The Office for the Protection of the Constitution may continue to monitor the Bavarian AfD as a whole party and inform the public about it. As the Bavarian Administrative Court (BayVGH) announced on Friday, this had been decided the day before in an urgent procedure. The State Office for the Protection of the Constitution began monitoring in 2022 – to clarify in which direction the party is moving and what influence extremist currents have within the AfD.
The AfD had sued against this and demanded that both observation and information to the public be stopped; by urgent application because this would violate the principle of equal opportunities with a view to the state elections. After an administrative court rejected this urgent application in the first instance in April, the AfD went on to the BayVGH, which now rejected the application. There is no legal remedy against the decision. However, the AfD’s lawsuit against the observation in the main matter is still pending at the administrative court, regardless of the urgent application.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution rightly assumes that there is actual evidence of anti-constitutional efforts by the AfD as a party as a whole, the BayVGH has now found after evaluating thousands of pages of files. This results in particular from the influence on the party of members who belonged to the formally disbanded ethnic movement “The Wing”, as well as from well-known “subversive fantasies”. This apparently refers to revelations about an AfD chat group in the aftermath of the pandemic, in which a “total revolution” against the “ruling criminals” was longed for. In the case of the “wing” and many of its supporters, the BayVGH speaks of a “national concept of the people that is incompatible with the Basic Law”. There are also indications that the political concept of the entire party violates the human dignity of people of Islamic faith. The court said that describing the Bavarian AfD as “certainly right-wing extremist” – which could only be the result of the observation process – is not permissible.
Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) recently defended the AfD’s observation when presenting the new half-yearly report from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The party takes up more space than ever before. Among other things, the state office identifies passages in the AfD election program that promote an ethnically homogeneous concept of the people and Islamophobia. This could be relevant to the key question of the observation as to whether the entire party is dominated by a “basic anti-constitutional tendency”. When presenting the election program in July, AfD state leader Stephan Protschka once again called all actions by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution “politically motivated”. It is a matter of “government protection” and the CSU wants to “silence” a political opponent.