Did German domestic intelligence services collaborate with Correctiv journalists to smear Alternative für Deutschland and incite the current wave of protests "against the right"?

Thomas Haldenwang, head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

It is the weekend and the anti-AfD protests have started up again. Perhaps the aim is to promote them to a semi-permanent ritual, like the weekly Fridays for Future marches to save the climate in 2019. This would make sense: The climateers seem to be losing steam, with Letzte Generation in disarray and Greta Thunberg continuing her transition to pro-Palestinian activism. Climate change is no longer a growth industry, and the permanent leftist protest must now take up new themes.

In the meantime, we are learning more about the highly suspicious Correctiv exposé on “The Secret Plan against Germany” that set all of this off.

To review: On 25 November, two-dozen people attended a private political meeting to discuss mass migration at a hotel in Potsdam; the participants included several AfD and CDU politicians. At the meeting, Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner gave a talk based on his recent book about his vision for “remigration.” An undercover “journalist” booked a room at the hotel to spy on the participants, while Correctiv operatives set up clandestine cameras to snap photographs through the windows. All of this culminated in a deeply dishonest investigative piece that portrayed the modest event as a Neo-Wannsee Conference. The press amplified this ridiculous story for weeks, Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for nationwide protests “against the right,” and the establishment parties together with many affiliate organisations have been eagerly sponsoring the demonstrations ever since.

From the very beginning, all of this was highly suspicious, above all because Correctiv is not an ordinary journalistic enterprise. They are a shady non-profit founded in 2014, funded by a wide array of entities with connections to the left-leaning political establishment, some of which channel taxpayer money into its coffers. To that comes the very convenient timing: The story dropped precisely as the coalition government was facing its newest political crisis in the form of the farmers’ protest. Was the whole thing staged by state actors to get the farmers out of the headlines and shift the conversation to more amenable topics?

The answer seems to be, very probably. As Tichys Einblick reports, The President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Thomas Haldenwang, has been making some very curious statements to the press. On Tuesday, he met with friendly journalists to express how happy he was “about the commitment of citizens who are demonstrating against the danger posed by Alternative für Deutschland.” He also said that his agency “had been well aware that the participants were planning to meet at the Potsdam hotel” weeks in advance. “We know them all,” he said.

You must remember that the BfV is not just any government agency, but a domestic intelligence service that is currently spying on the AfD as suspected “right-wing extremists.” It is very hard to accept that the BfV and Correctiv just happened to take an independent interest in the same Potsdam meeting. Correctiv journalists had no access to the proceedings, but in their article they are able to quote participants directly, and multiple times. Despite much jubilant reporting from Correctiv on their supersecret methods, they won’t say precisely how they came upon these quotations. Did the BfV record the event and provide transcripts to Correctiv? There are rumours that a bug was found hidden in a wall clock in the meeting room.

The most conservative theory of these events would be as follows: Haldenwang is a member of the CDU, the party for whom AfD poses the greatest problem. Rising support for AfD has denied the CDU and the CSU the chance to profit from the dismal performance of the present government and will force them to enter ever more unpopular coalitions with the left to maintain their cordon sanitaire against these alleged “right-wing extremists.” This would be one reason that Haldenwang demanded (a day after the Correctiv piece appeared) that “the centre of society, the silent majority in this country, wake up and finally take a clear stance against extremism.” He collaborated with Correctiv to awaken this “silent majority” and bring this dishonest report on the “Secret Plan against Germany” into the press. To hide their secret if official source, Correctiv went to elaborate lengths to stage and document their own surveillance. After the story broke, everyone fell into their expected roles – the government-friendly media who have been running desperate stories in defence of the Scholz Clown Car for months now, the Scholz Clown Car itself and of course all their collaborators in leftist NGO and activist networks.

Whatever the details, it could not be clearer that this entire thing is a stage-managed political farce, whereby “protesters” organised by the major parties and their affiliates take to the streets on behalf of a cause that official channels have presented to them, in order to demand precisely those things that the regime already wants to do. In this sense it is little different from the climate activism and the gay activism and the transgender activism that preceded it; the only novelty is the explicit targeting of the political opposition.