AfD leader's Hungary invite shows erosion of German far-right party's isolation

By Krisztina Than and Thomas Escritt

BUDAPEST/BERLIN (Reuters) - An endorsement from Elon Musk, 5 million euros in financial donations this year alone, and now an invitation to meet Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban: once isolated, the far-right Alternative for Germany has a growing number of friends.

Orban, whose anti-immigration stance and calls for restoration of Europe's energy relationship with Russia make him an ideological match for the nativist AfD, on Monday announced party leader Alice Weidel's visit to Hungary on social media.

"Berlin has always been a city of walls. It’s time to tear another one down," Orban said on X.

Orban told Switzerland's Neue Zuercher Zeitung that the initiative had come from Weidel herself.

"The AfD could get 20% of the vote (in Germany's Feb. 23 national election). If its head wants to talk to me, why should I say no?" the newspaper quoted him as saying in an interview.

Despite their ideological closeness, Orban has hitherto been careful to keep his distance from the AfD, with officials saying he did not want to antagonise mainstream German parties for whom the AfD is anathema. Germany's security services monitor the AfD on suspicion of being "right-wing extremist".

But the return to the White House of Donald Trump, the preferred candidate of both Orban and the AfD, and the party's growing poll strength within Germany, appear to have shifted the calculus that in the past made many reluctant to have public contact with the party.

Weidel's party shares Orban's desire to rebuild Europe's relations with Russia despite the ongoing Ukraine war as well as his strong antipathy to immigration, especially from Muslim countries.

DONATIONS

On Monday the German parliament disclosed that the AfD had received a 2.3 million euro donation on Feb. 1, its largest ever, from a far-right Austrian politician. That followed two separate donations in January from German businessmen totalling almost 2.5 million euros.

Each was individually larger than the total in declared donations that the party received in any given year of its 10-year history.

Musk, the world's richest man who is now leading efforts to slim down the U.S. federal government, endorsed the AfD before Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration.

"Only the AfD can save Germany," Musk wrote on X, his social media platform. He later hosted Weidel for an hour-long conversation.

The AfD is currently polling second in Germany's election race, behind Friedrich Merz's conservative bloc, though it has little chance of winning power for as long as the other parties continue to rule out inviting it for coalition talks.

That so-called "firewall" suffered a dent last week when, for the first time in postwar German history, a parliamentary motion was passed thanks to the votes of a far-right party. This prompted nationwide protests and resignations from Merz's party, which had submitted and backed the motion on migration.

(Editing by Gareth Jones)