BERLIN — Germany’s domestic intelligence agency on Wednesday classified the youth wing of a prominent far right nationalist party as an extremist group that threatens the constitution, dealing another blow to an organization that has come under increasing scrutiny over concerns of radicalization.
The spy agency reclassified the “Young Alternative” unit of the party after monitoring it for four years. The decision comes just a year after intelligence officials decided to put the entire party, called Alternative for Germany, under surveillance — the first time the agency had taken such a step against a main political opposition party in Germany’s postwar history.
The government also labeled two other far-right institutions as right wing extremists on Wednesday — the Institute for State Policy and the One Percent group. Both organizations are part of what is called the New Right in Germany, a conservative ideological movement that the agency said promotes violent, anti-democratic, and racist ideas.
Once a group is classified as extremist, its members could lose employment opportunities in the public sector and the ability to obtain or maintain weapons licenses. Domestic intelligence services, who already had the groups under surveillance, will also more quickly receive authority to tap or surveil group members.
“There is no longer any doubt that these three groups of people are pursuing anti-constitutional aspirations,” said the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the intelligence agency known by its German initials BfV.
Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel, two leaders in the party, called the decision an “outrageous action.”
“We currently have neither a reason nor corresponding documents that make this step comprehensible,” they said in a statement. “Of course, we are already examining the use of legal recourse.”
Political analysts say that Alternative for Germany (known by its German acronym AfD) has been becoming more radical since it entered the German parliament in 2017.
At that time, it was the country’s largest opposition party, winning 13 percent of the vote. Since the election of Chancellor Olaf Scholz last year ushered in a new government, however, the AfD has been superseded by the center right Christian Democrats, the party of the former chancellor Angela Merkel. The AfD’s political fortunes fell ahead of the 2021 parliamentary elections, in which it garnered only 10 percent of the vote.
But in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, amid economic anxieties over the impact of European sanctions against Moscow and rising inflation, the party has enjoyed a resurgence in the polls, with around 16 percent.
The AfD was the first far-right party to make it into Germany’s federal Parliament since World War II, and it has become the most serious test for Germany’s postwar democratic institutions and domestic intelligence services.
Despite marching with neo-Nazis in street rallies against coronavirus regulations and in protests against Germany’s support for Ukraine against Russia, the AfD enjoys pockets of support in state entities like the police and the military.
Debate over potential far-right infiltration into the heart of German democracy turned into concrete threats over the past year: Some AfD members were involved in a fantastical plot to try and overthrow the government, which German security forces foiled quickly in December. Just a few months later, Germany’s foreign intelligence service caught a mole in its own ranks who had been passing information to Russia. The man was also a supporter of Alternative for Germany.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, AfD lawmakers regularly traveled to Russia, where they were sometimes hosted at length by the foreign minister.
Already, two state branches of the AfD have become targets of domestic intelligence agencies. The eastern state of Thuringia labeled its local AfD chapter as a right-wing extremist group. In the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, the state intelligence agency said it was putting its state AfD branch under surveillance.
In its statement on Wednesday, Germany’s domestic spy agency said that the Young Alternative had made “agitation against refugees and migrants a constant, central theme,” particularly against Muslims.
The group is also working against “the principle of democracy,” by denigrating political opponents and the state, the BfV said. “The Youth Alternative is not concerned with debate of matters at hand but a general disparagement of the democratic system of the Federal Republic of Germany,” it said.
Because of Germany’s Nazi history and the fact that Hitler rose by democratic means before creating an authoritarian state, the country designed its postwar political structures with built-in safeguards to protect against the rise of political forces that could once again usurp the democracy from the inside.
The domestic intelligence agency is one of them. Its founding mission is to act as an early warning mechanism to protect the Constitution against budding threats.
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