German Interior Minister places responsibility for political violence with the AfD and a general “contempt for politics,” in the latest attempt to characterise free expression as somehow criminal

What is happening to us is not even secret. The major actors announce their plans openly, and then they act on them in the most transparent ways.

Last year, Thomas Haldenwang, whose spirit animal is a mole …

… and who also happens to be the domestic intelligence chief of Germany, promised to do what he could to “shake the population awake” and to “shake politicians awake,” in order to suppress popular support for Alternative für Deutschland. He complained only that it could not be left to his spy agency alone to scare voters away from them.

In other countries, such sentiments could never be voiced by the head of a government agency in public. In Germany, however, we do not have ordinary democracy. Rather, we have “defensive democracy,” where you can only disagree with establishment politicians up to a point. The line of transgression is drawn by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, whose chief is appointed by the Interior Minister. The government, in other words, gets to decide which opinions are allowed and which must be countered not by free elections and debate, but by legal harassment, surveillance and defamation.

The problem is simple: The German electorate is overwhelmingly conservative, but they are governed by an entrenched political establishment and a closed party cartel system that over the years has drifted ever further from their opinions. For a long time, simple prosperity papered over the growing rift between the rulers and the ruled, but the happy days of plenty are behind us. The Scholz government has therefore become deeply unpopular. Rather than moderating their programme, however, they have turned to all the unholy mechanisms of “defensive democracy,” to draw the line of wrongthink at a more extreme point than ever before. Millions of Germans now find themselves on the wrong side of it. To defame these millions and minimise the political impact of their views, state officials have mounted a great campaign to mobilise the people against the opposition. This campaign has unfolded in three phases, clearly timed to suppress AfD support ahead of crucial elections this year:

1) First came the coordinated media attacks on the AfD in January, premised on a piece of deeply deceptive reporting about an almost entirely invented secret AfD plan to deport migrants. There ensued months of regime-coordinated demonstrations “against the right,” which the Interior Ministry used as an occasion to unveil a wide-ranging programme to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents (that is, anyone they don’t like).

2) There followed foreign influence allegations against Petr Bystron and Maximilian Krah, the leading AfD candidates for the European parliamentary elections in June. Bystron is alleged to have received payments from the Russia-connected “Voice of Europe.” Krah, meanwhile, is accused of overmuch affinity to China following the arrest of his aide on allegations of espionage. Both stories again became the occasion for unceasing media coverage over weeks and much dark speculation, despite the near-total absence of proof or even any concrete details.

3) We are now in the midst of a third anti-AfD media campaign, following the assault on SPD politician Matthias Ecke in Dresden. We must hear from all and sundry about the grave danger of right-wing political violence in Germany, and how the AfD are responsible for escalating assaults on politicians.

German politics have long suffered from many problems, but the hysteria, open duplicity and naked coordination apparent in these efforts breaks new ground, which is really saying something. These are media tactics that were first developed during the Covid pandemic, and that have now been repurposed for domestic political manipulation.

Each of these assaults have taken aim at different pillars of the AfD political programme. They manifest a subtle strategy that it has taken me a while to appreciate. The first and the third represent indirect attacks; their purpose is to make the AfD too politically toxic for any establishment parties (particularly the centre-right CDU) to collaborate with. This would be the shaking-politicians-awake element of Haldenwang’s campaign. The second effort in our list, meanwhile, is an effort to “shake the population awake,” via the direct demoralisation of AfD supporters. Together, these efforts have seen some success. The AfD are the still the second-strongest party in Germany overall, but their nationwide support has slipped from a high of 23% last fall to 17% presently. Some of this decay must be put at the feet of Sahra Wagenknecht’s new socialist party, which provides another option for German voters who don’t like the present way of things. A great part of it, however, is surely the consequence of Haldenwang’s manipulations.

The problem with successful attacks is not just that they work, but that they embolden the attackers. The establishment clearly overestimated the success of their demonstrations against the right in the late winter. Their repressive plans to surveil, harass and de-bank the “extreme right” provoked considerable opposition, driving even the New York Times to voice nervousness about the state of democracy in Germany. There followed a long silence, during which Haldenwang stopped giving his disturbing media interviews and his boss, the Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, found time to talk about other things, like the disproportionate criminality of recent immigrants to Germany. As AfD polling slips, however, our rulers feel ever more freedom to act.

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Over the weekend, Faeser renewed her attacks on the “extreme right” with a long editorial in Welt, denouncing “increasing violence against politicians.”

Nancy Faeser as a marshmallow.

As editorials go, this one is very bad. Faeser links this “aggression” specifically to a “contempt for politics”; together, the two are causing a “dangerous escalation spiral” that “we must stop.” The problem, as she sees it, are “perpetrators” who “celebrate their fight against a ‘system’ that they despise.” These people are “despicable criminals” who “must be prosecuted with high-pressure investigations.” Among other things, “extremists” must be “consistently disarmed” with further changes to Germany’s already highly restrictive gun laws. Otherwise, the AfD bear “joint responsibility” for this violence; because they “repeatedly attack the human dignity of many in our country,” they are also to blame “for a growing climate of hatred and violence,” and their political statements represent “an invitation to perpetrators of violence to turn words into deeds.”

What is most bothering about all of this, is neither Faeser’s lazy tactic of recycling the selfsame tired quotations and incidents allegedly illustrating the grave threat of right-wing violence in the Federal Republic, nor her duplicitous omission of the vastly more significant and better-organised phenomenon of left-wing aggression. No, what is most bothering are the rhetorical efforts of a powerful cabinet minister to collapse the distinction between words and crimes, and to draw a cloud of criminal disrepute also over the opinions, the political arguments and even the emotional dispositions of ordinary Germans. She makes their views, their rhetoric and their feelings complicit in the “escalation spiral” that she says leads to violent attacks. AfD offences against “human dignity” are also responsible for heightened aggression. This is a thinly-veiled reference to the AfD anti-immigration platform; the implication is that opposing mass migration itself may be borderline illegal. Finally, there is Faeser’s anger over those who regard establishment politicians like herself with “contempt,” reminding us of her previous fulminations against those who “mock the state.” Faeser appears to be genuinely outraged that ordinary people don’t like her very much. She would prefer a meek and compliant electorate, and she fantasises about how voters might be bludgeoned into submission by the police.

This is an unhinged, crazy and very dangerous woman, who has achieved high office via the stupidity of German voters. For months, she has been pushing on all fronts to secure the establishment parties in power via a wide range of state repressions. Her campaign is related to ongoing attacks on the AfD, but also in many respects bigger and more significant. Like Haldenwang, she is an opportunist, who is using establishment anxiety over the AfD as an excuse to expand the prerogatives of her office and dismantle the rights of ordinary Germans. She has yet to succeed, but only because the ambient hysteria is as yet insufficient to justify her programme internally.

Remember: All it took was a trumped-up story about AfD politicians plotting “remigration” to inspire Faeser’s deranged policies against the “extreme right” in the first place. What happens if there is a major shooting or terrorist attack that can be plausibly laid at the feet of her opponents? What happens if our security services foil another Reichsbürger conspiracy to overthrow the Federal Republic? We are not merely at the mercy of random events, which would be bad enough. Elements of the state, including our constitutional protectors, are actively trying to make things like this happen. There is a very real danger that these people will very soon have the pretences necessary to push their fantasies further than anyone has yet imagined.