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.
The title isn’t very good. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV, Office for the Protection of the Constitution) found the party AfD to be “proven right-wing extremist”, not the far right in general. The BfV doesn’t look at parts of the political spectrum, they look at specific organisations.
Other parts of the far right are evaluated separately. The party NPD was almost banned before (only didn’t happen because the court ultimately found they were too small to be a danger to the constitution). “Der III Weg” and “Identitäre Bewegung” are evaluated separately. “Die Rechte” was evaluated separately but recently disbanded.
This sort of precision is important, because it shows that there is an orderly process in defence of democracy happening, and not just a random repression of viewpoints as Rubio would have you believe.