Spy Agency Report on the Alleged “Extremism” of AfD Turns Out to Be So Stupid That it Destroys all Momentum for Banning the Party

In my last post, I wrote that “The campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is not going well.” Today – a mere 72 hours later – you could say that the campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is all but dead. This is because the people most committed to banning the AfD also happen to be some of the stupidest, most incompetent legal and political operators the world has ever seen. Their incompetence is so enormous that I am for once willing to entertain conspiracy theories as to why they might have undermined their own project. It is that bad.

Two weeks ago, you may remember, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser forced the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to rush its long-planned upgrade of the AfD and declare the party to be a “confirmed Right-wing extremist” organisation. Word spread of a mysterious 1,100-page assessment, full of damning proofs that allegedly supported this upgrade. This document had to be kept secret, Faeser explained in an interview, “to protect sources and withhold indications of how our findings were obtained”. So espionage, much secret, wow.

The thing was, the anti-AfD dossier could not have been that secret, because somebody (almost certainly somebody in the Interior Ministry) immediately leaked it to Der Spiegel, whose journalists published various excerpts in an effort to make the case for how evil and fascist and Nazi and Hitler the AfD is. In this way the press could climax repeatedly in a wave of unceasing democratic orgasms over the renewed possibility of an AfD ban, even in the absence of the supersecret report.

The media circus dissipated quickly, however. The publicity campaign, the rollout – a lot of things went wrong, some of them inexplicably wrong. Still, I thought there was a 40% chance that the Bundestag would try to open ban proceedings sometime this year. That, as I said, was on Monday. What happened on Tuesday, is that Cicero, NiUS and Junge Freiheit all received the secret 1,100-page assessment (actually, it contains 1,108 pages) and published it in its entirety. Since Tuesday evening, a great many people have been reading this document, and they have been realising various things.

The first thing they’ve realised, is that it contains hardly anything derived from supersecret spy sources at all. It is little more than a collection of public statements by AfD politicians. Faeser’s sources-and-methods justification for keeping the report hidden was a total lie.

The second thing they’ve realised is that it is an abomination. The vast majority of material that the BfV has collected is not even suspect. It is a lot of off-colour jokes and memes, but also just banal nothing statements – thousands and thousands and thousands of them, arranged under various hysterical subject headings. Nothing in here is remotely strong enough to support the case for banning the AfD and a lot of it is also very bizarre in terms of argument. Not only have the prospects of an AfD ban all but evaporated, but I think it’s even likely the party will succeed in its present lawsuit and that the administrative court in Cologne will throw out the “Right-wing extremist label”.

All works must be judged against their purpose.

This particular document has two purposes. Strictly speaking, it exists to support and defend the upgrade of the AfD to “confirmed Right-wing extremist” status. It is hard to assess whether the dossier is successful on this front, because “confirmed Right-wing extremism” is a label that the BfV has just pulled out of it ass. It is not a legal thing, and ultimately administrative courts will have to decide whether the dubious evidence assembled here supports the new classification.

The second, broader purpose, is a political one. This document was supposed to support the case for banning the AfD. Specifically, it was supposed to convince those who matter that ban proceedings have a good chance of success with the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. On this front, the dossier is a dismal failure. This is why our new Chancellor Friedrich Merz has suddenly decided – in the 48 hours since the thing was leaked – that he opposes banning the AfD after all.

We have to be very clear about the standards here. For a party to be banned in the Federal Republic, it must be opposed to the “freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung”, or the “free democratic basic order”. This is an ideological trinity consisting of human dignity, democracy and the rule of law. Pure opposition is however not enough; the offending party must also seek to overcome at least one of these triune deities in an “aggressive” and “combative” fashion. The anti-democratic agenda must moreover be associated with the party as a whole. Practically, this means you need to get party leadership militating aggressively against democracy and/or the rule of law and/or human dignity.

The BfV assessment falls so far short of this standard, you have to wonder if there are saboteurs working secretly to defend the AfD inside the offices of constitutional protection. To say that this thing is shit would be an understatement.

