Germany’s domestic intelligence service has classified the far-right Alternative for Germany, which some polls show as the most popular in the country, as an extremist party, the German authorities announced on Friday.
The decision intensifies a quandary for Germany about what to do about the party, known as the AfD, whose leaders have trivialized the Holocaust, revived Nazi slogans and denigrated foreigners, all the while expanding their political base.
The designation is certain to inflame a long-running debate over whether German lawmakers should move to ban the party altogether. Such a step could cast Germany into a political crisis, without necessarily resolving how to bring the estimated 25 percent of the electorate that supports the AfD into the mainstream political fold.
The issue now threatens to become a distraction for Friedrich Merz, whose standing has fallen as the AfD’s has risen in recent weeks, even before he is sworn in as chancellor, which is expected on Tuesday.
Though the AfD finished second in elections in February, with 20.8 percent of the vote, Mr. Merz and his conservative Christian Democratic Party joined other mainstream parties in a pledge to shun the AfD as too extreme to govern. Instead, Mr. Merz turned to the center-left Social Democrats as a coalition partner, increasing the sense of disenfranchisement among AfD voters.
AfD leaders condemned the announcement on Friday as a politically motivated attempt to undercut their party, and said they would challenge it in court. The AfD now forms the biggest threat to Germany’s establishment parties, which have seen their decades of dominance over politics eroded as the country’s political landscape has fractured.
Among other things, the AfD pointed to the timing of the decision, characterizing it as a parting shot by the interior minister, Nancy Faeser, a left-wing Social Democrat, just days before she is to be replaced in Mr. Merz’s new government by Alexander Dobrindt, a mainstream conservative.
“This decision by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is complete nonsense in terms of substance, has nothing to do with law and justice, and is purely political in the fight between the cartel parties against the AfD,” Stephan Brandner, an AfD leader, told D.P.A., a German news agency, referring to the mainstream parties.
Nonetheless, the domestic intelligence agency made its determination after thoroughly monitoring the AfD for years, and based its decision on the findings of a 1,100-page report compiled by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
The office was specifically created in 1950 to monitor domestic threats to Germany’s democracy and prevent any takeover of the Parliament and government by extremist actors. It was an attempt by modern Germany’s founders to avert the kind of rupture that took place in 1933, when the Nazis seized control of Parliament and the government.
While the office is under the aegis of the interior ministry, which is responsible for domestic security, it is designed to operate independently from the government, to insulate it from the political pressures that the AfD alleges were behind the decision.
“The AfD advocates an ethnic concept of the people that discriminates against entire population groups and treats citizens with a migrant background as second-class Germans,” Ms. Faeser, the departing interior minister, said in a statement, noting that such discrimination runs afoul of Germany’s Constitution.
Much of the evidence for the designation lay in plain sight.
Alice Weidel, the party’s most visible leader, has railed against “headscarf-wearing girls” and “knife-wielding men on welfare,” in reference to Muslims.
Alexander Gauland, who once led the party, described the Holocaust as a speck of “bird poop” — he used a more vulgar word — on 1,000 years of successful German history.
Another lawmaker, Maximilian Krah, told an Italian newspaper interview last year that members of the S.S., the notorious Nazi paramilitary storm troopers who, among other things, ran Nazi concentration camps, were not criminal per se.
Björn Höcke, a party leader in Thuringia State, was twice convicted and fined last year for using a banned Nazi slogan during a campaign stop.
“The AfD is a magnet for domestic extremists and poses a threat to democracy from within,” Matthias Quent, a sociology professor who has spent years studying the extreme right, said in an email exchange.
Party members have also been implicated in a plot to overthrow the state by a group that does not recognize the legitimacy of the modern German Republic. That case is still going through the courts.
The party has rarely penalized its leaders for controversial speech, though it has ousted some members over particularly egregious infractions. Instead it has presented itself as a victim of mainstream political parties and liberal media.
The AfD’s political allies from abroad have done the same. Despite the long and public history of extreme statements by AfD leaders, the party received an endorsement during the last election campaign from Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser to President Trump.
In February, Vice President JD Vance chastised European leaders for trying to isolate far-right parties, and challenged their commitment to democracy.
Mr. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference stunned and angered his German hosts, drawing stern rebuke from Chancellor Olaf Scholz. German officials accused him of interfering in domestic politics and failing to understand the sources of Germany’s strict limitations on extremists, given its calamitous Nazi past.
Before Friday’s announcement, the domestic intelligence agency had classified the AfD’s youth wing as extremist in 2023. The party has since disbanded it.
The new classification gives domestic intelligence more tools to monitor the AfD. It also opens a legal avenue to have the Constitutional Court ban the party, a step that Germany’s top court has taken only twice in the 76-year history of Germany’s modern Constitution, both times with parties far less popular than the AfD.
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