Federal Constitutional Court: AfD fails with urgent application to announce the number of “wing” members

The AfD wanted to temporarily forbid the Office for the Protection of the Constitution from making public how many members the now-defunct extreme right wing of the party has. After the specialized courts, Karlsruhe now also rejected this.

D.he AfD failed before the Federal Constitutional Court in an attempt to temporarily prohibit the Office for the Protection of the Constitution from disclosing the number of members of the “wing”. The court rejected the party’s urgent application because of insufficient justification, as it announced on Thursday. It is not about the classification of the AfD as a suspected case. (Az. 2 BvQ 17/21)

In this case it is instead a question of whether the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) can make public how many members the now officially dissolved right wing of the party had and should still have. The AfD wanted to obtain an interim decision prohibiting the BfV from doing so until an urgent decision was made.

However, the specialized courts – the Cologne Administrative Court and the Münster Higher Administrative Court – had previously rejected such a so-called hanging decision. Now the Federal Constitutional Court decided against the AfD.

The Karlsruhe judges announced that this should have demonstrated that the interim decisions made earlier were “based on a misunderstanding of the meaning and scope of their basic rights”. But she did not do this sufficiently. The party also failed to explain in a comprehensible manner that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution actually wanted to announce the number of members of the “wing” before the administrative court’s urgent decision.