The courts protect a report from the German government that alerts the “extremist potential” of 10,000 AFD followers

The party had filed an appeal, trying to prevent the German Ministry of Interior in the process a report Very compromising, but the Superior Administrative Court of Berlin-Brandeburg has just ruled that “the Federal Ministry of Interior does not have to correct the 2022 report on the extremist potential of about 10,000 people” related to AFD. The sentence mentions that these people account for “between 30 and 40% of all members of AFD” and allows the investigation to follow, whose conclusions do not yet have a fixed presentation date.

In his judgment, the court considers that “the allegations are legal and factically unsustainable»And confirms the result of a summary procedure, at the beginning of 2024, in which the Administrative Court of First Instance had already concluded that it was not necessary to correct the report. At that time, the judges determined that the Ministry was empowered, by virtue of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, to inform the public about AFD’s efforts to alter the democratic basic order of freedoms, and they recalled that it is what is applied provided that there are sufficiently important factual indications for it.

In this case, these indications are mainly from the network around the regional president of AFD in Turingia, Björn Höckeleader of the “wing” of the party, a radical internal group that had to disintegrate to prevent the whole party from being declared unconstitutional but continues to act informally. The Interior Ministry report that sought to withdraw the AFD address supports those indications. At the moment, AFD is classified as “suspicious case of extremism” by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, allowing its surveillance and even the infiltration of agents.

In the event that AFD, the first force of the opposition, which has just gathered 20.8% of the votes in the elections last Sunday, would mean to declare illegal the vote of one in five German voters and plunged German politics in a state of unprecedented crisis in the history of the Federal Republic. That is the reason why another attempt to illegalize AFD through a parliamentary procedure that would end in the Constitutional Court of Karlsruhe, an initiative remains frozen and will not occur during this legislature. Surveys show that 41% of Germans are in favor of AFD’s ban, but 52% are against.

AFD is not only the first opposition party, but also the strongest political party in the five federated states of Eastern Germany, that is the main argument, but the promoters of the initiative do not want to surrender. “It is still our goal to launch a group procedure in the next legislative period,” confirms the green deputy Till Steffenwho has the support of the social democratic deputy Carmen Wegge and in total of 1230 deputies. Both know, however, that the initiative will not have a majority in the Bundestag. 69% of respondents, by the way, are shown in favor of the sanitary cord and only 28% consider it an error.