The Munich Administrative Court will announce a decision on July 1 regarding the AfD’s lawsuit against its surveillance by the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution. This was announced by the chairman of the 30th Chamber of the Administrative Court, Michael Kumetz, on Thursday. Previously, the court had discussed the issues surrounding the surveillance of the AfD as a suspected right-wing extremist case over three days of hearings.
Bavaria’s AfD regional chairman Stephan Protschka had already stated at the beginning of the hearing last Tuesday that he did not think he had a chance of success and announced that he would appeal to other courts. The AfD had already failed in two courts in the expedited proceedings.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution had presented the court with extensive material which was supposed to show that there were unconstitutional tendencies within the AfD as a party. This included thousands of pages of chat logs from social media platforms, excerpts from speeches and media reports.
Shortly before the start of the main hearing, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution presented another USB stick with 40 gigabytes of data. The material so far comes exclusively from publicly accessible sources. According to their own statements, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution will not use intelligence sources such as informants until the matter has been clarified in court.
In the documents presented, some anti-constitutional and racist statements were made by party members or sympathizers. Some of them were spread by party members. The AfD website tried to portray the statements as the excesses of individuals. The party as an organization investigated the misconduct and in some cases excluded or reprimanded party members.
At the end of the main hearing, AfD lawyer Christian Conrad requested that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior be prohibited from continuing to monitor the AfD. In the event of violations, a fine of 10,000 euros will be imposed. In addition to the monitoring, the publication of the results of the monitoring should also be prohibited and it should be determined that the monitoring is unlawful.
The government side requested that the lawsuit be dismissed. The proceedings were massively accelerated after the AfD side withdrew the vast majority of its initially announced more than 450 motions for evidence and procedural motions. The court had originally scheduled nine days of hearings, but the proceedings will end on July 1 after four days.