Members of Germany’s biggest opposition party, the right-wing Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), have been invited to participate in the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, after their exclusion from the key European security gathering for the two years prior.
A spokesperson for the conference said organisers had recently sent out invitations to all parties in the current German Bundestag, the main chamber of the country’s parliament, according to German news agency dpa.
Munich Security Conference foundation chairman Wolfgang Ischinger took the decision to include the AfD, together with the foundation’s board of trustees.
The AfD had been previously excluded from participating in the conference in 2024 and 2025. This was reportedly at the insistence of Christoph Heusgen, who was the conference foundation’s chairman between February 2022 and February 2025.
Heusgen argued the AfD did not conform with the conference’s basic principles of “peace through dialogue”. The hard-Left Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht party (BSW) was similarly excluded from the gathering.
In February 2025, Heusgen told newspaper Tagesspiegel: “Both the AfD and the BSW left the German Bundestag when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke. That is the opposite of dialogue, and I do not want to see anything like that at the conference.”
The decision once more to invite AfD – the BSW has since been voted out of the Bundestag – marks a change in course under chairman Ischinger who chairs the foundation in interim until his successor, former NATO general secretary Jens Stoltenberg, takes over in 2026.
Leading German Conservative politicians had previously demanded that the foundation once more exclude AfD from the conference.
Alexander Hoffmann, an MP for the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, told newspaper Welt on 27 December:
“I think it is correct [to exclude AfD] because this is about key security questions for the country. […] Critical information is not in good hands with AfD because the party has contacts to China and especially to Russia. And information flows, that is comprehensible, and therefore that would be a security risk.”
US Vice President JD Vance had previously heavily criticised the 2025 exclusion of the German right-wingers from the conference – and pointedly met up with AfD leader Alice Weidel outside the conference premises.
The Munich Security Conference is a leading global forum for international security policy and brings together hundreds of international decision makers, including defence ministers, intelligence directors, and industry leaders.
