Germany Restructures Police, Intelligence to Fight Far-Right Violent Extremists
Yahoo News reports that the hourlong press conference also included the respective presidents of Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the nation’s domestic intelligence service, and the Federal Criminal Police Office.
“Violence is increasing, propaganda is increasing … threats on the internet are creating a climate of fear,” Holger Münch, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said Tuesday. “Lübcke and Halle confirmed everything in the worst way possible.”
Seehofer noted that lawmakers had already approved a series of new security measures by the Interior Ministry.
Last week, the German Parliament passed stricter gun control laws which allow require gun owners to pass a security check once every five years. Germany’s budget for 2020 includes increased funds for new personnel to better target domestic far-right terror.
Thomas Haldenwang, president of the BfV, said that there are already systems to evaluate suspected perpetrators and tactics and to search the internet for terror networks, but that these systems were set up to fight radical Islamic terrorism. The new policies unveiled on Tuesday envisions that many of these same strategies will now be applied in the fight against far-right extremism. These measures include close monitoring of suspected far-right groups on the internet; far-right concerts or gatherings; and the monitoring of extreme political elements and factions within legal parties and movements. He pointed to the extremist “Junge Alternative,” the youth wing of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), as an example.
“The ‘new right’ will be more intensively scrutinized,” said Haldenwang, referring to far-right mobilization efforts online. “It’s a topic for the virtual world, as well as the real world.”
Der Spiegel reports that federal police and intelligence officers have also created centralized systems to better coordinate with counterparts on the state and local levels and share lists of suspected violent perpetrators. In a recent Bundestag hearing, experts told German lawmakers that mistrust between state and federal authorities over the sharing of informants’ information created blind spots which were partially responsible for the police’s inability to prevent the 2016 deadly terrorist attack on a Christmas market.
The German newspaper Tagesspiegel reports that federal statistics show that in 2018 there were more than 24,000 active right-wing extremists in Germany, with about 12,200 of them considered capable of carrying out violent acts. The total number of these extremists is expected to increase in 2019 by as much as a third, to 32,200, according to government documents obtained by the newspaper. The newspaper notes that a tighter monitoring of the far-right AfD revealed that groups affiliated with the AfD, such as “Der Flügel“ and “Junge Alternative,” serve as a semi-respectable façade for dangerous extremists who openly talk about using violence against immigrants and the state.
Seehofer noted that the new measures were also meant to find and weed out extremists within the government’s own ranks. The past four years saw an alarming increase in the number of cases involving right-wing extremism in the military, the police, and in the intelligence agencies.
