The “wing” is now being monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. However, this does not apply to the AfD as a whole party. Opinions differ as to how much influence the right-wing national group has in the party.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies the right-wing national wing of the AfD around the politician Björn Höcke as an observation case. The group is seen as a “proven extremist endeavor” against the liberal-democratic basic order, said the head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang in Berlin on Thursday. Höcke and AfD board member Andreas Kalbitz are right-wing extremists. Democracies could fail if their opponents destroy them from within. “This is the warning of history to us,” said Haldenwang. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution assumes that about 20 percent of the approximately 35,000 AfD members belong to the “wing”. With 7,000 followers, the grouping would be twice the size of the NPD.
Thomas Haldenwang, President of the Protection of the Constitution: The right-wing national “wing” of the AfD is a “proven extremist endeavor”. (Source: dpa)
Haldenwang had noticed a new dynamic in the report of right-wing extremism and a mixture of different milieus in the past months.
The AfD had published statements by party officials on the previous day to “clarify” earlier statements on Islam, immigration and the deportation of rejected asylum seekers. This should invalidate the constitutional protection’s reservations. Not all of these statements came from supporters of the “wing”, the founder and spokesman of the Thuringian AfD parliamentary group leader Bjorn Höcke is.
“Wing” has been a suspected case since November
For example, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, “wing” supporter and member of the state parliament of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, said: “Comparing Islam with a tree fungus is a drastic and polemically exaggerated imagery that I used in 2017, to which I refer but would no longer fall back because it creates false associations. It is therefore important to me to emphasize that I am not comparing people with parasites, but a parallel society. “
In January 2019, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the party’s right-wing “wing” as a suspected case of right-wing extremism, as did the AfD’s youth organization, the Junge Alternative.
The classification as an object of observation means that the movement can be observed with the full range of intelligence tools. This includes, for example, observing and recruiting informants. Individual data may be collected and stored. However, what a member of parliament or committees say must not be included in the files.
The “wing” has no formal membership. His followers gather once a year for the so-called “Kyffhäusertreffen”. In the past, AfD politicians also took part in this event, who do not count themselves among the “wing”, such as the party leader Jörg Meuthen.
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