Is freedom under threat in Germany?
Germany’s intelligence service’s labelling of the AfD as a “right-wing extremist group” in a classified report that’s had little scrutiny is deeply troubling, says Rainer Zitelmann
Elon Musk and US Foreign Minister Marco Rubio have both voiced concerns about threats to freedom in Germany over the last few months, most recently in response to the German domestic intelligence service’s (Verfassungsschutz) classification of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party as a “right-wing extremist group”.
Marco Wanderwitz, a politician from the CDU (the party led by Friedrich Merz, who was elected as the new Chancellor on Tuesday), believes that the intelligence report has established a stronger basis for a potential ban on the AfD: “I do think that today’s reclassification by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, backed up by a report containing over a thousand pages of evidence, has moved the dial in that direction”.
Referring to the 1,100-page report detailing the AfD’s actions and ideologies, Wanderwitz continued: “As long as the AfD maintains its current level of influence, both analog and digital, and continues to feed its supporters a daily diet of hatred, agitation, and extremist ideologies, it is virtually impossible for democratic parties to win back the vast majority of AfD voters who do not hold deep-seated extremist worldviews”. Therefore, Wanderwitz concludes, the AfD must be “eliminated, so to speak, if we want to succeed.”
The current debate in Germany is indeed troubling – and, at times, grotesque. On X (formerly Twitter), Georg Restle, presenter of one of Germany’s leading political programs on public TV (Monitor), demanded: “Enemies of the constitution must not be given a platform. Not on talk shows, not on the Tagesschau.” The Tagesschau – Germany’s most watched TV news program – has already announced that it will refer to the AfD as a “right-wing extremist group” in all future reports. For Restle, this clearly does not go far enough. He wants AfD politicians to be banned from speaking on television. And this at a time when every single poll has the AfD either as the strongest or second strongest party in Germany.
The most absurd aspect of the current discussion is that hardly anyone has actually seen the 1,100-page intelligence report – it is classified. Politicians from other parties haven’t seen it, the AfD hasn’t seen it, and the journalists writing about it haven’t seen it either. Only the left-leaning news magazine Der Spiegel claims to have had access to it.
One argument against publishing the report is that it could compromise the identities of confidential informants within the AfD. Another argument is that the AfD will be able to read the report soon enough anyway – albeit with redacted sections – if, as expected, the party files a lawsuit against the “right-wing extremist group” assessment. But, logically, if the AfD is going to be allowed to read the report at a later date, even in a redacted form, why not just let them read it now?
Secrecy
In any case, one can reasonably assume that most of the report relies on publicly accessible sources and only a very small fraction is based on testimonies from undercover informants. Although even this is speculation as hardly anyone involved in the debate is truly familiar with the report’s contents. There is a suspicion that the main reason the report is not being published is because its authors know it contains too many contentious and contestable claims.
According to research by the daily newspaper Die Welt, the report cites a number of examples of what it calls the AfD’s extremist nature, including the following statement from an AfD member on X: “Failed migration policies and abuse of the asylum system have led to hundreds of thousands of people being imported from seriously regressive and misogynistic cultures.”
Of course, this is just one of many examples in the report, but it underscores the importance of being able to critically examine the other quotes and references cited by “Verfassungsschutz”. Rather than doing their job and evaluating the arguments presented in the report, journalists who blindly accept its conclusions without reading it for themselves are basically acting as mouthpieces for the government and the intelligence service.
Personally, I take a critical view of the AfD and its evolution over the past ten years. The party was founded on conservative-libertarian principles. However, only three of the 18 founding members are still active members of the party today. Many of them left the AfD because they opposed the party’s steady shift toward the far right. Figures such as Björn Höcke, the influential chairman of the Thuringia regional association and a proponent of right-wing anti-capitalist views, have come to the fore, while many market economists and moderate conservatives have left the party in frustration. At the same time, it sounds as if the party chairman Tino Chrupalla bases his speeches on talking points crafted in Moscow.
You don’t have to like the AfD to take issue with the way the party is being treated. In recent years, civil liberties have increasingly been curtailed in Germany. One notable incident occurred when Deutschland-Kurier, a news portal with close ties to the AfD, shared a photoshopped image of Interior Minister Nancy Faeser. The doctored image depicted Faeser holding a sign that read, “I hate freedom of speech!”
It was later revealed that the image had been manipulated. The original photo, released by the interior ministry, had been taken on a different and far more serious occasion: Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the original image, the words on Faeser’s sign said: “We remember.” A court gave the editor David Bendels a seven-month suspended prison sentence for intentionally creating and disseminating the manipulated image and thereby spreading a “disparaging and false statement” about a political figure.
In another case, the police turned up at a man’s door at 6 am because he had called the minister of economic affairs, Robert Habeck, a “moron” online. These are just two examples among many of how freedom is now being curtailed in Germany that have got many Germans worried – and rightly so.
Dr Rainer Zitelmann is a German historian, sociologist and author. His latest book is The Origins of Poverty and Wealth