Reuters
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Friday, the national intelligence agency of Germany ranked the alternative to the far right for Germany (AFD) as an extremist entity which threatens democracy, a decision allowing it to better monitor the party which arrived second in the federal elections of February.
The conclusion of the BFV agency, based on an expert report of 1,100 pages, that AFD is racist and anti-Muslim allows the authorities to increase party surveillance, including by recruiting confidential informants and by intercepting communications.
Stigmatization could also hinder the party’s ability to attract members, while public funding could be in danger.
AFD, which is currently exceeding several opinion polls, condemned the decision, while political analysts said that it risked feeding the party.
“At the heart of our assessment is the ethnically and old concept of people who shape the AFD, who devalues whole segments of the population in Germany and violates their human dignity,” the domestic intelligence agency said in a press release.
“This concept is reflected in the overall anti-migrant and anti-muslim position of the party.”
AFD has “diffammed and disseminated” individuals and groups, arousing “irrational fears and hostility towards them,” he added.
In the first response from the party to the report, the leader of a regional parliamentary group, Anton Baron, said: “It is sad to see the state of democracy in our country when the established parties now resort to the most questionable means of acting against the strongest opposition party.”
The intelligence decision occurs a few days before the conservative chief Friedrich Merz ensures as a new German Chancellor and in the midst of a heated debate within his party on how to manage AFD in the new parliament.
The party has won a record number of seats, which theoretically gives it to chair several key parliamentary committees.
An eminent ally of Merz, Jens Spahn, called to treat AFD as a regular opposition party in parliamentary procedures, arguing that this approach prevents the party from adopting a story of “victim”.
However, other established parts as well as many within the own Spahn conservatives have rejected this approach – and could use Friday news as justification to block AFD attempts to direct key committees.
“There are tensions between the pretension of a party to posts of president according to its size and freedom of conscience of the members of the Parliament,” said political scientist Wolfgang Schroeder at the University of Kassel.
“Now these members can say that AFD representatives do not meet the necessary standards. The signs go up that AFD is not a normal party, and consequently, it will continue to be marginalized. ”
The classification could rekindle the attempts to ban the AFD, but the outgoing chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, of which the Social Democrats will be the subordinate partner of the new coalition of Merz, advised to rush to ban AFD.
“I am against a quick blow, we must carefully assess the classification,” he said on Friday during a church convention in the city in northern Hanover.
The German Parliament could also try to limit or stop public funding at AFD – but for the authorities to need evidence that the party is explicitly undermining or even overthrowing German democracy.
Certain AFD factions such that its youth wing had already been classified as extremists, while the party as a whole was classified as an extremist case presumed in 2021.
Created to protest against the plumps of the euro zone in 2013, AFD Euroskeptic turned into an anti-migration party after Germany’s decision to take a large wave of refugees in 2015.
The fact that the BFV agency needs a certain classification to be able to monitor a political party reflects the fact that it is more legally limited than other European intelligence services, in response to the country’s experience under Nazi and Communist domination.
