Alice Weidel once called Björn Höcke's racial discourse deeply problematic; leaked emails now show the AfD co-leader who sought his expulsion deeming him fit for cabinet
A decade-old internal conflict inside Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has returned to public view after a huge leak of the party's internal communications. The leaked emails show that co-leader Alice Weidel, as she was climbing the party's ranks, privately denounced one of its most influential figures, Björn Höcke, for using racist arguments and Nazi-era language, and sought to have him expelled from the party.
Years later, the same Weidel praised Höcke's leadership, described the bid to expel him as exaggerated and said he was suitable for a federal cabinet position. That striking reversal between her past warnings and her present position is now at the centre of debate in German politics.
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 said 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. The party condemned the leak as an attack on the German party system and therefore on democracy itself.
The material examined includes emails from one of Weidel's accounts between 2015 and 2017, when she was a relatively junior figure in the party leadership. The messages seen 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, she wrote, they were losing the mainstream conservative electorate completely through proximity to Pegida, and to the NPD in the east.
Weidel also strongly pushed back on a speech by Höcke that same year, in which he contrasted a life-affirming African expansionary type with a self-negating European placeholder type. Writing to the AfD's federal executive board, she said this was deeply problematic because the reasoning was racial and fundamentally wrong, adding that she could no longer hear the usual claim that it was not meant that way.
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 Höcke's rhetoric could bring the party under scrutiny by Germany's domestic intelligence service, writing that his statements alone, and the use of the Nazi-era term Volksgemeinschaft, were enough to land the AfD in the agency's annual report, and that some in the party seemed in a hurry to drive it into oblivion.
The leak also features emails about a speech Höcke gave in January 2017 to the AfD's youth wing, attacking Germany's culture of Holocaust remembrance. Höcke described Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a memorial of shame, criticised the country's efforts to confront its Nazi past and demanded a 180-degree turn in the politics of memory.
Weidel herself brought a motion to expel him from the AfD. The motion accused Höcke of using vocabulary from Adolf Hitler and endorsing the Führerprinzip, the Nazi doctrine of absolute leadership authority, and described him as displaying an affinity in essence with National Socialism. In an internal message, Weidel urged colleagues to wake up, for once, warning of the explosive force of the double meanings in his speech.
The course of events then changed quickly. As Weidel prepared to seek the party's nomination as lead candidate for the 2017 federal election, the correspondence shows she blocked the recording of her own motion against Höcke in the minutes of a leadership meeting, arguing further controversy would damage the party. Höcke subsequently acknowledged his speech had been a mistake and asked the leadership to withdraw the move against him, and Weidel publicly welcomed his letter as a positive signal and called for an end to the infighting.
Within weeks, she had secured her nomination as the AfD's lead candidate. Asked whether she would campaign alongside Höcke, she replied: yes, of course, they were two parts of one party. Yet the emails suggest her private misgivings had not entirely disappeared: in May 2017 she condemned an AfD election poster featuring a pregnant woman and the slogan 'New Germans? We'll make our own' as an NPD poster, in reference to the neo-Nazi party.
Today, Weidel no longer publicly criticises Höcke. She has praised his leadership in Thuringia and even suggested him for a federal cabinet position. In a 2025 interview she said they got along very well and had got to know each other over the years; asked whether Höcke was suitable for a federal cabinet position, she simply replied: yes.
Höcke, for his part, in February 2025 called the 2017 expulsion proceedings against him old news, saying they had got to know and appreciate each other, and that Weidel was the right lead candidate who did a top job. Asked to explain the contrast between her warnings at the time and her present position, Weidel declined to comment through a spokesperson, and a spokesperson for Höcke did not respond to a request for comment sent on Saturday.
In May 2025, Germany's domestic intelligence agency classified the AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation, citing among other things an exclusionary concept of the German nation; the classification, which grants authorities broader surveillance powers, was provisionally suspended by a court in Cologne last February. Whether the revelations will dent the AfD's large lead in polls ahead of key state elections in eastern Germany remains unclear.
