Germany: AfD appeals 'suspected' far-right extremist status

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party is challenging the country's domestic intelligence agency in court, saying it was not justified in labeling the party a "suspected case of far-right extremism" in 2021. 

The designation makes it easier for the BfV spy agency, known by the English title the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, to investigate and surveil AfD members. It can also facilitate the use or recruitment of informants from within the organization.

The higher regional court for North Rhine-Westphalia in Münster has scheduled two days for the hearing, which opened on Tuesday. Whether a verdict would follow on Wednesday was not immediately clear.  

The AfD unsuccessfully challenged the designation at a different court in 2022, this is its second appeal.

What happened on the first day in court? 

The case kicked off with the AfD's legal team filing several additions motions and requests, and also calling for an adjounrment.

It said there had not been sufficient time to review the roughly 4,200 pages of documents and 116 hours of video evidence provided by the BfV in January ahead of the hearing. 

Lawyer Christian Conrad also called for the panel of judges to recuse themselves on the basis of a conflict of interests.

And the AfD also appealed for information from the states of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, whose state chapters of the AfD have the more serious designation as "certified far-right extremist" organizations, to be made a part of the case.

The court rejected all of these motions, with presiding judge Gerald Buck accusing the party's legal team of wasting the court's time and providing no new arguments. He said the call to recuse the entire bench (known in German legal terms as a senate) appeared both sweeping and unfounded. 

At some points in the hearing, the relatively large crowd of public oberservers and journalists were asked to leave when issues deemed too sensitive for a public hearing were raised. 

The AfD also called for a new report and investigation on the party by the BfV — which has not yet been completed or released but which has been the subject of some media reports and speculation — to be submitted to the court as newer evidence on the issue. 

A BfV representative told the court that this was not possible at present because "there is no completed assessment." 

Why was the AfD given this classification? 

The prior court verdicts — which were reached in the same state, hence the location for this week's appeal — supported the BfV defining the political party as a case warranting suspicion and monitoring. 

It cited reports and evidence provided by the domestic intelligency agency, and the party appearing to use ethnicity as a key factor in its definition of a German people.

This runs contrary to Germany's postwar constitution, drafted soon after Adolf Hitler's Nazi dictatorship, that explicitly forbids racial persecution. It also noted evidence of xenophobic agitation and some of the party's members' more extreme commments and statements.

The youth wing of the AfD, known as the Young Alternative (or JA to use its German acronym that matches the word for yes), already has the more serious BfV categorization as a "certified" right-wing extremist group, as do two state branches of the party. 

"I'm watching it and am fairly relaxed. We'll see what comes out of it and then we will continue to chart our path," Bernd Baumannn, the head of the group of AfD members in the Bundestag federal parliament, told reporters in Berlin on Tuesday. 

Party co-chair Peter Boehringer was asked on DLF public radio how the party would deal with a defeat in court. He said that if a decision was reached in the two scheduled days, that alone would be seen as grounds to try to appeal at Germany's highest administrative court in Karlsruhe.

However, should it come to that, the court would only be investigating potential miscarriages of justice in the hearing, not the merits of the case. 

Some German politicians have called for sterner sanctions against the AfD, with some advocating efforts to strip it of public funding or even ban it outright. This case is unconnected to these appeals, and it has been roughly 70 years since any political party in Germany was outlawed. Several attempts to outlaw the more explicity neo-nazi NPD in recent years failed. 

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msh/wmr (AFP, dpa)