Leaked emails show AfD co-leader’s U-turn on ‘explosive’ nationalist colleague

BERLIN — As she was climbing the ranks of far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) a decade ago, Alice Weidel privately denounced one of her party’s most influential figures for using racist arguments and Nazi-era language, and sought to have him expelled. Years later, she praised his leadership, said a bid to ban him from the party was “exaggerated” and that he was suitable for a federal cabinet position. That striking reversal emerges from a massive leak of internal AfD communications, including emails in which Weidel condemned Björn Höcke, the party’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, and warned that extremists were driving away mainstream conservative voters. The revelations come from more than 420,000 emails and roughly 48,000 documents released by hackers this week, providing a rare glimpse inside Germany’s largest far-right party. An anonymous spokesperson for the hackers told Die Zeit the attack was not “politically” motivated “in the sense that [they] support another party,” but that they published the allegedly stolen material to promote “transparency and public accountability.” The AfD confirmed the breach, saying hackers had attacked a hosting provider in late September. It condemned the leak as “an attack on the German party system and therefore on democracy itself.” WELT, which, like POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, examined emails from one of Weidel’s accounts between 2015 and 2017, when she was a relatively junior figure in the party’s leadership. Asked by WELT to explain the contrast between her warnings at the time and her present position, Weidel declined to comment through a spokesperson. A spokesperson for Höcke did not respond to a request for comment sent by POLITICO on Saturday. ‘Deeply problematic’ The messages seen by WELT show a politician deeply alarmed by the growing influence of Höcke, who championed an ethnically defined German nationalism drawing on ideas associated with the Nazi era. In October 2015, Weidel warned colleagues that the party’s proximity to Pegida, an anti-Islam street movement, and the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (now known as The Homeland) was alienating the conservative voters it needed to attract. “In the west we are losing the mainstream conservative electorate completely through our proximity to Pegida, and to the NPD in the east,” she wrote. Weidel also strongly pushed back on a speech from Höcke that same year, where he contrasted a “life-affirming African expansionary type” with a “self-negating European placeholder type,” Weidel speaks at an AfD congress in Riesa, Germany on Jan. 11, 2025. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images “This is deeply problematic, because the reasoning here is racial. It is fundamentally wrong,” she wrote to the AfD’s federal executive board. “And please, spare me the usual ‘that’s-not-how-it-was-meant.’ I can’t hear it any more.” In another message, she warned that extremists were deliberately blurring the boundary between the AfD and neo-Nazi politics, driving mainstream conservatives away “in horror.” She also feared that Höcke’s rhetoric could bring the party under scrutiny by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, its domestic intelligence service monitoring threats to the constitutional order. “Höcke’s statements alone, and the use of the term Volksgemeinschaft” — the Nazi-era concept of an ethnic national community — “are enough to land the AfD in that report,” she wrote, referring to the intelligence service’s annual assessment. “Some in our party seem in a hurry to drive the AfD, deliberately or not, into oblivion.” In May 2025, the agency classified the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation”, citing, a