Germany’s biggest opposition party the Alternative for Germany is harbouring 20,000 Right-wing extremists, say the country’s domestic spy chiefs.
The number of extremists within the AfD, which came second in federal elections in February, rose by 77% last year alongside growth in party membership and its shift rightwards, stressed the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
It also highlighted in a new report a surge in overall crime motivated by Right-wing extremism.
The agency last month classified the party at large as “extremist” on the basis of a 1,100-page experts’ report enabling it to step up monitoring of the AfD.
The party, which got more than 20% of the vote in the February elections, over 150 seats in the German Parliament, and has won backing from Elon Musk, has legally challenged this classification.
The spy agency stressed on Tuesday that party statements frequently included xenophobic and anti-Muslim positions, with migrants from predominantly Islamic countries often accused of cultural incompatibility and a strong inclination toward criminal behaviour.
AfD leaders frequently made statements that could be considered to attack the constitution during state election campaigns in eastern Germany last year - and mostly were not reined in by the party, the agency added.
It cited the leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Bjoern Hoecke, who at a campaign event in August said the election could “lead to the implosion of the cartel party system” and “finally bring about something that is a true democracy”.
Crime motivated by Right-wing extremism in Germany jumped 47.4% last year, including 6 attempted murders up from 4 in 2023 and 23 cases of arson up from 16, the agency said.
The threat from Right-wing extremism has been rising in countries across Europe including in Britain where the intelligence and security services are dealing with an increasing number of cases, including children radicalised online.
MI5 chief Ken McCallum said last October that 75% of the agency’s work was focused on Islamist extremists and 25% on extreme Right-wing terrorism.
One in eight people under investigation were children under 18, a threefold increase in that proportion in the last three years, with extreme Right-wing terrorism particularly skewed towards young people, he said.
Most of the threats came from lone individuals, who could obtain inspirational and instructional material online.
He shot and stabbed to death the mother-of-two in Birstall, West Yorkshire, on 16 June, a week before the Brexit vote.
Mair shouted “Britain first” in the attack and prosecutors said his crimes were “nothing less than acts of terrorism”.
Sentencing him, Mr Justice Wilkie said Mair’s inspiration was not love for Britain but admiration for Nazism.
“Our parents’ generation made huge sacrifices to defeat those ideas and values in the Second World War,” he emphasised.
“What you did, and your admiration for those views which informed your crime, betrays the sacrifices of that generation.”
