By most accounts, Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland Party is on an upswing. It’s been steadily rising in the polls ahead of the German federal election set to take place on January 30, 2027, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats sink, and it won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt last month while receiving the largest share of votes in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. But a recent leak of hacked emails has become a headache for the party and could give a boost to calls for it to be banned.
Hackers released more than 421,000 internal party emails and 48,000 documents dating from November 2013 to September 2026, and they have drawn comparisons to the Epstein files. To give a sense of how massive the leak is, the file is 281 gigabytes, and when I tried to download it, the torrent program estimated it would take multiple days to accomplish this feat. Less than a gigabyte in, my laptop froze.
The emails that German media have reported on thus far involve things that were already known about the party: widespread racist and neo-Nazi views among its membership; a 2017 campaign finance scandal involving co-leader Alice Weidel; and a junket by several members to Syria in 2018. But what stands out is that the emails contradict what party officials have said publicly about these matters. So, in addition to the likelihood that these emails will keep journalists busy for a while, they have also attracted attention from the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV, the German domestic intelligence agency that already classifies the party as right-wing extremist.
The party did not respond to requests for comment. In an October 21 press release, the AfD confirmed the hack and said it would work with authorities to hold the perpetrators accountable. It said it would not respond to press inquiries as to whether specific content is genuine or fabricated and added that it has “already identified several concerning forgeries.” However, it did not identify what these alleged forgeries were and—showing the party’s apparent unfamiliarity with the “Streisand effect”—requested that journalists “refrain from using or disseminating any content linked to this data theft.”
Among said contents are multiple emails containing racial slurs and Nazi language, including a Christmas card with a swastika and “Heil Hitler.” This is probably the least surprising aspect of the emails for a party with a well-known track record of racism and nudge-wink Nazism.
In Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD won nearly 44 percent of the vote, state party leader Ulrich Siegmund brought four former members of the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend, a banned neo-Nazi organization modeled on the Hitler Youth, into his inner circle and has associated with people sporting clothing and tattoos with neo-Nazi symbols. The party also supports “remigration,” which means expelling people with immigrant backgrounds, even German citizens, and is regarded as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
In an August speech in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where it won 38.2 percent of the vote, party co-leader Tino Chrupalla drew applause from the crowd—and a criminal complaint for incitement from the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma—when he suggested a stash of guns found outside Berlin and attributed to Russian intelligence was left by “Gypsies” foraging for mushrooms, though he used the even more derogatory German-language equivalent of that word, in a political environment where anti-Romani racism, particularly among the AfD, has become “terrifyingly normalized.”
While the AfD’s racism itself isn’t necessarily remarkable, the 180-degree turn that Weidel has taken with regard to such open displays of racial animus has raised eyebrows.
Die Welt reported on October 26 that between 2015 and 2017, Weidel, then a lower-level official in the party, was worried that the “racist,” “wrong” and “problematic” views of Björn Höcke, the party leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, would cause centrist voters, particularly in the former West Germany, to “turn away from us in horror” and that his use of the term “Volksgemeinschaft”—a Nazi term for the German national community that excluded Jews and Romani people—would land the party in a BfV report, as ethno-nationalist and “völkisch” views like his blurred the lines between the AfD and the banned neo-Nazi National Democratic Party. She even tried unsuccessfully to get Höcke expelled from the AfD.
Weidel also supported the eventual expulsion from the AfD of Wolfgang Gedeon, a member of the state Parliament in Baden-Württemberg, following the 2016 discovery of his antisemitic writings, stating in an email that if Gedeon was not expelled, “we will lose members, and the AfD will shift in a direction that can no longer be controlled.”
Of course, since then, the party has very much shifted in an openly racist and fascist direction. That Höcke is an extremist cannot be overstated. He has derided the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe as a “monument of shame” while calling for Germany to abandon its policy of atonement for Nazi atrocities—much like non-German racist billionaire and AfD fanboy Elon Musk. Moreover, he has been convicted not once, but twice of using the Nazi slogan “Everything for Germany,” in a country where the public display of Nazi symbols is a crime.
The Alice Weidel who worried a decade ago about the bad taste that extremists were leaving in voters’ mouths today downplays or denies charges that the AfD is extremist while embracing Höcke and saying he would be suitable for a Cabinet position in an AfD-led government. So it appears her biggest concern was that open racists and Nazi sympathizers were a political liability, not that the AfD’s attractiveness to them signaled something fundamentally rotten about its ideology—and it looks as if that concern dissipated after the party found itself growing in the polls. Weidel’s eventual acceptance of Höcke and the almost comical hypocrisy of her personal life—as a leader of an anti-LGBTQ, xenophobic, Euro-skeptic party who is raising two children with her Sri Lankan–born same-sex partner at the home they share in Switzerland, where they can live and work freely thanks to Germany’s European Union membership—leave the impression that more than anything, Weidel is a Machiavellian opportunist.
That the leaked emails shine a light on an alleged 2017 financing scandal only deepens this impression.
