The head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency has warned that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has become increasingly extremist and anti-democratic as the far-right party, surging in opinion polls, picks new candidates for EU elections.

Thomas Haldenwang, president of Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), told the DPA news agency that some of the AfD candidates had expressed "far-right extremist conspiracy theories" during the party conference in Magdeburg, where the selections were made over the weekend.

Haldenwang said party members were swapping openly racist theories such as the "Great Replacement," which holds that political elites are deliberately introducing nonwhite migrants into Europe to supplant the white race.

'Xenophobic agitation'

The Magdeburg conference "once again confirmed our assessment that there are strong anti-constitutional currents within the party, whose influence is increasing." Haldenwang said any moderates remaining in the AfD had been almost totally sidelined in the weekend's selections.

Irmhild Bossdorf, who came ninth in the selection, adopted the term "remigration," previously spread by the extreme nationalist "Identitarian Movement." She said Germans should fear "man-made population change" more than man-made climate change.

In 2022, a court in Cologne found that the movement's "massive xenophobic agitation" expressed "a disregard for the human rights specified in the Basic Law." Statements such as "remigration" or "stop population exchange" are hostile to foreigners and Islam, the court said.

Several AfD representatives complained about "multiculturalism" or "mass immigration." Petr Bystron from Bavaria said: "The migrant quotas, the forced allocation of migrants, all that's an attack on everything we hold dear, our culture, our religion, yes, our homeland."

Nazi echoes

Several anti-EU soundbites from the AfD conference appeared in the German media at the weekend. Björn Höcke, who heads the party in the state of Thuringia, told the public broadcaster Phoenix on Sunday that "this EU must die, so the true Europe may live."

The historian Matthäus Wehowski tweeted that this echoed a headline from the Nazi-era newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, which said German soldiers had died in Stalingrad "so that Germany may live."

Maximilian Krah, the 46-year-old the AfD picked as its leading candidate in the 2024 EU elections, himself said he would like to reduce the European Commission by 80%.

Speaking to public broadcaster DLF on Monday, Krah added that "the EU has a very simple agenda at the moment: speaking almost exclusively about the climate crisis, gender issues, immigration, and war. The AfD, however, speaks of prosperity, family, people, and peace."

Asked about extremists in her party, prominent AfD figure Beatrix von Storch told DW's Thomas Sparrow: "I'm not saying we don't have any kind of problems. No one is saying that not even the board of the party. … But it's not like this is the problem of the AfD. The problem of Germany is that we need a different direction for our policy to go towards."

The BfV is charged with tracking extremist groups in Germany and assessing what threat they pose to the country's democratic order, set out in the German constitution, or Basic Law.  The agency currently categorizes the AfD as a "suspicious case," meaning that it maintains the party under certain surveillance measures.

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

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