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.
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.