Last week, the BfV, a German intelligence agency tasked with investigating threats to the “liberal democratic basic order,” made headlines by officially classifying the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party as “right-wing extremist.” This news shouldn’t have come as a shock. Since 2021, the far-right AfD has been monitored as a “suspected case” of right-wing extremism. And, while the investigation of the federal party was still pending, the local AfD in the states of Thuringia, Saxony, and Saxony-Anhalt had already been classified as right-wing extremist.
The BfV caused an uproar when it announced in November of 2024 that the results of the investigation would not be made public before the federal elections—which were to be held prematurely in February 2025—in order, they argued, for the agency to remain neutral and not influence voters’ decisions in the elections. This was a bizarre argument, both logically as well as legally. As jurists Till Patrik Holterhus and Janosch Wiesenthal argued in November 2024, there was no legal basis to withhold the assessment until the federal elections; in fact, quite the opposite was true:
[The BfV] is obliged under Section 16(1) [of the Federal Constitutional Protection Act] to inform the public of this promptly and in any case before the upcoming Bundestag elections. […] Informing citizens about the (possible) unconstitutionality of a party standing for election to the Bundestag is not an impairment of democratic competition, but rather a guarantee of its preconditions!
Nevertheless, the BfV withheld their assessment until after the election, in which the AfD came in 2nd place. With the new government consisting of a coalition between Christian conservatives (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD), this makes the AfD the biggest opposition party.
Most importantly, the verdict was crystal clear. In its public announcement, the BfV declared:
The party’s prevailing ethnic-based understanding of the Volk is not compatible with the free democratic basic order. It aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, to subject them to unequal treatment that does not conform to the constitution and thus to assign them a legally devalued status. Specifically, the AfD does not consider German citizens with a history of migration from Muslim countries, for example, to be equal members of the German people as defined by the party in ethnic terms.
This exclusionary understanding of the Volk is the starting point and ideological basis for continuous agitation against certain people or groups of people, with which they are defamed and disparaged across the board and irrational fears and rejection of them are stirred up. This can be seen in the large number of ongoing anti-foreigner, anti-minority, anti-Islam, and anti-Muslim statements made by leading party functionaries. In particular, the ongoing agitation against refugees and migrants promotes the spread and deepening of prejudices, resentment and fears towards this group of people. The devaluation of the aforementioned groups of people is also reflected in the generalized use of terms such as “knife-wielding migrants” or in the general attribution of an ethnocultural tendency towards violence by leading members of the AfD.
While such a searing assessment should come as no surprise to anyone who’s even vaguely followed the politics of the AfD, the fact that the BfV has drawn such an unequivocal conclusion about an entire federal party is a big deal. Certainly it’s something voters would want to be aware of when making a decision.
‘I’ll never say that everyone who wore an SS-uniform was a criminal’
The report, 1100 pages long, is only intended for internal use—though some details have trickled through. According to Der Spiegel, among the examples cited are remarks made by the party leader, Alice Weidel who, for example, claimed in 2023 that “knife crime” was “unknown in our culture” and was imported to Germany from Africa and the Middle East by “cultures prone to violence.” Dennis Hohloch, parliamentary secretary of the AfD, also made an appearance, declaring that “multiculturalism means loss of tradition, loss of identity, loss of homeland, murder, manslaughter, robbery and gang rape.”
A 2024 secret meeting of AfD politicians and right-wing activists, including known neo-Nazis, made headlines, during which they discussed the expulsion of millions from the country—or “remigration,” the popular term in far-right circles—including German citizens. The meeting was revealed by investigative journalists at Correctiv, and led to mass protests in the streets of Germany. Still, some AfD politicians didn’t even try to deny that they shared the same agenda. The head of the Brandenburg AfD, René Springer, for example, took to X to issue a threat:
We will return foreigners to their home countries. Millions of them. This is not a #secretplan. It’s a promise. For more security. For more justice. For the preservation of our identity. For Germany.
