An AfD leak shows a party managing evidence of extremism without resolving it

The AfD's formal boundary with extremist organizations is much less clear in its internal records than in its public rules. A leaked archive examined by CORRECTIV shows officials debating how to separate organizationally from the Identitarian Movement while preserving political cooperation. In 2017, Petr Bystron described the movement as the AfD's equivalent of Greenpeace for the Greens and proposed the formula: march separately, strike together.

The party maintains an incompatibility list that formally bars members of the Identitarian Movement, the former NPD and Blood & Honour. Yet people connected to those organizations have continued working in parliamentary offices, communications roles and the youth organization. The leak also shows uneven discipline: members associated with explicit Nazi symbols faced exclusion, while a functionary reported for links to Revolte Rheinland, an Identitarian successor group, apparently remained active. The AfD confirmed the leak but said it would not answer questions about its contents.

The documents reveal systematic attention to attribution. An internal working group circulated guidance warning against blanket denigration of foreigners, refugees and Muslims and against questioning equal rights on ethnic grounds. A Lower Saxony memo advised monitoring officeholders' accounts so that no posts remain that would please the Verfassungsschutz. After the federal party was classified as a confirmed extremist organization in 2025—a designation temporarily suspended during litigation—guidance told civil servants to keep political positions out of their state employment.

The party also paid about €16,000 in 2019 for a communications strategy that would portray the AfD as the true defender of the constitution while presenting the intelligence service as an instrument of established parties. The consultant had written for a far-right publication and was active in a fraternity monitored by the authorities. The strategy helps explain why procedural language about free speech and constitutional rights can coexist with ties to a milieu advocating an ethnically defined nation.

The direction may now be shifting from concealment toward open resistance. Björn Höcke has sought to weaken the incompatibility list, and Stefan Möller, his close ally who now handles intelligence-service questions on the federal executive, favors internal unity over exclusion. For any future party-ban case, the central question is attribution: whether extremist acts are isolated misconduct that the party corrects or evidence of its aims. The leak matters because it shows that AfD officials have understood that legal test for years—and have often managed the record around it.