section_path: Ideology and platform/Foreign policy/European Union
section_name: European Union
paragraph_text: European Union
  
  AfD initially held a position of soft Euroscepticism by opposing the euro currency and Eurozone bailouts, which the party saw as undermining European integration, but it was otherwise supportive of German membership of the European Union (EU).
  
  Since 2015, the party has shifted to a more purely Eurosceptic and nationalist position against the EU, calling for the withdrawal from the common European asylum and security policy, significant reform of the EU and a repatriation of powers back from Brussels with some party members endorsing a complete exit from the European Union if these aims are not achievable.
  
  During the 2021 party conference in Dresden, a majority of AfD members voted to include more hardline policies against the European Union including German withdrawal from the bloc in the party's manifesto ahead of the 2021 German federal election.
  
  Since 2025 the AfD has been working with Hungary's nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Alice Weidel praised Hungary as a model for AfD, saying that AfD shares Hungary's opposition to illegal immigration and stance on the European Union. In February 2025 Weidel stated about AfD's policy towards the European Union: "We should work together to reform the European Union at all costs. And that can only be done from within. We can achieve this by reducing the competences of the European Union, by dismantling the entire bureaucratic, expensive — and, in my view, corrupt — superstructure."