Germany is free to step up state surveillance of Alternative for Germany (AfD) politicians after the party was classified as having “guaranteed right-wing extremist intentions” by the country’s domestic intelligence service (BfV).
On Friday the BfV said it had passed on this recommendation to the federal interior ministry as part of a 1,100-page report on the party.
Classifying the entire AfD as extremist lowers the legal threshold for the BfV to carry out – or expand – its electronic surveillance of party officials and creates more secure legal grounds for deploying paid informers inside party organisations.
Excerpts from the classified report, released by the BfV, describes AfD politics as “incompatible” with Germany’s “free democratic order”, in particular for the party’s “ongoing” agitation against refugees and migrants.
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BfV vice-president Sinan Selen said the organisation had reached its conclusions after three years studying AfD position papers and remarks by party leaders as well as “new organisational developments”, in particular the decline of its once-dominant conservative-liberal faction and the rise of its far-right wing.
“Decisive for our assessment is the AfD’s ethnic-based understanding of the population,” the BfV said, “which denigrates entire population groups in Germany and violates their human dignity. This understanding of the population is reflected in the party’s overall anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim stance.”
Outgoing federal interior minister Nancy Faeser said the domestic intelligence agency had been given a “clear legal mandate to take action against extremism and protect our democracy”. She said the assessment had been carried out “with no political influence whatsoever”, noting that publication of the report was postponed from earlier this year for fear of interfering in February’s snap federal election.
Three months on from that poll, in advance of next week’s federal government swearing-in, opinion polls show the AfD has gained an additional five points’ support and is now Germany’s most popular party with 26 per cent backing.
AfD co-leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla attacked the BfV conclusion as defamatory and “a serious blow to German democracy” and “targeted interference in the democratic decision-making process that is clearly politically motivated”.
News of Friday’s classification has revived demands for the AfD to be banned outright.
Germany’s incoming federal interior minister Alexander Dobrindt, whose job it would be to initiate any such procedure, declined to be drawn on a ban on Friday. But he said it was likely that German courts would soon confirm the BfV assessment.
For Daniel Günther, state premier of the north-western state of Schleswig-Holstein, the BfV assessment was “no surprise, but it brings clarity”.
Mr Günther, a senior centre-right Christian Democrat (CDU) politician, said the AfD “is a threat to our free and democratic basic order and it endangers our social peace”.
