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.
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
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."
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland
Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch — but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alice Weidel
Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II." Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Frauke Petry
German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year — leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
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.
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Marcus Pretzell
Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote, "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Wendt
The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
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.
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland, again ...
During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.
-
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
... and again
Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say 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."
Author: Dagmar Breitenbach, Mark Hallam
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).