AfD politicians have also been openly using terminology like “Umvolkung”—once used by the Nazis to describe the “Re-Germanization” of certain areas in conquered Central and Eastern Europe. Today, the AfD and other right-wingers are re-purposing the term to claim that “ethnic Germans”—read: White Germans—are being “replaced” by non-White immigrants. Downplaying Nazi crimes is par for the course—AfD politician Maximilian Krah said in 2024: “I’ll never say that everyone who wore an SS-uniform was a criminal,” echoing Donald Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment from 2017, about the White supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The infamous SS (Schutzstaffel) was the most important instrument for the terror inflicted by the Nazi regime; they were responsible for mass murder, played a key role in the Holocaust, and ran concentration and extermination camps. And while Krah was initially sidelined by the party after the backlash, Alice Weidel responded with a sports metaphor: “When someone has to go on the reserve bench, they haven’t been kicked out yet.” Indeed, Krah was campaigning for the AfD in Saxony again in 2024—and was elected to parliament in the recent elections. He’s a member of the AfD faction in the Bundestag (German parliament)—just like his party colleague Matthias Helferich, who has referred to himself as “the friendly face of the NS” (National Socialism).
Helferich, who has also called himself the “democratic Freisler”—referring to Roland Freisler, a Nazi jurist and participant of the Wannsee Conference—has a fondness for wearing blue cornflowers, a Nazi symbol in Austria. Historian and director of the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial site Jens-Christian Wagner explains: “The blue cornflower was a symbol of the antisemitic Schönerer movement and in the 1930s in Austria it was a symbol of the then-banned NSDAP [the Nazi Party].” While Helferich’s Nazi controversies prevented him from being a part of the official AfD faction (parliamentary group) during the last legislative period, this time around he’s allowed on board.
Using slogans or symbols affiliated with the SS or SA (Sturmabteilung) is banned in Germany. Head of the AfD Thuringia Björn Höcke, whom a German court ruled could be called a fascist (which, if you know anything about how strict German libel laws are, should tell you something) was fined in the past for his use of the forbidden SA slogan, Alles für Deutschland (“Everything for Germany”). AfD candidate for the chancellorship, Alice Weidel, however, during the last campaign for federal elections used the slogan “Alice für Deutschland” which sounds identical, although it can’t get you sued. But the implications are clear.
Rubio and Vance throw in with the German far-right
It is this party that high-ranking members of the Trump administration are defending.
This should once again come as no surprise given that JD Vance demanded that German parties work together with the far-right AfD at the Munich Security Conference, where he met with Alice Weidel. Let’s also not forget that Elon Musk campaigned for the AfD, including a truly bizarre Twitter Space where Weidel claimed that Hitler had been left-wing.
It certainly seems significant that even now—after an agency has classified the AfD as “right-wing extremist” and a distinct and sure threat to the democratic order—high-ranking Trump cabinet members are jumping to its defense. Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to Twitter to engage in some classic Orwellian doublespeak, accusing those defending democracy as the actual tyrants:
Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy—it’s tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD—which took second in the recent election—but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes. Germany should reverse course.
Whether a party comes in second place in an election or not says nothing—nothing—about whether or not it harbors anti-democratic and extremist policies (as German history makes crystal clear). But it seems only fitting that Rubio, now a mouthpiece of a regime that seeks to crush dissent and resistance (all while touting “free speech”), would take offense at another nation taking action to defend its own democracy.
The blistering response from the German Foreign Office on X came swiftly:
This is democracy. This decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.
A local AfD chapter—seemingly aware of the US vice president’s sympathies to their political cause—called upon JD Vance to help. Retweeting Rubio’s post the VP added:
The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, and by far the most representative of East Germany. Now the bureaucrats try to destroy it. The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt—not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment.
It’s unclear what wall Vance is talking about—the historical Berlin Wall? Or is it the “Brandmauer,” the “fire wall” between right-wing extremists and established democratic parties that’s been a point of discussion in Germany over the last couple of years as the normalization of the AfD has advanced rapidly, thanks to media and politicians of established parties?
