Has Germany’s far-right AfD become a gateway for Chinese and Russian spies?

The arrest this week of an aide to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)'s lead candidate for the European parliamentary elections on accusations of spying for China is yet another blow to a party already tarnished by scandals involving alleged payments from sources close to Moscow.

Jian Guo, a German citizen of Chinese origin, was arrested in Dresden on Monday, 23 April, accused of spying for China.

Guo was a parliamentary assistant for Maximilian Krah, a member of the EU parliament and the AfD’s lead candidate for the upcoming European parliamentary elections on June 9.

Both Krah and Petr Bystron, number two on the AfD list for the June election, are facing investigations over foreign interference. The FBI last year questioned Krah during his trip to the US over alleged payments from sources close to the Kremlin. Bystron was accused of participating – knowingly or unknowingly – in a vast Russian disinformation operation.

Bystron, a Bavarian politician, was very involved with the "Voice of Europe" website at the heart of a Russian disinformation operation uncovered in March that aimed to undermine Western support for Ukraine. Bystron has been accused in the media of having received around €20,000 for his contributions to "Voice of Europe".

Alternative ‘against’ Germany

These mounting scandals give the impression that Germany's far-right party is a revolving door for infiltration by foreign agents, especially from authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China.

“The AfD has become a security risk” for Germany, wrote conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The magazine Der Spiegel also weighed in, asking in its newsletter of Tuesday 24 April: “Is the AfD an Alternative against Germany?"

Calls for Krah and Bustron to resign have multiplied in Germany.

But on Wednesday, Krah said he would remain the AfD’s top candidate in the upcoming EU elections.

“If you think this the end of me as the lead candidate, I must disappoint you,” he told reporters. “I am and remain the top candidate.”

As for Bystron, he has received the official support of Tino Chrupalla, one of the leaders of the far-right party.

It was the arrest of Guo, 40, that really triggered the outcry against the AfD. Until now, evidence of foreign influence-buying has largely been circumstantial: all-expenses-paid trips for AfD leaders to China, money from China or Russia or speeches given by AfD politicians that appear modeled on Russian propaganda.

The AfD and Russia: a long history

The accusations of espionage are “much more tangible evidence of collusion”, said Mareike Ohlberg, a sinologist and specialist in the Chinese Communist Party's influence campaigns at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a Berlin-based think-tank.

Indeed, the AfD's susceptibility to Russian propaganda has been examined and commented on for several years in Germany. The participation of Bavarian members of the AfD as observers at the highly controversial Russian presidential election last March, for example, did not go unnoticed – particularly when they declared that the election had been conducted in a “very democratic manner”.

The revelations in early February about the multiple identities of the Russian-born parliamentary assistant to an AfD member of Germany's federal parliament, have also made waves. It has to be said that the affair had all the makings of a spy movie. This colourful character was not only working as a translator for a German member of parliament, but also a rapper and agent of the FSB, one of Russia's intelligence services.

But in the long run, these links with Russia no longer come as much of a surprise in Germany.

“For journalists and observers who follow these affairs, the AfD has represented a security risk since around 2017, when the party began to increase its contacts with Russia,” said Anton Shekhovtsov, director of the Centre for Democratic Integrity in Austria, who has worked on the relations between Russia and the far right in Europe.

China lies in wait

China appears to be a new piece in the puzzle of the AfD's controversial foreign relations – and potentially even more problematic for Germany's intelligence services.

“If Russian interference is like a storm hitting Germany, China's is like global warming,” said Thomas Haldenwang, head of the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in 2022.

But Ohlberg said reports of the party's ties to China were nothing new.

“China has been cultivating its links with Alternative für Deutschland since at least 2019,” she said.

Back in 2023, news website t-online published a lengthy investigation into the ‘China-gate’ affair surrounding Krah, shedding some light on how Beijing operates. Krah had studied in China and was invited to Shanghai by the Chinese authorities in 2019.

“The Chinese will first try to influence their targets by inviting them to their homes or to meetings in neutral territory, but rarely in the country of origin,” intelligence expert Erich Schmidt-Eenboom told t-online.

Krah then became a great defender of the Chinese point of view, saying that accusations of Chinese abuses against the country's Uyghur Muslim minority are “fables to frighten people”. He also maintains that Taiwan is part of China, as is Tibet.

A symptom of a larger problem

“The aims of Chinese political interference operations are to gather information about the target country's views on China, and then to influence the way in which China is perceived,” Ohlberg said.

But the AfD is not the only target of Chinese operations.

“In fact, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) targets all the parties that count in a country and, in Germany, it has had even more success with the traditional parties” like the CDU, the SPD and the FDP liberals, Shekhovtsov said.

“The CCP does things differently with the traditional parties in Germany," Ohlberg added. "It tries to influence the major economic players, who then pass on the right message to their elected representatives.”

With the AfD, the modus operandi “seems to resemble more classic espionage cases with the recruitment of agents”, she said, adding that Beijing may be doing the same with the other parties, but that this has not yet been discovered.

For Ohlberg, the AfD nevertheless represents potentially more fertile ground than other parties. Chinese interference is “increasingly taking the form of operations aimed at demonstrating the weaknesses of Western democracy, and this is the kind of rhetoric that an AfD politician is more likely to repeat”, she noted.

The growing number of foreign interference scandals – Russian and Chinese – involving the AfD points to a growing "security problem" in Germany. But for Ohlberg, the far-right party is merely a symptom.

“The security risk stems above all from a ‘very 1990s’ attitude to foreign threats that persists in Germany. In other words, there is still the impression that the Cold War has just ended and that we can concentrate on economic development without worrying too much about foreign spies", she said.

The cases involving the AfD – much like the arrest on Monday of three Germans accused of carrying out industrial espionage for China – have been a wake-up call to the country. It's been a rude awakening.

(This article is a translation of the original in French.)