ExtremismGermany’s far-right AfD disbands youth groups over police surveillance
Two regional youth wings of the far-right, populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) will be dissolved after being placed under police monitoring. All the mainstream parties in Germany have called on the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, to place the AfD under surveillance for extremist tendencies and the party’s ties to violent fringe groups. The AfD, with the active support of the Kremlin’s hacking and disinformation specialists, has won 94 seats in the Bundestag in the October 2017 election, and is now Germany’s third largest political party.
Two regional youth wings of the far-right, populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) will be dissolved after being placed under police monitoring.
Some of the party leaders criticized what they described as “abuse of power” after German federal authorities announced that surveillance of some branches of the party was authorized because of growing concerns of the party’s ties to violent right-wing extremists.
The AfD has won 94 seats in the Bundestag in the October 2017 election, and is now Germany’s third largest political party.
As was the case with other populist, far-right, anti-EU, anti-NATO, anti-U.S., and pro-Russia parties throughout Europe, the AfD benefitted from an active disinformation and hacking campaign conducted by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, a campaign modeled after the Kremlin’s effort to help Donald Trump in the U.S. 2016 presidential election.
In 2014, 2015, and 2016, the Kremlin’s disinformation specialists and hackers meddled in the political processes of twenty-seven countries in order to weaken Western democracies internally by bringing to power, or increasing the influence of, extremist and divisive parties and movements – partiers and movements which would also work to weaken the post-Second World War system of organizations and alliances the United States helped create in order to contain the Soviet Union and, later, Russia.
The Kremlin’s most successful efforts were the victories by Trump in the United States and the populist Five Star Movement in Italy, and the AfD’s political breakthrough in Germany.
The AfD is an uneasy coalition of different extremist groups cobbled together in order to increase the party’s chances at the polls. Many of the AfD leaders, especially at the state level, and a sizeable portion of the party’s rank and file, are all manner of neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, Islamophobs, racists, and Greater Germany revanchists who join right-wing populists, anti-immigration activists, Euroskeptics, anti-U.S., anti-free market, and pro-Russia elements.
The AfD said on Monday that its youth wings in Bremen and Lower Saxony would be disbanded after it came to light that they were being closely monitored by the regional branches of Germany’s domestic intelligence service (the BfV).
Lower Saxony’s interior minister Boris Pistorius, a Social Democrat (SPD), said he had signed the order to monitor the Young Alternative (“Junge Alternative,” or “JA” for short) because of credible concerns about right-wing extremism.
