The Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution does not have to change passages about the AfD in its report, the Weimar Administrative Court ruled. The issue is historical revisionism by state leader Höcke, Islamophobia and doubts about the party’s loyalty to the rule of law. The party intends to appeal.
On Tuesday afternoon, the vice president of the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Roger Derichs, and the co-head of the Thuringian AfD, Stefan Möller, sat opposite each other in the Weimar administrative court. They did not exchange a word with each other, and the courtroom was completely silent. This is hardly surprising: the Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies the AfD in Thuringia as definitely right-wing extremist, and the Thuringian AfD wants to abolish the domestic secret service.
Then the clock on the wall of the courtroom strikes 2 p.m. and the presiding judge, Thomas Lenhart, comes in. His subsequent explanation of the verdict in the case “Alternative for Germany against the Free State of Thuringia” lasts just 18 minutes. It concerns three formulations in the report of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution for 2021, against which the AfD is suing. The court dismisses the lawsuit, and the Thuringian authority does not have to change any formulations about the AfD.
The far-right party was disturbed, for example, by the fact that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified a Facebook post by the co-state leader Björn Höcke as historical revisionism. In it, Höcke remembers the “fallen soldiers of both world wars”, the “dead of a cruel bombing war”, the “victims of flight and expulsion”, those “who died miserably in the prison camps after May 8, 1945” and the “war dead of our European brother nations”.
“What is impressive about Höcke’s list is that it is mainly about Germans in the role of victims – as fallen soldiers, as victims of bombings, as victims of flight and expulsion, as prisoners of war,” says the report from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. “However, it remains completely unmentioned that the Second World War was a war of annihilation that started on German soil and was systematically waged against enemies in the spirit of a racial-biological ideology.”
The court considers this assessment to be “justifiable,” said administrative judge Lenhart on Tuesday. “If a memorial text on the occasion of Remembrance Day does not mention the victims of National Socialism and the Holocaust in a very detailed list of the dead, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution can cite such a text in a chapter on historical revisionism as one of several examples.”
Although there is a “flaw” associated with being mentioned in the report by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, this is less important than the public’s interest in information, says Judge Lenhart. The same applies to the formulations in the subsections “Islamophobia” and “Attacks on the rule of law”. Overall, the facts reported were accurately presented. “In the court’s opinion, the interpretations of the quotes do not exceed the objectively required framework and contain an appropriate and justifiable assessment of the quotes.”
The subject of the dispute was the classification of a Facebook post by co-state head Möller, in which he claimed that the judges of the Federal Constitutional Court were “carefully selected and appointed by the ruling political majority” and decided in favor of these parties. In doing so, Möller “denied the independent courts their control function and thus the Federal Republic a system of democratic separation of powers,” according to the report by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
The Weimar Administrative Court considers it justifiable to view the posting as an attack on the rule of law principle – after all, half of the members of the Federal Constitutional Court are elected by the Bundestag and the Bundesrat with a two-thirds majority. “This election procedure is intended to ensure the political independence of the judges and prevent one-sided selection by existing political majorities,” said Lenhart.
AfD does not take action against classification as right-wing extremist
Möller, however, sees things completely differently. He considers the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to be a “foreign body in democracy,” he told WELT. “They want to prevent me, as an opposition member, from expressing judicial policy positions that criticize the practice of the ruling parties filling courts.”
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution does not accept this. “There is a broad political discussion about the practice of appointing constitutional judges,” says Vice President Derichs WELT. “However, Möller’s statements also deny that the German legal system complies with the requirements of the Basic Law and that the courts are independent.” In recent years, the Constitutional Court has “made several painful decisions to the detriment of the governments” – and since the judges are only elected once for twelve years and re-election is not possible, they should not “behave cheaply.”
Finally, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution had accused the AfD of using the fatal knife attack in Würzburg in 2021 by a perpetrator classified as mentally ill “for blanket agitation against Muslims”. Based on a statement by Höcke that the perpetrator “did not belong here from the start”, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution wants to recognize that his behavior plays no role for Höcke, but only his ethnic affiliation. The court also considers this to be justifiable. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution may see the “ethnic-cultural concept of the people” taken up in the posting as a violation of human dignity.
The AfD did not challenge the general classification as definitely right-wing extremist or most of the other formulations in the report by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution during the proceedings. “If we were to challenge the general classification, we would be entering into a process in which we would be vastly inferior,” Möller explained before the trial.
The proceedings therefore do not affect the assessments of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution that the Thuringian AfD “in addition to a deeply racist view of humanity, implicitly affirms violence as a means” and introduces an “idea of culture or civilization levels that violates fundamental rights” into the debate; or that it “in an extremist manner” attributes individual characteristics to groups and supports the “extremist theory of the so-called Great Replacement”, according to which the immigration of Muslims is controlled by conspiratorial powers. The Thuringian AfD sees “overcoming the entire ‘system’ as the only alternative”, according to the report for 2021.
The verdict is not final. The AfD has announced that it will appeal.
Political editor Frederik Schindler reports for WELT about the AfD, Islamism and anti-Semitism. You can find his articles here.