08\/30\/2025August 30, 2025AfD responsible for over half of administrative penalties <\/p>\n
Since 2017, German political parties have had to pay a cumulative \u20ac1.8 million ($2.1 million)\u00a0in administrative penalties \u2013 with over half issued to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)<\/a>.<\/p>\n The fines pertain to issues such as illegal donations, the misuse of parliamentary group funds and the provision of false information in financial reports.<\/p>\n 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 \u20ac1.1 million.<\/p>\n 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-W\u00fcrttemberg<\/a> in 2016 and North Rhine-Westphalia<\/a> in 2017, as well as a further \u20ac400,000 donation, also from Switzerland.<\/p>\n The party has filed a Federal Administrative Court lawsuit against another claim regarding an alleged \u20ac108,000 donation, which is not yet final.<\/p>\n What did the AfD say about the fines?<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n Nowadays, he said, the party operates a strict “six-eye-principle” and offers intensive training.<\/p>\n The other parties in the German Bundestag received have much smaller total penalties, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz<\/a>‘s CDU<\/a>\u00a0fined around \u20ac200,000, junior coalition partners the SPD<\/a> around \u20ac140,000, the Greens<\/a> \u20ac134,000, the Left Party<\/a> \u20ac92,000, the Bavarian CSU<\/a> \u20ac79,300 and the business-orientated FDP<\/a> just \u20ac2,300.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"08\/30\/2025August 30, 2025AfD responsible for over half of administrative penalties Since 2017, German political parties have had to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[2000,299,1824],"class_list":{"0":"post-384901","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-germany"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115117271610364599","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}