The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany has classified the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as a “committed right-wing extremist organization”, due to the extremist nature of the party as a whole, which disregards human dignity, the Office said in a press release.
The federal agency has been working to assess the AfD for months, but it has so far been categorised as ‘suspected right-wing extremism’ at the federal level. The status obtained now means that the entire party is considered unconstitutional, Der Spiegel explains. This lowers the barriers to intelligence surveillance of the party and allows for tapping phones and recruiting informants, the newspaper said.
The constitutional defence office notes that the ‘understanding of the people based on ethnicity’ that prevails in the AdG is ‘incompatible with the basic free democratic order’. For example, the party does not regard Germans ‘with a history of migration from predominantly Muslim countries as equal members of the German nation.’
In late February, Germany held early elections to the Bundestag, in which the far-right Alternative for Germany party came in second place, receiving a record number of votes in its history (the conservative CDU/CSU bloc took first place). However, the head of the CDU/CSU bloc, Friedrich Merz, who will become the new German chancellor, refused to co-operate with the AfD in forming a coalition.
