Merkel’s “We Can Do It!” 10th Anniversary – DW – 08/31/2025

In the period since 2017, political parties in Germany have collectively accumulated €1.8 million ($2.1 million) in administrative fines, with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) accounting for more than half of these penalties.

These fines are linked to issues such as receiving illicit donations, misusing funds from parliamentary groups, and providing false information in financial disclosures.

As per the official statistics obtained by the Germany dpa news agency and featured in this weekend’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper, the AfD has been alone fined approximately €1.1 million.

The data from the German Parliament indicates that the most significant administrative transgression by the AfD was accepting illict donations from the Swiss company Goal AG for election advertising during state votes in Baden-Württemberg in 2016 and North Rhine-Westphalia in 2017, alongside an additional €400,000 donation from Switzerland.

The party is also contesting a claim in the Federal Administrative Court concerning a suspected €108,000 donation, a case that has yet to conclude.

AfD’s Response to Fines

In their defense, the AfD attributes their predicament to their relatively short party history, with a spokesperson stating: “Especially in its early years, the AfD did not have the decades of experience in managing donations that other parties possessed.”

Today, the spokesman averred, the party enforces a rigorous “six-eye-principle” and provides extensive training.

The other parties in Germany’s Bundestag have incurred significantly smaller total fines, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz‘s CDU party fined about €200,000, the SPD SPD around €140,000, the Greens €134,000, the Left Party €92,000, the CSU €79,300, and the FDP partisans fined a meager €2,300.