BERLIN — After the episode with the Nazi-linked serenade, Kay Gottschalk, a member of the German parliament from the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, was sure his presentation to the State Department would be canceled.
It was early October, and Gottschalk, who is back in the United States this week with a large AfD delegation, had attended an event with the New York Young Republican Club. There were drinks, speeches and an opera tenor’s rendition of “Deutschlandlied,” or “Song of the Germans” — not just the third verse, which is the German national anthem, but the first two stanzas proclaiming “Germany above all,” which have been highly taboo since being embraced by the Nazis.
The song set off a firestorm. Gottschalk defended his young Republican hosts for “a well-intentioned gesture of appreciation to us” and said it was time to rehabilitate the condemned verses, which were written in the 19th century, long before the Nazis. He waited to get a call rescinding his invitation to brief President Donald Trump’s State Department.
Gottschalk was on the Staten Island Ferry, with the Statue of Liberty coming into view, when his phone rang. It was David Goldman, a senior adviser on the State Department policy planning staff.
“Kay, you passed your test,” Goldman said, according to Gottschalk. “You’ve really proven yourself to be a friend. … You defended the guys. They really messed up. But you didn’t hang them out to dry. You defended them; you handled it nicely and diplomatically. You’re a friend of our party, of our people.”
Goldman concluded: “Your lecture is still on.”
Gottschalk’s presentation was scheduled for an hour, but there was so much interest that it lasted for two, he said. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has branded the AfD as “extremist,” and some German lawmakers are pushing to ban the party for undermining the constitution. Mainstream German parties refuse to work with the AfD because of its nationalist, anti-immigration agenda.
But as the AfD has surged in opinion polls, it has received a warm, at times seemingly unconditional, embrace by the Trump administration and influential members of the MAGA movement.
This week, about two dozen AfD members of the Bundestag — the German parliament — are visiting the U.S. to meet with Republicans, according to the AfD’s foreign policy spokesman, Markus Frohnmaier, who is part of the delegation. They will attend a New York Young Republican Club gala, where Emilio Pons, the same tenor from October, will sing the U.S. national anthem.
Most of the German delegation will meet at least one member of Congress, Frohnmaier said: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida), an outspoken AfD supporter.
The trip follows several high-level AfD visits to Washington. In September, two AfD members met officials from the State Department, National Security Council and Vice President JD Vance’s office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. A few weeks later, Frohnmaier and another AfD lawmaker met with Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie. More meetings are planned for next year.
According to most polls, the AfD is virtually tied with Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union. While the AfD is not in power at the federal or state level, party leaders say Trump and his MAGA movement see the AfD as their natural ally.
“We have the sense that they want us as partners,” AfD deputy leader Beatrix von Storch said, “partners who will eventually have a say at the executive level, because there’s a very clear awareness of the challenges facing conservative, patriotic and civic-minded parties in the Western world.”
Trump’s relationship with AfD has been on display since he returned to the White House, when von Storch and another AfD leader were invited to Trump’s January inauguration, an honor not extended to any officials then in Germany’s governing coalition.
Ahead of German federal elections the following month, Vance delivered a blistering speech at the Munich Security Conference, blasting the German government for “censoring” and persecuting the AfD. Vance met with party leader Alice Weidel. During the campaign, Elon Musk also appeared at an AfD rally and interviewed Weidel on X, his social media platform.
When von Storch attended the September meeting in the Eisenhower Building, she brought Joachim Paul, a local AfD politician whom a court had barred from running for mayor in the small western Germany city of Ludwigshafen over alleged concerns about his loyalty to the constitution.
Trump and his allies are sympathetic to the AfD’s plight because Trump, too, has faced persecution, von Storch said. She said she hopes that pressure from the Trump administration might convince Merz’s government to reconsider its “fire wall” forbidding cooperation with the AfD.
The Trump alliance is core to the identities of some AfD leaders. Von Storch — whose grandfather was Hitler’s finance minister — has a “Make America Great Again” hat hanging from the desk lamp in her office. Gottschalk keeps a framed photo on his office wall of himself on a Florida roadside in 2024, waving an enormous “Trump 2024: Take America Back” flag.
In Germany, where Trump remains broadly unpopular — a Pew Research Center survey this summer found that 81 percent of Germans have little or no confidence in him to do the right thing in world affairs — it might seem counterintuitive for the AfD to hitch its fortunes so publicly to his administration.
But some AfD leaders see a political road map in Trump’s path to power. AfD members expect to win control of at least one state government in elections next year — and possibly even to share power at the federal level if Merz’s governing coalition collapses.
As they prepare to shift from being the largest opposition party to the tall task of governing, some leaders say Trump has shown how an insurgent populist movement can make the transition.
Bundestag member Hannes Gnauck, who was in Washington earlier this week as part of a delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, sees Project 2025 — the controversial Heritage Foundation blueprint for a Trump’s second administration — as a model for implementing the AfD’s agenda.
Anticipating that the courts could try to block AfD efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, Gnauck said he also draws inspiration from Trump’s successes in reshaping U.S. courts.
“We are firmly convinced that we will take over the government in 2029 and fill the first ministerial posts,” Gnauck said. “And for us, it is of course essential to build a good relationship with our strongest ally.”
While it’s not unusual for a foreign political party to seek ties to a U.S. administration, “what’s significant is how the AfD is treated increasingly by Washington, and especially the Trump administration and people who support the administration, as a normal party,” said Jeff Rathke, president of the American-German Institute at Johns Hopkins University and former U.S. diplomat in Germany.
Rathke added, “It’s essentially the United States taking sides in a democratic country’s political battles.”
Last week, the Trump administration released a national security strategy that accused Europe of instigating its own “civilizational erasure” through lax immigration policies. While many leaders derided the document, Frohnmaier cheered it as a “reality check for Europe” that “hits a nerve that the established parties in Germany have been denying for years: mass immigration from highly Islamized and violence-prone regions poses an existential threat to cultural identity, internal security, and social cohesion.”
The Merz administration has brushed off concerns that the frequent contact between the AfD and the Trump administration could undermine official diplomatic channels. Government spokesman Sebastian Hille told The Washington Post this week that there was “good contact” between the two countries’ leaders.
“Those are the diplomatic channels that are important to us,” Hille said.
So far, Trump officials haven’t reciprocated the steady stream of AfD trips to D.C. But last month, Alex Bruesewitz, a social media architect of Trump’s 2024 campaign and senior adviser to a Trump-affiliated PAC, visited the Bundestag as the featured guest on an AfD panel about “how conservatives can regain control of the narrative.”
Von Storch invited Bruesewitz after meeting him earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference in Hungary, hosted Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a Trump ally.
In 2026, Frohnmaier plans to hold a larger event with Luna, the Florida congresswoman, and he hopes she will visit Berlin afterward. (Luna’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) Frohnmaier also aims to launch a cooperative effort to train young conservative politicians. Von Storch, meanwhile, plans to attend the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington in February.
Luna has championed the cause of Naomi Seibt, a prominent AfD supporter and social media influencer who is seeking asylum in the United States, claiming persecution by German authorities.
When the AfD representatives attend the New York Young Republicans Club black-tie gala on Saturday, they’ll join a guest list that includes three Republican members of Congress, former Trump official Andrew Giuliani (Rudy’s son), conservative undercover-video activist James O’Keefe, former Trump deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley and “Afrikaner Freedom Fighters” who will serve as toastmasters, according to the club website.
Before Trump returned to office, the AfD was more aligned with Russia and skeptical toward the United States. “Three years ago, I was laughed at in my own party” for saying the AfD needed closer U.S. ties, Gottschalk said. No one’s laughing now.
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