As politicians call for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to be monitored by domestic security authorities, DW looks at the criteria that must be met for this to happen.
Image: picture-alliance/M. Scholz
Advertisement
This past weekend, Thuringia's AfD chief Björn Höcke took part in a march organized by the far-right, anti-Islam group, PEGIDA – an incident that shows "how the AfD and the neo-Nazis cooperate," according to Thomas Oppermann, vice president of the German Bundestag.
Oppermann is just one of the senior politicians echoing calls for the AfD to be subject to surveillance by the country's domestic security agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or BfV.
The BfV's tasks and powers
The BfV is charged with collecting and analyzing information on:
1. Efforts directed against the free democratic basic order or against the existence and the security of the federation or one of its states
2. Intelligence activities carried out on behalf of a foreign power
3. Efforts jeopardizing foreign interests of the Federal Republic of Germany by the use of violence or the preparation thereof
4. Efforts directed against the idea of international understanding, especially against the peaceful coexistence of peoples
For the most part, information is gathered in two ways.
1. By open, generally accessible sources, including newspapers, flyers, programs and public events
2. By the use of intelligence means including the handling of individuals recruited from the extremist scene, covert surveillance, and, if necessary, mail and telephone interception, which is subject to authorization
Bremen, Lower Saxony monitor AfD youth wings
The federal government has so far said that it does not see a case for making the far-right populist party as a whole subject to BfV surveillance – even after recent events in the eastern city of Chemnitz, where it played a part in the unrest and protests that surged against foreigners after two migrants were charged in the fatal stabbing of a German man.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/W. Kumm
The states of Bremen and Lower Saxony have meanwhile placed the AfD regional youth wings (Youth Alternative, or JA for short) under observation, with Lower Saxony's Interior Minister Boris Pistorius branding the JA an "unconstitutional organization."
An eye on the NPD
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
Image: Britta Pedersen/dpa/picture alliance
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
Image: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images
Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
8 images1 | 8
The BfV does, however, monitor other groups on the far-right spectrum such as the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), as well as The Right and The Third Way. But two failed attempts to have the openly unconstitutional neo-Nazi NPD banned once and for all show the kinds of limitations the agency faces.
The first attempt failed in 2003 due to the many BfV informers at the head of the NPD, and the next attempt failed in 2016 because of a lack of political relevance: the party isn't present in a single German state parliament.
Leftist organizations under surveillance
It's not just right-wing extremist groups that are on the agency's radar, though. For years, the BfV has also been observing "openly extremist structures" on the far-left of the political spectrum, including the Marxist Forum (MF), the Anti-Capitalist Left (AKL) and the Communist Platform (KPF).
