Two MPs from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party travel to Russia this week for a BRICS-nation summit in Sochi, amidst a mounting outcry at home concerning the controversial party’s links to the Kremlin. Opponents of Germany’s largest opposition party claim that the AfD may be passing sensitive military data to Russian authorities – a charge that the AfD vehemently denies.
The Sochi summit on cooperation between Europe and BRICS, the group of major emerging economies that includes Russia as well as Brazil, India, China, and South Africa.
AfD has insisted on maintaining its contacts with Russia despite the latter’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and has been highly critical of German military support for Kyiv and western sanctions on Russia.
The party, classified as “extremist” and a threat to democracy by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, has repeatedly rejected accusations of cooperation with Russia.
Rainer Rothfuss, one of the AfD MPs bound for the BRICS summit, was unequivocal: “I consider it my personal mission to use every legitimate democratic means of open debate to help prevent any escalation of the conflict with Russia into NATO territory and into Germany itself.”
AfD, Germany’s most popular party in recent polls, views the Sochi trip as a means of sustaining open dialogue, just as it maintains it has done with U.S. politicians. As reported by German media, Rothfuss is scheduled to join former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, for a closed discussion to be held on the eve of the summit with all the participants. The session with Medvedev, who will not be attending the summit proper, will deal with BRICS-related economic issues, Stefan Keuter, deputy parliamentary leader of the AfD, declared, noting pointedly that it is “not a meeting with government officials from Moscow.”
Last week, the chief of the German domestic intelligence service cautioned that Moscow was attempting to influence German politics by trying to cultivate contacts, especially on the left and right fringes. He told the broadcaster RTL that these efforts were part of an attempt “to present Russian narratives in the end as more articulate and ultimately more acceptable” and were designed “to call Western democracies into question.”
Senior politicians from other German political parties have expressed concern that AfP could be supplying Moscow with sensitive information. Thomas Roewekamp, the chair of the Bundestag defence committee and a member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz‘s conservatives, told Der Spiegel magazine that AfD was asking “targeted, grid-like” parliamentary questions about the military which conveyed the kind of “information that would be of great value to foreign powers, not least to Russia, which has been continuously increasing its espionage activities and hybrid attacks against part of Germany.”
On Wednesday last, AfD’s Keuter told the Bundestag that it was up to the opposition to “critically examine” whether government policy “really strengthens our country’s security”, when, in his view, the government was attempting to deflect attention from its strategic miscalculations regarding Russia.
In 2024, German prosecutors opened investigations into the activities of two AfD lawmakers — Petr Bystron and Maximilian Krah — over alleged foreign payments. Both deny wrongdoing.
