Protecting the constitution or protecting the government?

On the BfV intelligence agency's new report on the AfD

Dear Reader,

What evidence does Germany’s domestic intelligence agency have about the inner workings of the AfD that led to its decision to label the party as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation?

The short answer: very little—at least publicly. If the agency does possess evidence that the AfD is secretly plotting the downfall of democracy, it isn’t sharing it.

The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) spent three years investigating the right-wing party and compiled its findings into a 1,000-page dossier.

The result? The AfD has now been upgraded from a “suspected” to a “verified” right-wing extremist party — a move that fits into a longer institutional response to the rise of the AfD, rather than a transparent reckoning with newly revealed facts.

But, opaquely, the report remains classified. Apparently, the public is supposed to simply take the agency’s word for it. Still, the BfV seems no better at keeping secrets than the BND—Germany’s foreign intelligence service—is at gathering them: two national newspapers have already seen the full report and published excerpts.

Reading these leaked passages, it’s difficult to understand the need for secrecy. No undercover operatives are at risk. Alice Weidel won’t be scratching through her living room walls in search of wiretaps. No elaborate kompromat is poised to collapse. Despite having access to traditional intelligence tools, the BfV has based its findings entirely on public statements made by AfD politicians.

And what do we learn from that? Very little that’s new. The agency cites instances where AfD leaders describe Germany as a “vassal” of the United States, presenting this as evidence of a “systematic denigration of the state”; it lists frequent references to “knife migration” as proof that the party links criminality to ethnic origin; criticism of George Soros is flagged as antisemitism; and the party’s use of the word “dictatorship” to describe Covid lockdowns is said to “undermine trust in the state.”

This is all just treading over well-worn ground. There has been endless discussion of the AfD’s highly emotional rhetoric in the German press for years. Sometimes one gets the impression that the German media do little else other than turning AfD speeches into ‘did they really just say that?’ headlines.

Which raises the question: At a time when Russian sabotage efforts are escalating across Europe, why is Germany’s domestic intelligence agency devoting resources to analysing hours of publicly available footage and speeches—only to affirm a conclusion that most of the media had already reached?

In truth, the document reveals more about the BfV itself than it does about the AfD. The agency’s name translates as the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. But one wonders if its employees have ever read the constitution, Article 5 of which states: “Everyone has the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions… Censorship does not take place.” There’s no asterisk excluding opinions that are offensive, in bad taste, or crude.

Indeed, some of the cited examples appear so far within the Overton window that the AfD’s claims of being targeted by a modern-day Stasi no longer sound quite so far-fetched.

Consider this quote, flagged by the BfV: “What once applied—that nationality was more than just a passport—doesn’t matter anymore. An ethnic community is being replaced with an ethnic particularism: a mass of people with no shared identity, arriving from all corners of the world, divided into small ethnic groups and parallel societies that identify more with their place of origin, or that of their parents, than with their German passport.”

Now recall Britain’s left-wing Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s speech on migration earlier this week. He described the open-border policies of his predecessors as a “squalid” experiment that was making Britain an “island of strangers.” He even suggested Britons had been subjects in a “lab experiment.” His rhetoric was only marginally more polished than that of the AfD. Would he be placed under surveillance if he said that in Germany?

Another revealing section concerns the AfD’s criticism of rival politicians. The BfV reports directly to the Interior Ministry, until recently headed by SPD politician Nancy Faeser.

The report happens to include several of the AfD’s jibes at Faeser as evidence of the party’s extremism. Referring to Faeser’s decision to wear a rainbow armband during Germany’s opening World Cup match in Qatar in 2022, AfD leader Timo Chrupalla remarked: “German ministers wearing armbands—I had hoped we’d never see such pictures again.” According to the BfV, this is evidence that the AfD is guilty of “minimising Nazi crimes.”

In fact, the statement is clearly a criticism of the Nazis. Calling someone a Nazi—once taboo—is now a daily occurrence in German public debate. Is it the role of an intelligence agency to decide who is permitted to do so, and who is not?

Of course, Germans are well aware of their country’s history with over-powerful state security services. But the current case will test whether the rejection of such techniques is a matter of principle or merely one of convenience.