ARGUMENT: Extremism in GermanyThe German Far Right Doesn’t Need to Win Elections to Be Dangerous

On March 3, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency placed the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) under observation as a suspected far-right extremist organization. Sam Denney writes in Lawfare that this move is only the latest step in a two-year process of increasing government scrutiny of the AfD’s activities. In January 2019, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV)—whose role is comparable to MI5 in the United Kingdom—first began monitoring the hard-right nationalist elements of the party, referred to as the Flügel or “wing.” Reports indicate that the BfV was collecting open-source evidence to build its case against the entire AfD over the same time period. 

Denney adds:

The challenge posed by the German far right goes beyond the AfD. Through vocal right-wing and conspiracy theorist street movements and in hidden networks in the security services, the far right poses a significant and complex threat to the German constitutional order. Highly organized and openly hostile to the rules binding other political actors, the German far right has outperformed its electoral support in shaping German society. In 2020, the BfV reported that the number of right-wing extremists in Germany has increased to 33,300, of whom 13,300 are thought to be willing to commit violence.

Denney notes that the AfD’s relative success and the growth of increasingly vocal far-right street movements is concerning enough. More ominous still, though, is the fact that significant numbers of far-right extremists have been uncovered in Germany’s security services. “Such discoveries have long been dismissed as isolated cases, but the past few years have seen far-right networks uncovered by government investigations and the press among both serving and former members of Germany’s military and police,” he writes.

Denney concludes:

Ultimately, the strength of Germany’s far-right scene carries important implications beyond German borders. The AfD has an affinity for President Vladimir Putin’s Russia and has pushed to lift EU sanctions on Russia and for better German-Russian relations. In December 2020, AfD co-chairman Tino Chrupalla and parliamentary foreign policy speaker Armin-Paul Hampel were invited to Russia by the Duma, the Russian parliament’s lower chamber, and received by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. While serving as election observers, some AfD parliamentarians have praised as fair disputed elections in Crimea and Nagorno-Karabakh. Others have met with the Kremlin-aligned Assad regime in Syria, declaring the war-torn country “safe” for migrants to return. Funding streams for the party are murky and stretch beyond German borders to Switzerland, where two Swiss companies have been used to funnel money to the AfD from unknown sources. The AfD claims the funds come from 14 different donors, both Germans and non-Germans, but this explanation is disputed in the press and by campaign legal expert and AfD-watcher Sophie Schönberger as an attempt to hide campaign financing from official oversight. 

The international ties of the German far right go beyond the AfD. German neo-Nazis have developed contacts with like-minded groups in the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine and the United States. To gain paramilitary and even combat experience, some have traveled to Russia, Ukraine and the United States. German right-wing extremists have organized music festivals and martial arts events to which thousands of extremists from a dozen countries have traveled. According to the Counter Extremism Project, events such as these have played a key role in the development of “a leaderless, transnational and apocalyptic violent extreme right-wing movement,” and German far-right extremists count as some of the most internationally networked. President Trump’s one-time adviser Steve Bannon attempted to create a coordinated far-right internationalism that failed. But the creation of a leaderless movement dedicated to the protection of white European culture and operating in similar fashion to Islamist terrorist groups might be more dangerous still. 

The past years have served as a disturbing wake-up call about the allure that hate and illiberalism still hold in German society. While the AfD has not been able to expand its base of support, two years of increasing pressure by the BfV, combined with the party’s infighting and clear radicalization have not dented it significantly either. The actions of the BfV alone will not protect German democracy from the far right. As in democracies everywhere, that remains the responsibility of the voters.