The leader of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has called for the abolition of Berlin’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which serves as a domestic political spy agency, with the brief of ensuring that only acceptable beliefs are expressed by the various political parties of the country.
AfD leader Alice Weidel said this week that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) “should be abolished in its current form or at least fundamentally reformed,” Die Welt reported.
Weidel accused the domestic intelligence agency of being used to “monitor and suppress the political opposition,” while noting that the heads of the BfV are not independent abriters, but rather political appointees and therefore ultimately beholden to the establishment in Berlin, notably the Interior Minister.
While she acknowledges that there is a role for domestic intelligence agencies, such as performing counter-terror operations, the AfD leader said that any such agency should be barred from “acting against the political opposition.”
Last year, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the AfD as a “right-wing extremist” organisation, opening the door to further state surveillance of party communications and even authorising the government to legally plant moles within the party. Although the classification is currently being appealed, opponents of the anti-mass migration party hope that it will lay the groundwork for a future ban of the AfD, as has been advocated for by the left-wing Social Democrats (SPD).
The BfV, which was established in the wake of the Second World War to act as a buffer against fascist or communist groups from staging a coup against the liberal post-war government, cited public comments from AfD politicians criticising mass migration, Islam, and globalism as evidence of the party’s supposed extremism.
Despite the attempts to cast the AfD outside of the Overton Window or even potentially ban it altogether, the party has continued to rise in popularity and now stands as the indisputably most popular party in the country, holding a seven-point lead over the governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz according to the latest RTL tracker.
The party’s popularity has put it in the driver’s seat for the upcoming state elections in Saxony-Anhalt next month. The AfD’s lead candidate in the elections, Ulrich Siegmund, first proposed reforming the state branch of the BfV to remove its political monitoring remit.
While the national classification of the AfD as an “extremist” group is currently under appeal, the state branch of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt has already been officially classified as such by local political police. With Siegmund holding a commanding lead in the polls, it is possible that the AfD, for the first time in its history, will win control of the state government, in which case it would likely be on a collision course with the domestic spy agency currently surveilling the party.
The prospect of the Saxony-Anhalt government being controlled by the AfD is already sending shockwaves through the political establishment, with German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius suggesting last month that the federal government may seek to block an AfD-controlled state government from accessing classified documents, claiming that the Eurosceptic party is beholden to Russia.
The coalition government is also looking to vastly expand the authority of domestic spy agencies, including by increasing the BfV’s and the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) ‘s authority to collect and store data. The reforms are likely to remove key oversight from the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection, meaning that those surveilled by the domestic spy agency will have little recourse to access information about the state’s collection of their data.
The AfD is not alone in its critiques of the political intelligence apparatus in the country, with even the former president of the BfV, Hans Georg Maaßen, claiming last year that the attempts by his former agency to brand the AfD as an extremist organisation were done at the behest of the previous Social Democrat government in a “clear case of using domestic intelligence services to suppress opposition.”
“In no other Western democracy are political parties monitored by intelligence agencies, because these agencies are part of the executive branch and therefore answer to the government. That creates an obvious conflict of interest,” the ex-BfV chief remarked.
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