Summary
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency declared the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party a “proven right-wing extremist organization,” citing Holocaust trivialization, Nazi slogans, and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
This marks the first time a federally represented party has been labeled extremist.
U.S. Republicans, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, condemned the move. Rubio called it “tyranny in disguise” and praised the AfD’s popularity, while Elon Musk said banning the “centrist AfD” would be “an extreme attack on democracy.”
The AfD recently won 152 seats and over 20% of the vote.
So they just labelled it? Hopefully that means some sort of action can be taken now?
Legally, the only thing that happened is that the BfV can now use their whole toolbox of covert instruments against the AfD. The federal government, parliament, or a majority of states can always starts proceedings before the constitutional court to ban a party. Of course you don’t want to do that if you have a flimsy case, but in principle there’s no requirements at all.
Politically, it means that politicians have less of an excuse to not open proceedings.
Side note I doubt those 1100 pages are all the BfV has on the party: In their press release (the actual report is still classified) they only mentioned the AfD attacking human dignity, while for a court case you’d definitely also want to argue the wanting to dismantle democracy part, and if that was in the 1100 pages then the press release would’ve included language saying so (that’s just how bureaucracy works in Germany, summaries don’t randomly leave stuff out).
Yes. This is actually a fairly big step. All of the previous attempts to ban the AfD have been thrown out because of the lack of a ruling like this.
No, they’ve been thrown out because our political landscape collectively is too afraid to stand up to fascists. Karlsruhe has more than hinted at the fact that they would rule in favor of banning the AfD yet nothing is being done.
It’s sadly not a ruling yet, it’s a assesment by an intelligence agency, which now can use more tools to surveil the afd. And hopefully we get a court case to ban the afd soon, but for this we need either the government, bundestag or bundesrat to start proceedings.
As far as I understand, the domestic intelligence agency declaring the AfD as rightwing extremist and the party being outlawed are two independent things. It could have been outlawed prior to this decision, and it will not necessarily be outlawed even with the decision. However, the intelligence service now has greater authority to observe and wiretap AfD members.
Of course, the fact that the party is now officially declared as Nazi scum should hopefully embolden the parliament to start the necessary processing to outlaw them.
Before that, the AfD was labeled only “suspected extremist” (with some sub-structures being already “confirmed extremist”); Now, the whole party is “confirmed extremist”, which gives a lot of powers to the government and the agencies.
For example, before, as a political party, they were (partially) financed by the government (every regular party gets money from the government depending on the outcome of the votes, in order to enable them to be politically active) - donations are on top of this, but they are much more limited and regulated than e.g. in the US. Now this money source can be cut.
Eavesdropping orders on a normal political party are between hard and impossible to achieve (like a client-lawyer privilege thing); a classification of “confirmed extremist” makes this much easier. Same for house searches or similar things. Doing this to members of parliament still needs revocation of the immunity, but that is easier to get, and anyone else in the party is not protected like this, anyway.
No the AfD has not done some unspeakable act of horror such as holding up a Palestinian flag. Or say “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free”. That would be cause to disband them and label them a terror group within a day.
The AfD has only does Sieg Heils which is okay with German liberals.