the court suspects large parts of the AfD of wanting to create a two-tier society, where people judged to be "ethnically German" would have more rights than people whose families originally came from abroad.
The ruling means intelligence services can now monitor the communications of the far-right party.
www.bbc.com
Founded in 2013 as an anti-European Union party, AfD has since radicalized and become an extremist, anti-immigrant party whose aim is “to eliminate the free democratic basic order,” according to a 2023 report by the German Institute for Human Rights.
AfD leaders have made antisemitic, anti-Muslim and anti-democratic statements, detailed below.
The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz or BfV), its domestic intelligence agency which monitors extremist threats to Germany’s democracy, has listed AfD as an officially suspected extremist organization and classified its youth wing, “Young Alternative,” as extremist in April 2023. The state-level BfV offices in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia have gone a step further and classified the AfD party as a whole as extremist. As a suspected extremist organization, AfD is subject to BfV intelligence collection, including the use of informants and surveillance of individuals and their communications.[1]
Why is AfD of concern? Nazi slogans, Holocaust trivialization and more.
Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD party in the state of Thuringia, has twice been fined by a German court for using a banned Nazi slogan. The phrase, “Everything for Germany” (“Alles für Deutschland”) was a slogan of the Nazi stormtroopers and engraved on their daggers.
In a 2017 speech to the AfD youth wing, Höcke bemoaned German’s culture of remembrance of the Holocaust, saying, “We Germans, our people, are the only people in the world who planted a monument of shame in the middle of our national capital.” He called for Germany to stop atoning for Nazi crimes and make a "180-degree turn" in how it remembers its past.
Alexander Gauland, an AfD co-founder, former party leader, and current Member of Parliament, has engaged in Holocaust trivialization on several occasions. In a 2018 speech to the AfD youth wing, he said, “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” Gauland also said in 2017 that Germans should be “proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.”
Höcke has maintained he was unaware the banned slogan was used by Hitler’s storm troopers. His critics have rejected that defense, noting Höcke was a history teacher before his AfD days.
Alternative for Germany politician Björn Höcke was fined for uttering a phrase employed by Hitler’s storm troopers.
www.politico.eu
Why use many word when few source do trick