Between July and September 2017, Weidel’s office received donations totaling more than 130,000 euros from Swiss-German billionaire Henning Conle, funneled through a Swiss pharmaceutical company linked to him—a violation of German campaign finance laws that forbid political parties from receiving donations from outside the EU. The party was fined 396,000 euros in 2023, and Weidel has consistently said it was only in September 2017 that she became aware of the donations. But the hacked emails suggest that she was aware of and expected the donations as early as July 2017, an allegation she has rejected.
Conle was accused in 2025 of once again making an illegal donation to the AfD—this time for 2.35 million euros through an Austrian intermediary, in violation of German laws requiring anyone who donates more than 500 euros to be publicly identified. If the allegation was confirmed, the AfD would face fines of about 7 million euros (almost $8 million).
The party gets plenty of financial support from non-billionaire affluent people too. In April 2024, Reuters profiled one wealthy AfD donor, Hartmut Issmer, then 72. One reason Issmer supported the AfD was its affinity for Russia, where he vacationed in 2023 to see beyond the “warmongering” headlines about a country that deliberately murders civilians in its unprovoked war of imperial aggression against Ukraine. Issmer returned from his vacation convinced that Russia—a predatory European colonial empire under a fascist regime that ruthlessly crushes dissent, including murdering political opponents overseas—was a model for Germany to emulate.
Pro-Russia views from the AfD cannot be written off as naïveté or the effect of seeing less litter on Russian streets than one is accustomed to at home. Under Russia’s vision of a “multipolar world,” Europe would not be a free and democratic bloc but a hodgepodge of authoritarian states subservient to Moscow or—in the case of Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltics—recolonized by Russia. And that’s a vision that would seem to align well with the AfD’s own authoritarian, ethno-nationalist worldview and boot-licking obsequiousness toward the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin.
The party’s tongue was planted firmly on Putin’s filthy boot soles in mid-October when members of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt’s state Parliament and members of a far-left party also known for savoring the flavor of Russian shoe leather, the Bündnis Soziale Gerechtigkeit und Wirtschaftliche Vernunft, or BSW, passed a motion calling for ending aid to Ukraine and opening peace negotiations with Moscow. If enacted at the federal level, such a policy would inevitably lead to Neville Chamberlain–esque appeasement of Putin and thus encourage further Russian aggression. While symbolic, the motion was an illustrative example of a “Red-Brown Alliance,” a recurring phenomenon throughout the history of the last 100 years where the “red” hard left and “brown” fascists temporarily set aside their ideological differences to find common and usually antidemocratic cause.
Indeed, few things have illustrated the AfD’s creepy affinity for Russia more than its response to the Ukraine war.
In an interview with Economist editor in chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, Weidel claimed that Ukraine has “already lost” the war and insinuated it is not a democracy because it suspended elections in wartime—as the U.K. also did in World War II, by the way. Given that a report this month by the Institute for the Study of War showed that Russia has made almost no territorial gains despite suffering more than 1.5 million casualties, as Ukrainian drones and missiles pummel its economy, Weidel’s definition of “losing” appears rather different from that of most people.
But the hacked emails indicate the AfD’s ties with the Putin regime go much deeper than simply spouting Kremlin propaganda and opposing European efforts to stop Russia’s revanchist imperialism.
On October 24, business newspaper Handelsblatt reported that a delegation of seven AfD members visited Syria and met with officials from the now ousted Ba’athist regime of former dictator Bashar Al Assad, amid the country’s civil war in March 2018. This delegation, according to the report, likely got help crossing Syria’s border with Lebanon from the terrorist group Hezbollah and Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, which could facilitate their entry without their needing to obtain visas beforehand.
The emails stand in stark contrast with what one of the travelers, North Rhine-Westphalia state Parliament member Christian Blex, told a press conference on the group’s return from the junket later that month, when he claimed to have applied for a visa from the Syrian Embassy in Berlin and called the suggestion by a reporter that he had received assistance from Russia “absurd.” He further suggested Syria was a “safe country of origin,” and the AfD faction of the Bundestag unsuccessfully attempted to make a motion calling for a repatriation agreement with the Assad regime.
The emails and the steady drip of media coverage that the leak has engendered will likely do little to dispel negative views of the AfD. The question that inevitably arises is, how much actual damage will these disclosures ultimately do to the party as it grows in the polls and seeks to rule the country.
Kai Arzheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Mainz, pointed out that much of what is in the emails is already known. In an email, he told me that even though revelations of a “remigration” meeting in January 2024 led to some of the largest demonstrations in postwar German history, those were “seemingly forgotten after a few months” as the AfD’s voters “seem to willingly ignore the ugly bits (and for some of them, they’re part of the attraction).”
With respect to a ban, Arzheimer said, the impact is also unclear. The legal question is whether all of this is characteristic of the party as a whole—and it’s one the emails likewise leave unanswered. Lawyers at Germany’s Society for Civil Rights see a ban as likely successful from a legal standpoint, stating in a report in June that the party is “demonstrably unconstitutional.” But Arzheimer said the more relevant question is political—that is to say, whether the government will find the courage to enact a ban while it still can.
“There is of course a chance that the current leak may sway the public’s view of the AfD, which could help the government to find said courage,” he told me. “But with news cycles being what they are, I suspect that public and media attention may have moved on to something else in a few weeks’ time.”
