Germany’s spy agency BfV has labeled the entirety of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as an extremist entity.
The BfV domestic intelligence agency, which is in charge of safeguarding Germany’s constitutional order, said the announcement comes after an “intense and comprehensive” examination.
“The ethnicity-and ancestry-based conception of the people that predominates within the party is not compatible with the free democratic order,” the BfV said on Friday.
Hopefully this inspires the other parties to to start the process to see the AfD banned. I know the report might not look like much, because of how obvious the findings are. But previous attempts at banning them have failed because such an official report was missing. So maybe our political system starts getting its shit together.
As we say in Germany: Hope dies last
If I passed that impression, I’m sorry.
I’m well aware that plenty of people in Germany are fighting Far-Right extremist in all its forms, both at home and abroad and I definitely don’t think of Germans as “all the same” (if I did I would be a massive hypocrite) - as with everybody else Germans come in all sorts, good, bad and everything in between: so is human nature.
What I see is a political and press environment in Germany (and, as I said, I see similar things in other countries) spreading a way of thinking about other people which is the same that the far-right has, hence in my view it’s indirectly boosting the far-right in that country partly by confirming to people who already thought like that, that it’s fine to think so, and partly by teaching others to think like that.
This is not a German thing: the same kind of environment anywhere else would have the same result.