But two days before the dinner, AfD leader Alice Weidel told senior party lawmakers to reduce the number of high-profile trips party politicians are making to the U.S. to cultivate ties with MAGA Republicans, according to four people who were present at the meeting. The calculation is that its growing alignment with the U.S. administration is increasingly turning into a liability for the AfD.
“There have been a big many trips to the U.S. in quick succession, and there is a perception within the parliamentary group, the foreign policy working group, and certainly among the leadership that our goal has always been to maintain balanced and good relations with all international players,” said Torben Braga, an AfD lawmaker from the eastern state of Thuringia. “In that we include — unlike other parties — Russia, but also, for example, China and India and countries in the Global South.”
Surveys show that most Germans are against this month’s strikes on Iran, and attitudes toward the U.S. are nearing record negatives, with only 15 percent of Germans saying they view the U.S. as a trustworthy partner in one recent poll. This helps explain why the AfD’s leaders last month condemned the war with Iran, warning that “renewed destabilization of the Middle East” is “not in Germany’s interest.”
The effort to create some distance with Trump isn’t entirely new. AfD leaders loosened their embrace of the Trump administration earlier this year as public sentiment in Germany turned against the U.S. president over his talk of taking control of Greenland and his decision to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
But the latest effort of AfD leaders to distance themselves from Trump reflects the new political realities in the far-right strongholds of the former East Germany ahead of two state elections in the region in September. In these areas, skepticism of American military interventions is more pervasive, as is sympathy with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The AfD is leading comfortably in polls ahead of both state elections, and its leaders aim to harness that momentum to gain power for the first time since the party’s founding in 2013 in at least one of the two races.