Substantial portions of this report are apparently plagiarised from random sources, like unrelated court decisions. The very strange introduction does nothing but summarise rulings from the Administrative Court in Cologne and the Upper Administrative Court for Nordrhein-Westfalen, which upheld BfV’s classification of the party as a “suspected case” of Right-wing extremism. I can see no reason for this, and I suspect BfV functionaries simply wanted to write an introduction about how bad the AfD is but could not come up with any of their own words or ideas.

The meat of the document is two very long sections, the first of them entitled ‘Evidence of efforts to undermine the free democratic basic order’ and the second of them entitled ‘Evidence of efforts to undermine the free democratic basic order in the federal election campaign’. The BfV had clearly finished the first section sometime late last year, but then the government collapsed in November, the election campaign kicked off and the AfD began producing more material. The BfV just decided to start a totally new section rather than incorporate the campaign material into their existing report.

Then there is the contents.

As I said above, nothing in here derives from clandestine sources, with two quasi-exceptions: There are some random details about the irrelevant financial relationships of some AfD politicians, and then there is vague and quite trivial information about behind-the-scenes coordination between AfD and Compact magazine. The financial stuff comes from the Financial Intelligence Unit of the German customs police; it does not represent the work of the BfV at all. As for Compact, you might remember that this is the magazine that Faeser tried to ban last July. I suspect this material comes from a separate BfV investigation of Compact related to Faeser’s effort to prohibit the magazine. None of these items represent dedicated surveillance or informant operations against the AfD. This is just crazy to me.

The BfV is legally required to use espionage only as a last resort, but the whole point of upgrading the AfD to “suspected Right-wing extremist” status in 2021 was to open the door to surveillance and infiltration. This is absolutely necessary for those who want to ban the party, because nothing its politicians have done in public meets the high legal standards for prohibition. The whole hope, this whole time, has been that the BfV has spent the last three or four years hard at work tapping phones and paying informants to deliver proof of crpytofascist Right-wing extremism in the AfD. And yet, there is absolutely nothing like that in this report.

Even when it comes to discussions about the party’s structure, personnel decisions and points of recent history, the BfV appears to have no internal sources at all and rely entirely on press reports. There’s a crazy bit early on, for example, when it comes to describe this AfD sub-organisation calling itself ‘Jews in the AfD‘ (JAfD). It argues that the JAfD is a very tiny club and that its existence should not absolve the AfD of suspicions of antisemitism. In the course of its discussion, it becomes clear that everything the BfV knows about JAfD comes straight from the press. Its membership numbers, its significance within the party – on all of these points, the leading German domestic spy agency can only speculate. Its officers could’ve just called up JAfD chairman Artur Abramovych and asked him how many members his club has, like this t-online journalist did in February. Alternatively, they could’ve googled that article like I just did. They did neither. That’s how sloppy and completely uninformed this report is. (The JAfD has 22 full members. Don’t tell the BfV.)

Since this dossier was released on Tuesday, it has become a minor internet sport to unearth insane passages. Björn Harms and Janina Lionello at NiUS have done an excellent job compiling some of the most absurd bits:

