The National Intelligence Service of Germany has classified the extreme right -wing alternative for Germany, which some surveys show as the most popular in the country, as an extremist part, the German authorities announced on Friday.
The decision intensifies a Germany dilemma about what to do with the party, known as the department, whose leaders have trivialized the holocaust, revived Nazis slogans and denigrated foreigners, while expanding their political base.
The designation will surely inflame a long -standing debate about whether German legislators should move to prohibit the party completely. Such a step could make Germany a political crisis, without necessarily resolving how to bring the estimated 25 percent of the electorate that supports the department to the conventional political fold.
The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, labeled the “mortal immigration policies of the open border of Germany” as extremist, instead of the department, published in X.
“Germany cools to its espionage agency new powers to examine the opposition. That is not democracy, it is disguised tyranny,” he said in the position.
The problem now threatens to become a distraction for Friedrich Merz, whose position has fallen as the AFD has increased in recent weeks, even before it jur as a chancellor, what is expected on Tuesday.
He thought that the department ended second in the elections in February, with 20.8 percent of the votes, Mr. Merz and its conservative Christian Democratic Party joined other main parties in a promise to reject it as too extreme to govern. On the other hand, Mr. Merz resorted to the social democrats of the left center as a partner of the coalition, increasing the sense of deprivation of deprivation among AFD voters.
AFD leaders condemned the announcement on Friday as a motivated political attempt to undermine their party, and said they would challenge him in court. The DEFF now forms the greatest threat to Germany establishment parties, which have seen their decades of dominance over eroded politics as the country’s political landscape has fractured.
Among other things, the department pointed out the moment of the decision, characterizing it as a photo of separation by Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser, a left -wing social democrat, a few days before it is replaced in the new government of Mr. Merz by Alexander Dobrindt, a conventional conservative.
“This decision of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution makes no sense in terms of substance, it has nothing to do with the law and justice, and is purely political in the fight between the poster parties against the AFD,” said Stephan Brandner, an AFD leader, to DPA, a German news agency, which refers to the main parties.
Without a subway, the National Intelligence Agency made its determination after thoroughly monitoring the AFD for years, and based its decision on the results of a report of 1,100 pages compiled by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
The office was created specifically in 1950 to monitor national threats to Germany’s democracy and avoid any acquisition of Parliament and the government by extremist actors. It was an attempt by the founders of modern Germany to avoid the child of the break that the place of Tok in 1933, when the Nazis took control of Parliament and the Government.
Although the office is under the auspices of the Ministry of Interior, which is the response to national security, it is designed to operate independently of the government, to isolate it from the political pressures that AFD alleges that they were the decision.
“The Department of Advance for an ethnic concept of the people who discriminates to the entire population groups and treats citizens with migrant history as second -class Germans,” Mrs. Faeser said, the Minister of the Interior that leaves, in a statement, pointing out that such discrimination faces the Constitution of Germany or in Germany.
Much of the evidence of the designation lay in sight.
Alice Weidel, the most visible leader of the party, has criticized “girls who use the head” and “men who push the knife in well -being”, referring to Muslims.
Alexander Gauland, who once directed the party, described the holocaust as a motorcycle or “bird peanut”, used a more vulgar word, in 1,000 years of successful German history.
Another legislator, Maximilian Krah, told an interview with Italian newspapers last year that the members of the SS, the famous Nazi paramilitary storm soldiers who, among other things, directed Nazis concentration camps, were not criminals per se.
Björn Höcke, a party leader in the state of Thuringia, was convicted and folds twice last year to use a king of Nazi slogan forbidden a campaign stop.
“AFD is a magnet for national extremists and raises a threat to democracy from the inside,” said Matthias Quent, a sociology teacher who has spent years studying the extreme right, in an email exchange.
Party members have also involved in a plot to overthrow the State by a group that does not recognize the legitimacy of the Modern German Republic. That case is still going through the courses.
The party has rarely penalized its leaders for a controversial speech, thought it has expelled some members about particularly atrocious infractions. On the other hand, he has presented himself as a victim or conventional political parties and liberal media.
The political allies of the AFD abroad have done the same. Despite the long and public history of extreme statements of the AFD leaders, the party received a backup duration of Elon Musk’s last electoral campaign, President Trump’s billionaire advisor.
In February, Vice President JD Vance punished European leaders for extreme right parties and challenged their commitment to democracy.
Mr. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference surprised and angered his German hosts, taking severe reprimand from Foreign Minister Olaf Scholz. German officials accused him of interfering in internal policy and not understanding the sources of the strict limitations of Germany in the extremists, given his Nazi calamito.
Before Friday’s announcement, the National Intelligence Agency had classified the AFDS youth wing as an extremist in 2023. Since then, the party has inclined it.
The new classification gives national intelligence more tools to monitor the department. It also opens a legal way for the Constitutional Court to prohibit the party, a step that the Superior Court of Germany has taken only twice in the 76 years of history of the modern constitution of Germany, both times with much less popular parts than the department.
Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to Mr. Rubio’s statement on Friday night, stating in X that “the decision is the result of an exhaustive and independent investigation to protect our Constitution and the rule of law.”
“We have learned from our history that right -wing extremism needs to be arrested,” the ministry wrote in its publication.
