According to its own information, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is monitoring an AfD member of the Bavarian state parliament. “The person in question has sufficiently serious factual evidence that he is abusing his mandate to fight against the free democratic basic order and is actively and aggressively fighting it,” the authority said in response to a request in Munich on Wednesday. Bayerischer Rundfunk had previously reported on the case.
It remained unclear which of the 32 members of the AfD faction it was. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BayLfV) did not name any names. The formal observation of the relevant member of the state parliament (MdL) “began after the recent completion of a corresponding test phase,” the authority said at the request of the dpa with. “Due to the high legal requirements for the observation of an MdL, the BayLfV continually reviews the continued proportionality of the observation.”
Observing members of parliament is generally permitted, but the legislature has set high hurdles and strict requirements for such cases. The Basic Law initially guarantees MPs a free mandate. Only in exceptional cases are observations – or other legal investigations – justified and proportionate. The authority emphasized that initially no intelligence resources would be used for observation. This will remain the case in principle “at least until a decision in the pending main proceedings in the AfD’s lawsuit against its observation” by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The main proceedings at the Munich Administrative Court start in June.
Both the administrative court and the administrative court had already rejected urgent applications from the AfD against the observation. The observation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the current case only refers to the MP in question “and his political activities relevant to the protection of the Constitution,” it said on the question of whether other employees of the parliamentary group or the MP were also being observed. “It should be noted that all statements and the voting behavior of the MdL in parliamentary committees are excluded from observation.”