state government since the second world war.
• Trump hailed that win on Truth Social, concluding his message with the German acronym MGGA!!!.
• Germany's domestic intelligence agency monitors the AfD as a suspected rightwing extremist organisation, and state agencies classify five of its regional branches as confirmed extremist.
• Thuringia AfD leader Björn Höcke was convicted in 2024 of knowingly using a slogan of the SA, the Nazi party's paramilitary wing, and AfD politicians attended a meeting with extremists at which a mass-deportation masterplan was discussed.
• The party's 2025 election programme calls for lifting sanctions on Russia and repairing the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

Nearly all of Germany's other parties have kept a firewall, refusing to govern with it.