AfD Divided Over U.S. Interventionism

The Trump administration’s numerous military and other international interventions continue to fuel disagreement within the AfD over the appropriate foreign policy course. The new “transatlanticists” in the AfD, with their alignment with the MAGA movement—which, in turn, provides massive international support for the AfD—find themselves increasingly confronted with Trump’s military interventions and their consequences for German politics. As early as January, co-chair Alice Weidel had openly criticized U.S. policy toward Venezuela and Greenland, thereby opposing the Trump supporters within her own party, who, for their part, saw the AfD’s relations with the U.S. government as being at risk.

The joint attacks by the U.S. and Israel against Iran since February 28 have further driven a wedge between the factions. As a result, Hannes Gnauck (AfD member of the Bundestag’s Defense Committee) apparently felt compelled to quickly retract his call for German military protection in the Strait of Hormuz, as reported by table.media. While the faction’s foreign policy working group was “largely in agreement on this position,” it stood “diametrically opposed to the party leadership.”

Rumor has it that the party leadership has called for a reduction in the number of trips to the U.S. But this apparently matters little to the foreign policy-focused faction within the Bundestag parliamentary group. In the working groups on foreign policy and defense, however, members feel they need to better position themselves so as not to constantly see their own positions undermined by statements from the leadership.

AfD Officials Continue to Travel

And despite internal party disputes, the trips and meetings continue on all sides. As early as the beginning of March, Markus Frohnmaier, Marc Bernhardt, and Anna Rathert were guests in Washington, D.C., at the Alliance of Sovereign Nations (ASN), led by Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna and Turning Point Action. Parts of the ASN conference were subsidized by the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag with a total of 35,000 euros.

Shortly thereafter, Malte Kaufmann attended the NXT 2026 conference in India, as the only German parliamentarian, as Kaufmann noted in a press release. At the high-level meeting, which was also attended by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Kaufmann delivered a speech on German-Indian economic relations. Kaufmann participated in a televised discussion on the CNN News18 channel. There, he commented on the role of NATO: “(...) we are embedded in NATO. That’s for sure. But the current situation also shows us that we need to strengthen our military on our own. This is why in Germany we have now spent a lot of money to buy equipment and to make our German military an army we can rely on.”

At the end of March, the return visit by the Young US Republicans to the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag—which had already been announced in December—took place. On March 25, Beatrix von Storch and Frohnmaier invited the president of the New York Young Republicans, Stefano Forte, and Christopher Butler (Americans for Tax Reform) to the Bundestag to discuss German-American relations.

The Dilemma of Europe’s Far Right

Trump supporters are now paying the price for having relied so heavily on the support of the MAGA movement, and they are facing a significant backlash within their own party. The AfD is currently struggling to make its mark during this foreign policy crisis: If it wants “Germany first,” it tends to oppose Trump and must advocate for the deployment of the Bundeswehr or even NATO. The AfD cannot sell German participation in military action against Iran to its base. It finds it easier to criticize the federal government over high fuel costs. This is a dilemma that the AfD shares with other far-right parties in Europe. Even the recent defeat of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in her attempt to push through sweeping judicial reforms was attributed by analysts—such as Francesca Basso and Viviana Mazza of Corriere della Sera in their newsletter Europe Matters—in part to her excessive closeness to Trump and his policies.