• In sarcastic allusion to Björn Höcke’s conviction for using the forbidden SA slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (I hereby distance myself from all deplorable National Socialist slogans and symbols, including this one), the AfD developed the campaign slogan “Alice für Deutschland” to support its Chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel. The BfV believes this slogan is a “trivialisation” of “National Socialist language” (!) and it spends three whole pages compiling all the instances in which every AfD politician repeated the phrase “Alice für Deutschland” during the campaign.
• In the midst of the long aforementioned attempt to convict the AfD of antisemitism, the BfV decide that “globalist” is an antisemitic “cipher” deployed by the party, and that attacking Bill Gates as a “globalist” is therefore antisemitic, because Gates is “perceived as Jewish”.
• The BfV also cites criticism of George Soros as ipso facto evidence of antisemitism. Anytime somebody in the AfD complains about Soros it goes straight into its antisemitism file.
• Alice Weidel referred to a migrant who murdered someone by stabbing as “one of these knifemen”, which the BfV declares to be a “xenophobic and anti-minority statement”. Various AfD politicians, who speak of “knife migrants” or “knife migration”, are likewise guilty of violating human dignity, because “the… term… establishes a direct correlation between migration… and the increase in offences involving knife crime”. On multiple occasions, the BfV classifies as politically suspect mere references to migrant crimes.
• Björn Höcke, whom the BfV considers to be an especially extreme Right-wing extremist, called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame” in 2017. In a recent campaign speech, Alice Weidel deplored the clearing of trees in the Reinhardswald to make space for wind turbines, and she called these wind turbines “windmills of shame”. This is politically suspect because she used the word “shame”, which is the same word that Höcke used seven years before her speech.
• The BfV lists a case in which an AfD politician retweeted someone else talking about “Biodeutsche” – contemporary and extremely widespread shorthand for “ethnic German” that is in no way associated with the Right. They shriek that this retweet indicates politically suspect “ethnic” and “descent-based” understandings.

One could easily extend this list with far more examples, but you get the point. This report represents the work of untold hundreds of people who do nothing but scroll Facebook and X every day, archiving thousands of social media posts and speeches and blog comments. Because they are incredibly stupid, uninspired and plodding, they cannot fail to make asses of themselves over and over again. Really, you can open this thing to almost any page and find another howler.

The argumentation of the report is often highly eccentric. Like many of us, AfD politicians frequently criticised the Covid measures and related developments by drawing comparisons to the old East German DDR. Others attacked the European response to the war in Ukraine by positing that our countries might be acting for the benefit of the United States. According to the BfV, these and similar arguments are intended to undermine public trust in German democracy and for that reason they are anti-democratic. That is absurd enough, but the unmitigated morons who compile these citations often seem to forget their convoluted reasoning and for long stretches just adduce citation after citation where AfD politicians complain of defects in German democracy as evidence of their hostility to democracy. You feel like you’re losing your mind, it is just so crazy.

The same goes for what I take to be the core of this report – the long sections devoted to demonstrating that the AfD harbours an understanding of human differences dependent upon “ethnicity” and “descent”. The strategy of the BfV all along has been to argue that the AfD is plotting to treat naturalised Germans as lower-tier citizens or to deprive them of their passports and deport them. This strikes against “human dignity” and therefore represents a ban-worthy offence. Evidence that the AfD is actually plotting anything like this, however, is basically nowhere to be found, and so the BfV just compiles thousands of statements in which AfD politicians refer to or assume the existence of ethnic Germans and ethnic non-Germans and scream about how terrible this is. As with the BfV approach to anti-democracy, its argumentative constructs decay in the course of the report itself, leaving the BfV in the bizarre position of accusing everybody who refers to human ethnicity or race as a Right-wing extremist.

Anybody who reads this monument to incompetence and misplaced political zealotry will see at once what is going on here: Alternative für Deutschland is a populist opposition party of the kind that exists all across Europe. Our political elite want to ban the AfD not because it consists of neo-Nazis and not because it’s planning to destroy the rule of law, democracy or human dignity. No, they want to ban the AfD because its growing strength is beginning to make parliamentary majorities among the cartel parties impossible to achieve. The bounds of the politically acceptable must therefore be redrawn to exclude the AfD. This project entails a massive campaign to cast a cloud of Nazi suspicion and even criminality over all manner of ordinary political discourse. It is now potentially Nazi to compare the methods of the Covid lockdowners and vaccinators to the DDR. It is potentially Nazi to notice that migrants are responsible for a vast proportion of stabbings and group rapes. It is potentially Nazi to speak of ethnic Germans, to deplore globalists and to attack Bill Gates. Any talking points or policy proposals or terminology unique to the AfD, whatever those may be, will be redefined as Right-wing extreme.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Germany has really, really stupid politics.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.