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Germany’s domestic intelligence service has designated the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the biggest opposition party, as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” force, meaning authorities can step up their surveillance as critics call for it to be legally banned.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had since 2021 considered the anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin party a “suspected” threat to Germany’s democratic order, with regional chapters in three eastern states classed as confirmed extremist.
The AfD came second in the February general election with just over 20% of the vote.
The Cologne-based BfV said it had concluded that the “ethnic-ancestry-based understanding” of German identity held in the AfD was “incompatible with the free democratic basic order” set out in the constitution.
The party “aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, to subject them to unconstitutional unequal treatment and thus to assign them a legally devalued status”, the spy agency said.
The decision will lift restrictions on measures to monitor the party for suspected illegal activities, including tapping telephone communications, observing its meetings and recruiting secret informants.
The AfD has faced growing calls from opponents for it to be outlawed on the grounds that it seeks to undermine democratic values, including protection of minority rights. Such a ban can be sought by either house of parliament – the Bundestag or the Bundesrat – or the government itself.
Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democratic Union leader, is due to be sworn in as Germany’s next chancellor at the Bundestag on Tuesday after his conservative bloc won the February snap election. However, his party has lost ground since the vote, with several recent polls showing the AfD in first place.
Merz will lead a centre-right government with the Social Democrats. Their coalition agreement bars any explicit or tacit cooperation with the AfD, a policy that all the mainstream parties have deemed a critical “firewall” to protect German democracy.
The AfD won a record number of seats in the election, which theoretically entitles it to chair several key parliamentary committees, although it would still need the support of other parties.
Analysts say the new government will have a limited window to win back voter trust or risk the AfD, which has about 51,000 members, winning outright at the next general election, planned for 2029.
The party has made strong gains over the last year on the back of voter frustration with immigration policy and an ailing economy.
It came first in Thuringia’s regional election in September, marking the first time since the Nazi period that a far-right party had won a state poll, and it performed well the same month in two other former communist regions.
After active endorsement by Donald Trump’s adviser Elon Musk during the campaign, the AfD turned in the best national result for a hard-right party in Germany since the second world war.
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The BfV had worked for several months to compile a case against the AfD. The news magazine Der Spiegel said the file presented to the interior ministry this week weighed in at 1,100 pages outlining the party’s efforts to erode German democracy.
This included viewing German citizens “with a background of migration from predominantly Muslim countries” as inferior while inciting hostility toward asylum seekers and migrants.
Political analysts and security authorities say the AfD, which was founded 12 years ago by a group of Eurosceptic professors, has radicalised further with each change in leadership as it ousted more moderate figures.
It is now led by Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, who during the recent campaigns openly called for the “remigration” of people they deemed to be “poorly integrated”, including German citizens with roots abroad.
The AfD also calls for a break with Germany’s sacrosanct culture of historical remembrance of the Holocaust, repeatedly using thinly veiled Nazi slogans, which are outlawed in Germany.
In an online chat with Musk in January, Weidel referred to Adolf Hitler as a communist.
