08/30/2025August 30, 2025AfD responsible for over half of administrative penalties
Since 2017, German political parties have had to pay a cumulative €1.8 million ($2.1 million) in administrative penalties – with over half issued to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The fines pertain to issues such as illegal donations, the misuse of parliamentary group funds and the provision of false information in financial reports.
And according to official figures reported in this weekend’s Welt am Sonntag broadsheet and seen by the Germany dpa news agency, the AfD alone has been fined around €1.1 million.
According to the parliamentary data, the AfD’s biggest administrative transgression was the acceptance of illegal donations from Swiss company Goal AG for election advertising ahead of state polls in Baden-Württemberg in 2016 and North Rhine-Westphalia in 2017, as well as a further €400,000 donation, also from Switzerland.
The party has filed a Federal Administrative Court lawsuit against another claim regarding an alleged €108,000 donation, which is not yet final.
What did the AfD say about the fines?
In its defense, the AfD has pointed to its comparatively young party history, with a spokesman claiming: “In particular in the first few years, the AfD couldn’t fall back on the wealth of experience in dealing with donations that other parties had built up over decades.”
Nowadays, he said, the party operates a strict “six-eye-principle” and offers intensive training.
The other parties in the German Bundestag received have much smaller total penalties, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz‘s CDU fined around €200,000, junior coalition partners the SPD around €140,000, the Greens €134,000, the Left Party €92,000, the Bavarian CSU €79,300 and the business-orientated FDP just €2,300.