In sensational preliminary ruling, court prohibits German spy agency from classifying the AfD as a "confirmed right-wing extremist" organisation

The broadly worded judgment is a stinging humiliation for The Marshmallow Minister

The Cologne Administrative Court, which adjudicates in the first instance administrative suits against the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

Old friends may remember the farce we experienced last May, when outgoing Marshmallow Interior Minister Nancy Faeser pushed her gaggle of goons in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to upgrade their political classification of Alternative für Deutschland.

No longer did the BfV consider the national political party to lurk under mere “suspicion of right-wing extremism,” oh no. They announced suddenly and with much establishment fanfare that they had determined the AfD to be “confirmed right-wing extremists.”

Faeser and her goons hoped this new designation would edge the AfD more firmly into Evil Nazi Fascist Hitler territory in the popular mind, thereby preparing the way for banning the party. According to the dumb Gender Studies-tier retards unassailable and unbiased experts of the BfV, the AfD were more definitely Evil, more definitely Nazi, more definitely Fascist and more definitely Hitler than ever before. They had such clear proofs of all the Evil Nazi Fascist Hitlerism lurking within the AfD that they could not even reveal them. Doing so, Faeser said, would compromise the mysterious sources and methods of her highly sophisticated political spy agency. Instead, the Interior Ministry leaked a classified dossier supporting the upgrade to sympathetic media like Der Spiegel, and these media promptly published earnest articles telling us all how absolutely Fascist and Evil and Nazi and Hitler all the secret evidence showed the AfD to be, because trust us bro.

What happened next is that somebody leaked the full 1,000-page dossier to the alternative news outlets Cicero and NiUS, both of which promptly published the full .pdf. It turned out to be one of the stupidest and most trivial documents I’ve ever read. The supersecret hyperspy sources tapped by the BfV? Google and social media posts. The supersecret hyperspy methods used by the BfV? Compiling interminable lists of potentially untoward or possibly impolite things AfD politicians uttered in googlable documents or on social media. It was so bad that almost overnight the dossier destroyed much of the momentum for an AfD ban – exactly the opposite of what its architects had intended. Even many establishment figures quietly admitted what a travesty the whole thing had turned out to be.

NEVERTHELESS: The establishment moved quickly to capitalise on the new extremist designation. Various state governments began plotting to cleanse the civil service of AfD members on the grounds that they were affiliates of an officially “extremist” organisation. In Rheinland-Pfalz they even toyed with the idea of illegally excluding AfD candidates from running in local elections also on the basis of this bureaucratic designation. The Social Democrats began pushing to initiate ban proceedings against the AfD, a move that – if successful – would grant the left parties indefinite parliamentary majorities both nationally and across many state parliaments, amounting to a kind of legal coup and casting us into a new DDR-light regime.

Meanwhile, the AfD filed suit with the Administrative Court in Cologne to overturn their upgraded designation because it was so obviously dumb and unfounded. They also asked the court to prohibit the designation temporarily, while their primary lawsuit is pending – a long involved process that will take years. The Cologne judges released their unusually extensive 55-page decision on the temporary injunction yesterday. For the party-banning speech-repressing opinion-monitoring enthusiasts of Our Democracy, it is a disaster.

From the Cologne court’s press release:

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) may not classify and treat the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation until the conclusion of the main proceedings … The BfV must also refrain from publicly announcing such a classification …

In its decision today, the court has rejected the BfV’s assessment. We give the following reasons: According to the findings of the summary proceedings, there is sufficient certainty that the AfD houses some efforts directed against the free democratic basic order … These efforts, however, do not characterise the AfD such that its overall essence may be described as anti-constitutional.

That is very important. Not only the AfD, but all political parties, have randos saying potentially or probably or even certainly anti-constitutional things. To justify a ban, you need more than random people saying random things. You need to show a) that the party is fundamentally opposed to the “free democratic basic order” (an ideological trinity consisting of human dignity, democracy and the rule of law), and b) that it exercises this opposition in an “aggressive” or “combative” manner. The BfV have hardly addressed b) at all, and their evidence has not convinced the court that a) applies. To argue their case, the BfV seem to have positively emptied their archives, submitting not only the leaked 1,000-page dossier to the court, but also an additional raft of supporting materials running to 7,000 pages across 20 different binders and electronic files extending to 1.5 terabytes.

The court finds that some “anti-Muslim” demands formulated by the AfD in the course of the 2025 election campaign are contrary to the German Basic Law, because these would tend to vitiate “the equal practice of religion,” but the judges also find that these are insufficient to “establish the anti-constitutional character of the party as a whole.” The court further noted that the BfV “has not disclosed any intelligence information … even in court proceedings” relating to allegedly secret anti-constitutional plots within the AfD, which means that “we cannot assume to the detriment of [the AfD] that [the party] is pursuing such further plans internally.”

A significant prong of the constitutional protectors’ argument held that the AfD’s advocacy of “remigration” was itself openly unconstitutional. Importantly, the court completely disagreed:

… [N]o sufficient conclusions can be drawn from any plans pursued by [the AfD] … with regard to so-called remigration. The vague term “remigration” does not imply a concrete political goal in the sense of undifferentiated deportations … In the absence of a more concrete explanation of specific anti-constitutional intentions with respect to implementing a … remigration policy, such intentions are not apparent.

As I said, this is only a temporary ruling, but given the devastating wording of the court’s judgment, it seems unlikely that the judges in Cologne will ultimately uphold the “extremist” designation when to comes time to decide the main case some years from now. The constitutional protectors may also appeal this injunction, but they would be unlikely to win, and also too I think there is a substantial chance that their ultimate boss, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU), directs them to let this go.¹ Whatever happens, the case for banning the AfD has taken a major, perhaps a fatal, blow. The fundamental problem this whole time has been that the AfD programme is pretty much constitutionally unassailable. Those who want to ban the party have had to hope against hope that the constitutional protectors could unearth secret AfD Nazi plans via their super advanced espionage methods. Instead they’ve spent years copying and pasting Facebook posts and they have basically nothing.

This case converges with other evidence suggesting that the German state – while it may presently wish to ban the opposition and repress its critics – increasingly lacks the internal resolve and coherence for this project. I’ll write more about that tomorrow; today’s adventures (see below) interrupted my routine, but I wanted to get this news out there as soon as possible.

1. Dobrindt is not rushing to file an appeal. Instead, he has announced that his office will conduct “a thorough review” of the 1,000-page dossier supporting the “extremist” classification.