German government refuses to publish secret ‘proof’ that AfD is an extremist organisation

Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), has determined that the opposition Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is “definitely” an extremist organization or, more precisely, an organisation of the “far-right”. But where is the proof? In announcing the finding on May 2, outgoing Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser claimed it is contained in a 1,100-page report, citing evidence from party officials and members, and that shows, more specifically, that the party employs a discriminatory, “ethnic” conception of German nationhood. 

But a first problem with this is that the 1,100-page report has been kept secret. It appears to have somehow been “leaked”, or simply provided, to selected media, which have cited what are said to be examples from it. But (a) a few, possibly cherry-picked, examples are not necessarily representative, and (b) the cited examples hardly represent flagrant examples of “ethnic” racism in any case. 

Thus, for instance, the newsweekly Der Spiegel cites a 2024 meme disseminated by the party’s local chapter in Thuringia, which shows a “deportation plane” or charter-flight and featuring the caption, “Summer, Sun, Remigration”. But, as the lawyer Joachim Steinhöfel has pointed out in an interview with the German alternative news media Nius, this could simply be read as a satirical expression of support for deporting foreigners residing illegally in Germany– a policy that both of the parties forming Germany’s incoming coalition government also endorse. (The Spiegel article does not show the supposedly “incriminating” meme, but it can be viewed on the Facebook page of the AfD-Thuringia here.)

Perhaps there are more egregious examples of racism in the rest of 1,100-page report. But since the report is not public, we have no way of knowing. As Nius editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt put it in the same Nius broadcast, “Show us the evidence!”

A second problem is that even supposing that there are indeed more egregious examples in the rest of the report, how do we know that they are organic expressions of the predominant sentiment in the party? The root of the problem here is that German domestic intelligence is known to have its own agents – or “V-men” and “V-women” as they are called – running fake accounts on social media in order to infiltrate the allegedly “far-right” scene. 

The original report in the mainstream Süddeutsche Zeitung that first broke the story in September 2022 spoke of “more than a hundred” such fake accounts. But the real number must be much higher than that. Thus, as reported by Nius, the Berlin regional government acknowledged last year, in response to a parliamentary question, that just its own local intelligence bureau was running 236 such fake accounts, including 59 on Facebook and 36 on X. The Berlin bureau is just one of 16 regional “Offices for the Protection of the Constitution”.

So, even supposing egregious examples are to be found, how would we know that they were not posted by German intelligence’s own agents or, if not, by genuine members of the AfD who were entrapped by the latter?

A final problem is that even if we suppose that – despite protestations to the contrary – the AfD does indeed embrace an ethnic conception of nationhood, how is this incompatible with the German constitution? Such an ethnic conception of nationhood is known in German as the “Volkish” ideology, from the German word Volk, which can be translated as either “nation” or “people”, but has traditionally had heavily ethnic overtones. Citing the BfV report, Faeser accused the AfD of adopting “Volkish” positions.

But the fact of the matter is that the German constitution or “Basic Law” itself employs just such a “Volkish” conception of German nationhood. Unlike, say, in the US or the UK or France, the nation is not defined in civic terms. Thus, Article 116 of the Basic Law explicitly distinguishes between German citizenship [Staatsangehörigkeit] and German nationality [Volkszugehörigkeit]. The former expression literally means “membership in the state”; the latter means “belonging to” the nation or Volk. Under certain circumstances, German law even confers special rights upon Volksdeutschen – or, in other words, “ethnic Germans” – and the distinction is especially significant given that the Basic Law famously declares that state power emanates from the Volk (Article 20) – not the citizenry.

German critics, like the late historian Wolfgang Wippermann, have long called for such traces of ethnic-national or “Volkish” thinking to be purged from German law – thus far to no avail. So, how can Germany’s “Office for the Protection of the Constitution” accuse the AfD of extremism for – allegedly – employing a conception of nationhood that is found in the very constitution it is supposed to “protect”?