The State Office for the Protection of the Constitution is monitoring the Bavarian AfD as a whole party. This was confirmed by a spokesman for the Interior Ministry on Tuesday evening Süddeutsche Zeitung. Accordingly, the observation has already been recorded. “This serves to clarify the extent to which there are efforts in the AfD as a whole party that are trying to impair or eliminate the core of the Basic Law,” the ministry said. At first he had Munich Mercury reported about it.
This Thursday, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) will present the semi-annual information from the state office. According to the announcement, the focus should be on the “breeding ground for extremists”, which the corona pandemic and the war in Ukraine, together with their geopolitical effects, represented. The attention should now be directed to the AfD, whose head of state Stephan Protschka reacts calmly. He calls the decision “politically motivated”. The CSU is trying to “silence a political opponent like the AfD.” He had expected the observation and “I’m very relaxed about the whole thing. That won’t stop us in the election campaign or in our political work,” Protschka said SZ-Demand.
So far, only individuals and the ethnic AfD group “Flugel” and the offspring Junge Alternative (JA) have been observed in Bavaria. According to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the “ethnically homogeneous concept of the people” represented in the wing is primarily problematic; it “contradicts the central basic principles of the free democratic basic order”. The wing is formally dissolved throughout Germany, most recently the security authorities in the Free State did not want or could no longer quantify the exact number of people in the current.
The members of the parliamentary group remain unmolested
An official object of observation, as is now the case for the entire state association with its more than 4,000 members, means that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution no longer only evaluates public information, but can also use intelligence tools if necessary, such as tapping phones, obtaining covert information or using informants .
The observation is not yet a fixed categorization as an anti-constitutional party – but the prelude, so to speak, to securing evidence and trying to reliably verify this thesis. Most recently, some federal states had already announced that they would make the respective state associations of the AfD an object of observation, for example Baden-Württemberg in the summer. There were “actual indications that justify the suspicion that the AfD is a right-wing extremist effort that is directed against the constitutional order,” it said.
The background to the decision of the state office in Stuttgart was the later court-confirmed survey of the entire AfD party as an object of observation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in March 2021. State associations “could not be viewed in isolation from the federal association of the party,” explained the state office in Baden-Württemberg. Bayern should now also be guided by this. In addition, it is likely to be about the influence of the East German, more radical AfD associations on the structures and processes of the party in the Free State.
According to the Ministry of the Interior, the members of the state parliamentary group are excluded from the observation in Bavaria. “Because the requirements developed by the Federal Constitutional Court for the observation of MPs have not yet been met,” it says. There are high hurdles for the observation of members of parliament. In 2013, “prerequisites and limits” were specified in a fundamental decision in Karlsruhe. If a parliamentarian abuses his mandate “to fight against the free democratic basic order or actively and aggressively fights it,” that justifies the measure, the judges said. In general, however, the proportionality with a view to the free mandate must be checked individually.
AfD circles worry that the observation could lead to a decline in members
With this logic, the state office stopped monitoring three members of the Bavarian AfD parliamentary group at the beginning of 2019; they had been the focus of the authorities during the previous election campaign and when they moved into the Maximilianeum. The internal review for this was also based on the 2013 judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court.
Since it was founded in 2018, the AfD parliamentary group in the state parliament has shrunk from 22 to 17 MPs – most recently parliamentary group leader Christian Klingen said goodbye, at the time it was rumored in the party that as a civil servant he was afraid of the threat of surveillance by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. He himself spoke of “certain tendencies” that he could no longer support. In Bavarian AfD circles, there has long been concern that an observation could lead to a loss of members who are civil servants or work in the public sector.
Members of monitored groups and parties are included in the “directory of extremist or extremist-influenced organizations” in Bavaria. This extensive catalog of associations of all kinds, both national and international, is presented to candidates for civil service, for example. It is then up to the personnel authorities to decide, especially in the case of recruitment, whether in a specific case the proximity to a group gives rise to doubts about loyalty to the constitution.