Domestic spy agency declares Alternative für Deutschland to be a "confirmed right-wing extremist" organisation, as authorities inch closer to banning the party

The AfD allegedly understand Germanness to be “defined by ethnic descent,” which is “incompatible with the free democratic basic order" of the Federal Republic.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, announcing the new classification to the press.

This morning, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) officially reclassified Alternative für Deutschland as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. The BfV is Germany’s primary domestic intelligence agency; it is subject to the Ministry of the Interior and tasked, among other things, with policing the democratic respectability of ordinary Germans and their political parties. The upgraded AfD classification is supported by an extensive and totally secret 1,100-page assessment of AfD activities and beliefs, which BfV analysts have been preparing since last year.

Everybody expected the BfV to do this. Leading Social Democrats in particular have been urging the BfV to release their new assessment for months. They see it as a political justification for initiating ban proceedings against the party. As I wrote last week, it is now likely that the new CDU/SPD government, or the new Bundestag, or both, will ask the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe to weigh an AfD prohibition. This new assessment matters mostly because it is the first concrete move in that direction.

The only thing that is really surprising about this news, is the timing: I and everybody else expected the BfV to wait until the CDU and the SPD form a new government and appoint a new Interior Minister. Instead, the sitting Interior Minister Nancy Faeser appears to have forced this assessment through in the final four days of her tenure. This, and not AfD poll numbers (as some have speculated), is the reason this is happening now.

While the BfV assessment bears enormous political importance, its legal significance is rather more obscure. Most concretely, the BfV will enjoy even greater freedom to use surveillance and intelligence-gathering tactics against the AfD; otherwise, party membership may bring enhanced scrutiny upon civil servants and Germans who apply for things like weapons permits.

In their press release, the BfV justify their reclassification by appealing to “the extremist nature” of the AfD and “its disregard for human dignity.” The central political crime of the AfD and its members is alleged to be their “prevailing understanding of the German people” as a group “defined by ethnic descent” – an understanding they say is “incompatible with the free democratic basic order.”

[The AfD] aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, subject them to unconstitutional unequal treatment and thus assign them a legally inferior status. Specifically, the AfD does not consider German citizens with a migration background from Muslim countries to be equal members of the German people as defined by the party on ethnic grounds.

This exclusionary understanding of the German people is the starting point and ideological basis for continuous agitation against certain individuals or groups. The party defames and disparages these groups generally and stirs up irrational fears about them, encouraging their rejection. This is evident in the large number of ongoing xenophobic, anti-minority, Islamophobic and anti-Muslim statements made by leading party officials. In particular, the ongoing agitation against refugees and migrants promotes the spread and deepening of prejudices, resentment and fears towards such groups. The devaluation of the aforementioned groups is also evident in the generalised use of terms such as ‘knife migrants’ [Messermigranten] or in the general attribution of an ethno-cultural propensity for violence by leading members of the AfD.

As I said above, the BfV assessment is secret, officially to protect the intelligence sources and methods that underpin its contents, but surely also to spare BfV argumentation and criteria from public scrutiny. The BfV are, however, busy leaking key evidentiary nuggets to the press, because like all intelligence agencies they are also a publicity operation, with an explicit remit to stir up condemnation and stigma against those who think the wrong way.

Among other things, the assessment allegedly cites these extremely right-wing remarks from an 11 August 2024 speech by Hannes Gnauck, who sits on the AfD federal executive committee:

We must also be allowed to decide once again who belongs to this nation and who does not. There is more to being German than simply holding citizenship papers. All of us here in this market square are connected by much more than just a common language. We are connected by an invisible and simply inexplicable bond. Each and every one of you has more in common with me than any Syrian or Afghan, and I don’t have to explain that – it’s simply a law of nature.

The assessment also includes this absolutely extremist 25 August 2024 statement by Dennis Hohloch, an AfD staffer in the Brandenburg state parliament:

Diversity means multiculturalism. And what does multiculturalism mean? Multiculturalism means a loss of tradition, a loss of identity, a loss of homeland, murder, manslaughter, robbery and gang rape.

Finally, the BfV would like us to know that their assessment includes this insanely extreme (and since-deleted) tweet from Martin Reichardt, a Bundestag staffer:

Failed migration policy and asylum abuse have led to the importation of 100,000 people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures.

Obviously the BfV are leaking their choicest, least arguable, and juiciest bits of evidence – the stuff they think will really turn ordinary Germans against those evil AfD Nazis. I invite you re-read these three passages with that in mind, and then try to imagine for yourself what an absurd cultural and ideological bubble these people must inhabit, to find these remarks scandalous.

A series of court decisions within the past five years have declared that ethnic understandings of Germanness are contrary to the constitution of the Federal Republic. These culminated in a decision from the Federal Constitutional Court last January, which excluded the small hard-right party known as Die Heimat (formerly the National Democratic Party of Germany) from state funding, because their “ethnic-ancestry-based” view of the German people “disregards … human dignity … and is incompatible with the principle of democracy.” The German administrative state and our political elite have internalised these new limits to acceptable politics, setting the bar for right-wing extremism lower than ever before. All you need to do, to be a Nazi these days, is believe that being German involves something more than holding a specific passport.

What is happening before our eyes, practically and ideologically, is highly intriguing. The AfD are not despised because they believe that Germans are an ethnicity; nobody would have dreamed of arguing that was unconstitutional even 30 years ago. No, the AfD are despised because their electoral success threatens the political cartel that presently has the Federal Republic in a vice grip. To get rid of the AfD, this cartel has turned to the machinery of defensive democracy, and precisely because the AfD are not a very extreme party, they have had to define widely shared ethnic beliefs as a new area of political extremism. Thus, for purely tactical reasons, ever more mainstream concepts are folded into the bounds of the forbidden and the fascistic – with profound ideological consequences. “Democracy” itself must change, to make the AfD impossible and to preserve prevailing power relationships.