The German internal ministry and the country’s domestic intelligence agency BfV on Tuesday, June 6th, released a report showing a sharp increase in politically motivated extremist crimes, particularly on the Right. Unsurprisingly, it has now become the biggest topic in German mainstream media, fueling a public discourse about banning the national conservative AfD, the country’s largest opposition party.
However, a closer look at the statistics—and at the aspects the legacy media conspicuously ignores— reveals a different picture, exposing the establishment’s agenda to smear the Right, hidden in plain sight.
The main figure reported everywhere is that crimes classified as being motivated by right-wing extremism have risen by 47.4% in one year, from around 30,000 in 2023 to 43,000 in 2024.
All mainstream outlets would have you believe that this is solely due to the hateful discourse of the AfD. However, the reality is different: two-thirds (nearly 64%) of these crimes are so-called “propaganda offences,” which primarily cover the dissemination of banned hate symbols—the swastika, in most cases—in the public domain.
And since these offenses are automatically classified as “right-wing” in almost all cases (with the very few exceptions when the perpetrators are identified and explicitly state another motive), the majority seems to be related to left-wing vandalism.
The conservative outlet Apollo News contacted both the federal and state-level police, who confirmed that swastikas painted on right-wing campaign material—such as AfD or CDU election posters—also count as “right-wing extremist” propaganda offenses, because they’re classified as “trivialization” of Nazi ideology, regardless of the obvious, left-wing motivation.
The same goes for vandalizing party headquarters, politicians’ homes, or even Teslas; as long as a swastika or any other Nazi imagery is involved—like a ‘Hitler moustache’ or the word ‘Nazi’—the incident is logged as a “right-wing” hate crime.
Furthermore, while physical or verbal violence still constitutes an insignificant part (3.4%) of the total number, the majority of the remaining one-third is online hate speech, which again is subjective, and in many cases involves only the criticism of the government and its policies.
At the same time, the media is silent about the other aspect of the BfV report: the 38% rise in left-wing extremist crimes, and most importantly, the 46.6% rise in crimes motivated by “foreign ideologies”—almost the same increase as in the alleged right-wing crime.
This separate categorization is dishonest in itself, as the two could be merged: two-thirds of the crimes of ‘foreign ideologies’ have either a pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel motive, while the rest are mostly Islamist or Turkish-extremist motivated, with the left-wing antisemitism being the prominent link between all of these groups.
What’s more, these incidents are significantly more serious than the average “right-wing” crimes, with physical violence constituting 13%, and property damage another 17% of “foreign” motivated crimes, both nearly doubling compared to the year before.
The goal of this coordinated smear campaign is clear: manufacturing public support for banning the AfD, which only seems like a question of time now. This goal has been pursued for months by both the BfV—which was recently forced to walk back its “extremist” classification for the party as its bogus report was leaked—and the government, which has been hinting at it ever since the AfD rose to the first place in the polls in April.