The agency cited a “xenophobic, anti-minority, Islamophobic” rhetoric among the reasons for the designation.
Germany’s extreme-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been labeled as an extremist entity by the country’s intelligence agency, Deutsche Welle reported.
The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz or BfV), the domestic intelligence agency, said Friday the “ethnicity-and ancestry-based conception of the people that predominates within the party is not compatible with the free democratic order.”
It cited a “xenophobic, anti-minority, Islamophobic” rhetoric among the reasons for the designation.
The party “aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, to subject them to treatment that violates the constitution, and thereby assign them a legally subordinate status,” the agency said.
The designation gives authorities greater powers to monitor the party, with measures such as intercepting phone calls and using undercover agents.
The AfD won 20,8 % of the votes in the federal election last February, finishing second behind incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc who had 28.6% of the vote.
AfD co-leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla criticized the agency’s move, describing it as a “heavy blow” to democracy.
“The AfD as an opposition party is now being publicly discredited and criminalised,” they said, vowing to mount a legal challenge against the label, which they said was “clearly politically motivated.”
The AfD has repeatedly courted controversy in recent years, with its senior officials dismissing Germany’s Nazi era as “bird shit” in the nation’s history which spans over 1,000 years, or claiming Adolf Hitler was “forced” to invade Poland.
The party has a long list of antisemitic incidents since its founding in 2013.
Alexander Gauland, an AfD co-founder, former party leader, and current Member of Parliament, has engaged in Holocaust trivialization on several occasions. In a 2018 speech to the AfD youth wing, he said, “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” Gauland also said in 2017 that Germans should be “proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.”
But there is a split inside the AfD between a conservative wing led by Alice Weidel that wants to free itself from accusations of antisemitism — not unlike Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party in France — and a white nationalist faction that is rooted mostly in the eastern regions of the former communist German Democratic Republic.
Many of the hardliners have a history in other extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi organizations.
Weidel leads the AfD’s more moderate wing, which includes ongoing support for Israel. But while Israel’s Foreign Minister announced earlier this year a decision to establish formal ties with three far-right parties in France, Spain and Sweden, it is still maintaining a policy of non-engagement with Austria’s Freedom Party and Germany’s AfD.