Suggesting that Islamic culture is not compatible with Christian society, criticising “globalist” elites, claiming that immigration and certain ethnic minorities are linked to higher rates of crime, and even calling for the use of private firms to assist in deportations were all listed as evidence that the populist Alternative for Germany party is a “right wing extremist” organisation.
A thousand-plus-page document produced by Berlin’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) — under the direction of former far-left Interior Minister Nancy Faeser and rushed to implementation in her final hours in power — to justify its decision to classify the anti-mass migration AfD party as extremists was leaked and published this week by former Social Democrat politician Mathias Brodkorb on his Cicero website.
According to Die Welt, the document almost entirely relied on public comments made by AfD politicians rather than any undisclosed information obtained through other means. Thus, it appears that the case to brand the country’s second-largest party and the official opposition to the government as an extremist group, which would allow for mass surveillance of the entire party — as has already been done against local branches of the AfD — was built on political opinions.
The paper of record noted that much of the so-called evidence consisted of statements which the political spy agency felt were “incompatible with human dignity” by allegedly espousing “ethnic nationalist, anti-foreign and anti-minority, anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic positions.”
The BfV reportedly claimed that AfD Thuringia leader Björn Höcke’s comments condemning the influence of “globalists” and “financial elites” in conjunction with describing the German government as their “puppets”, demonstrated an example of antisemetic rhetoric. The document is said to have quoted a 2022 speech, in which he said that the politicians in Berlin were not “German patriots” but rather “globalist speech puppets” who act in the interest of “large American corporations and for globalist masterminds.”
The intelligence agency said that while opposition against multiculturalism did not necessarily indicate extremist beliefs, the promotion of ‘ethnopluralism’, or the belief in separate and distinct nations based on their historical ethnicities, crossed the bounds of acceptable political speech. Again, Höcke was cited for another speech in 2022 in which he warned that if Europe fails to stop mass migration from Arab and African countries, it would “eliminate Europe for what it has become over thousands of years” and spark a “cultural meltdown”.
“That’s why we need at least temporary foreclosure… It’s not just the quantity of people that matters, it’s also the quality of people… If we want to survive as a European civilisation, then we have to seal ourselves off from mass immigration,” the AfD politician is quoted as saying. The BfV argued that distinguishing migrants by their quality demonstrated an “antipluralistic view of society would not be compatible with human dignity.” The agency also cited Höcke’s use of terms such as the “Great Replacement” and calling for remigration as evidence of extremism.
Comments from AfD leader Alice Weidel also drew the ire of the political spy agents for comments linking certain minority ethnic groups to crime in Germany, as she pointed out that migrant crime was undercounted, as the government statistics do not list those who gain citizenship among migrant criminals. She pointed specifically to people from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria as having higher crime rates than native Germans. This, the BfV said, “reduces the entirety of migrants from these countries as fundamentally more dangerous than Germans through blanket insinuations.”
Additionally, the intelligence agency objected to suggestions that Islamic culture is not compatible with Christian societies like Germany, despite the frequent jihadi terror attacks in the country since the opening of the floodgates to migration from the Muslim world.
Suggesting that “real integration” of Muslims into Christian countries was largely impossible, AfD member of the Bundestag Christina Baum was cited as saying: “Many of our Muslim fellow citizens never made a secret of saying out loud what they think of us Germans, our laws and traditions – namely nothing, not at all. Most of them despise us and consider us women fair game.”
Even simple policy proposals surrounding immigration were documented, including calls from Brandenburg state MP Lena Kotre for the government to employ private contractors to carry out deportation services. According to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, such suggestions ignored that deportations are “human rights-intensive interventions”.
The report also accused the party of having downplayed the crimes of Nazi Germany, citing Höcke’s use of the phrase “Everything for Germany”, a phrase that predates the 20th century. Höcke has claimed that he was unaware of its ties to the Nazi regime. The BfV also cited comments from state parliamentarian Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, who is cited as saying in 2023 that “only a tiny proportion of Wehrmacht soldiers committed crimes” and thus it was unfair to brand “our great-grandfathers and our grandfathers” as criminals.
The leaked report was heavily criticised by a constitutional law professor at the University of Augsburg, Josef Franz Lindner, who argued that political parties should largely be exempt from laws enabling state surveillance of “extremist” groups, as it is improper for the government to target political opponents through state surveillance.
“Trying to combat and ‘eliminate’ political opponents with the help of the secret service is unworthy of a mature democracy,” Lindner said.
“The core problem of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) in its current performance is that… it has viewed its mandate primarily in political terms. This is a profound misunderstanding of its own role. A secret service that believes it has the right to participate in the political decision-making process and can, through new, unlawful categories, open up new fields of observation and effectively exclude certain opinions from political discourse, is dangerous,” he added.
In a speech before the Bundestag this week, AfD leader Alice Weidel rejected the notion that her party represented extremism, arguing that the Berlin political establishment was far more extreme.
“An extremist is someone who arbitrarily restricts fundamental rights, as in the Corona period. An extremist is someone who destroys the prosperity of citizens through eco-socialist transformation. An extremist is someone who wants to abolish civil liberties and freedom of expression.”