Whatever confused metaphor Vance banged out in between meetings—it’s clear where his and the Trump administration’s sympathies lie: With a party that has now been officially classified as right-wing extremist, and a threat to Germany’s democracy.
Even the BfV itself has flirted with the Right
For those not familiar with German politics it’s important to understand that the BfV is far from a left-leaning or even progressive agency. It skews conservative, and in the past has come under criticism multiple times for being too lax on right-wing extremism. As with many post-war German agencies, it counted numerous former Nazis amongst its initial staff. A recent former president, Hans-Georg Maassen, has been a conservative hardliner in office, with a tendency to peddle far-right-friendly narratives and he came under fire in 2017 when it was alleged that he had passed along internal information from a BfV report about Islamists to AfD politicians weeks before it was published.
The question of how someone like Maassen led an agency tasked with surveilling threats to democracy when he himself is so sympathetic to those on the far-right, has to this day not been answered. But even before Maassen’s tenure, the BfV had failed to stop the “Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund” (National Socialist Underground—NSU), a neo-Nazi terror group whose racist murders of nine people and a police officer remained untouched by the BfV.
During one of the killings, a BfV staffer was present at the crime scene, and mere days after the terror group’s murders became public, the BfV destroyed the files on seven BfV undercover informants in right-wing circles in proximity to the NSU. Due to the mishandling of the investigation of the NSU, Heinz Fromm, then president of the BfV, asked to be retired in July of 2012—Hans Georg Maassen was his successor.
Maassen himself was fired in November 2018 after he had repeatedly and falsely denied the existence of several targeted attacks on journalists and people with a migration background in Chemnitz, Saxony, and had derided parts of the Social Democrats—then in a government coalition with the CDU—as “left wing radicals.” Since then, he’s made a name for himself as a far-right agitator and politician for his party “Werteunion” (“Union of Values,” a right-wing offshoot of the CDU).
Today, he sounds almost indistinguishable from leading AfD politicians, and has connections to the US far-right (he in fact walked past me at CPAC earlier this year, an event that happened to include Steve Bannon’s Nazi salute). Maassen himself has been listed as a right-wing “object of observation” by the agency since 2024. Unsurprisingly, Maassen has protested his former agency’s assessment of the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party—and has applauded Rubio for his defense of the AfD, tweeting:
Secretary Rubio’s objections are justified. And I am grateful for them! […] Unfortunately, the current federal government, under the left-wing radical Minister Faeser, has misused the domestic intelligence agency as an instrument to persecute political opponents of the government.
This narrative, incidentally, is also being used by leading AfD politicians who are framing the long-overdue assessment as an attempt by a tyrannical government to oppress the opposition. And to further the political theater the AfD has announced they will fight it in the courts. As a result, the BfV has officially paused its use of the classification of the AfD as “far-right extremist”—a development the party now uses to claim premature victory. Journalist Ann-Katrin Müller, who’s been covering the AfD for Der Spiegel for years, tells Religion Dispatches that this framing is inaccurate:
The [BfV]’s commitment to put the classification on pause while [the case is] in court is a normal procedure. While the summary proceedings continue, the BfV is not calling the AfD ‘assuredly extreme right-wing’ and is once again treating it as a suspected case in terms of intelligence resources. But of course the [BfV] is sticking to its assessment and is fighting for it in court. The ‘standstill pledge’ serves to speed up the summary proceedings, nothing more.
Regarding the AfD’s false claims that the agency is backing down, Müller is clear: “AfD claims that the [BfV] is taking something back or that it has won a victory… [are] simply not true.”
So yes, while the BfV is an agency with a problematic history—though largely concerning its focus on left-leaning and climate activists—that only makes BfV’s assessment of the AfD as a right-wing extremist organization that much more meaningful. It’s also yet another mask-off moment for those on the MAGA Right and Trump’s cabinet who align themselves with the AfD. As an excuse, ignorance is now off the table.
