Germany places entire far-right AfD under surveillance — reports | News | DW | 03.03.2021

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Germany places entire far-right AfD under surveillance — reports

Germany's domestic intelligence agency is investigating the far-right Alternative for Germany — the largest opposition party in parliament — according to national media. The move comes ahead of national elections.

Kombobild | Logo des BfV und der AfD

Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) have placed the Alternative for Germany (AfD) under surveillance, according to local media.

That designation gives state agents more powers for surveillance in certain circumstances, including potentially tapping the party's communications.

The BfV refused to comment on media reports from Der Spiegel magazine, the DPA news agency and public broadcaster ARD. The Interior Ministry, which oversees the BfV, said it would neither confirm nor deny them.

Why has there been no official statement?

The BfV is apparently unable to announce the decision officially because of an ongoing legal dispute.

A court in the city of Cologne last week rejected an urgent motion by the AfD to stop the BfV from placing it under formal investigation. The party said any announcement that it was being investigated would undermine its right to fight the election on an equal footing to other political parties.

In response, the BfV said it would not make any formal announcement on investigations into the AfD for the foreseeable future. The same would apply to candidates standing in elections in 2021.

The court in Cologne said that, because the BfV had confirmed it would postpone any public announcement on the matter, the AfD's motion was redundant.

The AfD's co-chairman Tino Chrupalla on Wednesday accused the BfV of leaking the information to the media. He said it was a "scandalous" attempt to influence opinion about the party.

Meanwhile, Volker Ullrich — interior affairs spokesman for the CSU, the conservative Bavarian sister party to Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats — appeared to suggest the new surveillance status was a fait accompli.

In a tweet, he described it as a "consistent and correct decision."

"The concept of a defensible democracy means naming and fighting the opponents of the free democratic basic order," said Ullrich.

German Green party lawmaker Konstantin von Notz also welcomed the decision, telling DW: "We know from our history that even in a democracy, enemies of the rule of law can be elected ... to then eliminate democracy and the rule of law."

Several other prominent politicians outside the AfD responded to the news.

Who are the AfD?

The AfD started out as a party campaigning against Germany's membership of the euro as a currency in 2013, before adopting more of an anti-immigration and anti-Islam mantle.

It arrived as a significant opposition force in the Bundestag in 2017, capitalizing in large part on public anger in parts of the electorate over Merkel's 2015 decision to allow in a wave of asylum seekers from conflict-torn countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The party has often caused outrage by questioning Germany's culture of remembrance and atonment after World War II. One of its foremost figures, Alexander Gauland, notoriously described the Nazi era as just "a speck of bird poo" on German history.

  • Christian Lüth (Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance)

    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."

  • Alexander Gauland (picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat)

    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."

  • Weidel and Gauland (Reuters/F.Bensch)

    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.

  • Frauke Petry (Getty Images/T. Lohnes)

    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.

  • Björn Höcke (picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz)

    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.

  • Beatrix von Storch (picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat)

    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.

  • Marcus Pretzell (picture alliance/dpa/M. Murat)

    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.

  • Andre Wendt (picture alliance/ZB/H. Schmidt)

    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.

  • Andre Poggenburg(picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf)

    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.

  • Alexander Gauland AfD

    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.

  • Alexander Gauland

    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


Although the AfD is the largest opposition party in parliament, it has seen its popularity flat-line and even wane since establishing itself in 2017's election.

It is set to contend six regional elections this year and a general election on September 26. Nationwide, it is currently polling in the region of 10%, after logging 12.6% in 2017.

The party has repeatedly faced accusations of ties to right-wing extremists.

Parts of the AfD — including the party's youth division and the Flügel (Wing) extremist group — have already attracted the attention of the intelligence community.

The Flügel came under full surveillance by the BfV last year after the agency said its members included proven right-wing extremists.

rc/msh (AFP, dpa, AP)

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