The national intelligence service of Germany has classified the extreme right alternative for Germany, which certain polls show as the most popular in the country, as an extremist party, the German authorities announced on Friday.
The decision intensifies a dilemma for Germany on what to do about the party, known as the AFD, whose leaders trivialized the Holocaust, relaunched from Nazi slogans and denigrated foreigners, while expanding their political base.
The designation is certain to inflamm a long -standing debate on the question of whether German legislators should completely prohibit the party. Such a step could launch Germany in a political crisis, without necessarily resolving how to bring the estimated 25% of the electorate which supports AFD in the traditional political lap.
The American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, labeled Germany’s “Open Immigration Policy” as extremists, rather than AFD, in a statement published on X.
“Germany has just given new powers to its spy agency to monitor the opposition. It is not democracy-it is the disguised tyranny,” he said in the post.
The problem is now threatening to become a distraction of Friedrich Merz, whose position has fallen while AFDs have increased in recent weeks, even before it is sworn as Chancellor, which is scheduled for Tuesday.
Although AFD finished second in the elections in February, with 20.8% of the vote, Mr. Merz and his conservative Christian Democratic Party joined other traditional parties in a commitment to avoid AFD as too extreme to govern. Instead, Mr. Merz turned to the Social Democrats in Center-Gauche as a coalition partner, increasing the feeling of deprivation of their rights among AFD voters.
AFD leaders condemned the announcement on Friday as an attempted political motivation to undermine their party and said they would dispute the court. AFD now constitutes the greatest threat to German establishment parties, which have seen their decades of domination over eroded policy while the country’s political landscape has broken down.
Among other things, AFD has underlined the decision of the decision, characterizing it as a separation from the Minister of the Interior, Nancy FaeSer, a social democrat of left, a few days before being replaced in the new government of Mr. Merz by Alexander Dobrindt, a consumer curator.
“This decision of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is a complete nonsense in terms of substance, has nothing to do with law and justice, and is purely political in the fight between the Cartel parties against AFD,” said Stephan Brandner, a chief of AFD, in DPA, a German press agency, referring to the main parties.
Nevertheless, the national intelligence agency made its decision after having followed AFD in depth for years and founded its decision on the conclusions of a 1,100 pages report compiled by the Office for the protection of the Constitution.
The office was specifically created in 1950 to monitor interior threats to German democracy and prevent any takeover of the Parliament and the Government by extremist actors. It was an attempt by the founders of modern Germany to avoid the kind of rupture that took place in 1933, when the Nazis took control of the Parliament and the government.
Although the office is under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior, which is responsible for internal security, it is designed to operate independently of the government, to isolate it from the political pressures preceding that AFD was at the origin of the decision.
“AFD advocates an ethnic concept of the people who discriminate whole population groups and deals with citizens with migrant history as second -class Germans,” said Ms. Faeser, Minister of the Interior, noting that such a discrimination is a matter of the Constitution of Germany.
A large part of the evidence of the designation resided in sight.
Alice Weidel, the most visible leader in the party, embarrassed “girls wearing scarves” and “knife men on well-being”, in reference to Muslims.
Alexander Gauland, who formerly directed the party, described the holocaust as a grain of “bird shit” – he used a more vulgar word – on 1000 years of successful German history.
Another legislator, Maximilian Krah, told an Italian newspaper interview last year that the members of the SS, the notions of Nazi paramilitary soldiers, who, among others, led Nazi concentration camps, were not criminals in itself.
Björn Höcke, a party leader in Thuringia, was sentenced twice and sentenced to a fine last year for using a Nazi slogan prohibited during a campaign stop.
“AFD is a magnet for domestic extremists and constitutes a threat to interior democracy,” said Matthias Quent, professor of sociology who has spent years studying in the far right, in an exchange of emails.
Party members were also involved in a conspiracy to overthrow the state by a group that does not recognize the legitimacy of the modern German Republic. This affair always goes through the courts.
The party has rarely penalized its leaders for a controversial speech, although it has ousted certain members on particularly blatant offenses. Instead, he presented himself as a victim of traditional political parties and liberal media.
AFD political allies abroad have done the same. Despite the long and public publication of the extreme declarations of AFD leaders, the party received approval during the last electoral campaign of Elon Musk, the billionaire councilor of President Trump.
In February, Vice-President JD Vance reprimanded European leaders for trying to isolate the far-right parties and challenged their commitment to democracy.
Mr. Vance’s speech at the Munich security conference amazed and angry his German hosts, attracting Stern Rebuke by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. German officials have accused him of being interfere in internal policy and not to understand the sources of the strict limitations of Germany to the extremists, given his calamitic Nazi past.
Before Friday’s announcement, the national intelligence agency had classified the AFD youth wing as an extremist in 2023. The party has since dissolved it.
The new classification gives domestic intelligence more tools to monitor AFD. It also opens a legal avenue for the Constitutional Court to prohibit the Party, a stage that the German court only took twice during the 76 years of history of the modern constitution of Germany, twice with much less popular parties than AFD.
Friday, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to Mr. Rubio’s statement, claiming on X that the “decision is the result of an in -depth and independent investigation to protect our constitution and the rule of law”.
“We have learned from our history that right -wing extremism must be stopped,” wrote the ministry in his article.
