By branding the Alternative für Deutschland an extremist threat, the German state of Lower Saxony thrusts the country’s insurgent right into the glare of spies’ cameras. It also alarms allies of US President Trump and tests the republic’s—and the European Union’s—resolve in fighting their own destructive forces.
Lower Saxony’s interior ministry chose an awkward moment to make history. Germany’s most populous north-western state, home to Volkswagen and the Hanover trade fair, is miles from the post-industrial east where support for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) first surged.
Yet on 17 February state officials branded the movement a “definite right-wing extremist group”, thereby unlocking every power in the domestic-security toolbox, from phone taps to covert informants. It is the first time any western state has lowered the boom on the AfD. The party’s claim to be nothing more than a rambunctious voice of opposition will now be tested under the very surveillance it says it abhors.
Opinion as sabotage
The label carries legal bite. Once the state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution concludes that an organisation displays contempt for the democratic order, agents may read emails, follow the money, and—if judges agree—trace encrypted apps.
Daniela Behrens, Lower Saxony’s interior minister, said investigators found that senior AfD figures deride state institutions, rank citizens with foreign roots as second-class and lobby for “the so-called remigration of millions of people”. The ministry insists the classification targets structures, not opinions; but an opinion that looks like sabotage of the liberal order will now merit a file.
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Ms Behrens left no room for doubt about her motives. “We will not allow our democracy and our society, which is based on respect for fundamental values, to be destabilized and turned upside down,” she said. Civil-liberties lawyers fret that the line between observation and harassment can blur. Supporters of the move counter that a constitution written in the ashes of Nazism obliges the state to strike first whenever extremists probe for weaknesses.
Ruffling Washington’s feathers
The thunder from Hanover echoed across the Atlantic. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state and a confidant of President Donald Trump, lambasted the decision. “It is tyranny in disguise,” he said. Republican hawks see Europe’s cordon sanitaire around the populist right as a club for keeping outsiders at bay. German officials retort that protecting pluralism sometimes requires picking sides.
The AfD, founded in 2013 as a protest against euro-zone bail-outs, has since morphed into the country’s most effective vehicle for anger at immigration, climate taxes and arms for Ukraine. In February’s federal election it doubled its haul of votes to nearly 21 per cent, second only to Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats. Nationwide polls now put it as high as 27 per cent. Five regional contests loom this year; the party heads the field in two eastern states. Were it not ostracised by every other force in the Bundestag, it might already share power.
We will not allow our democracy and our society, which is based on respect for fundamental values, to be destabilized and turned upside down. — Daniela Behrens, Lower Saxony’s interior minister
Isolation has hardly muted its impact. The established parties borrow its rhetoric on border fences, tougher policing and looser green rules. Debates that once centred on incremental reform now echo with demands to scrap the asylum clause in Germany’s Basic Law or reopen nuclear plants closed in 2023. Each talking point began life in an AfD manifesto.
What the party wants
The essence of that manifesto is rupture. Early leaders dreamt of an orderly exit from the euro; their heirs want Germany out of the EU altogether. The AfD slams subsidies for wind farms and calls man-made climate change a myth.
The party champions a ‘Germany First‘ industrial strategy and fancies rapprochement with Russia, sanctions be damned. Above all it pushes ‘remigration‘: the large-scale deportation of migrants who arrived illegally, or simply failed to assimilate. Alice Weidel, the co-leader, accuses Brussels of strangling the car industry with its plan to outlaw new combustion engines after 2035.
Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution had seen enough by May 2025. It classed the AfD nationwide as “a proven right-wing extremist organisation”. The party appealed; until judges rule, the designation remains in limbo. Lower Saxony’s step therefore tightens the vise at state level while the federal case drags on. Intelligence officials say the regional dossier bulges with new evidence gathered since the national finding.
‘Monument of shame‘
Extremism is not a debating point but, prosecutors argue, a pattern of deeds. Investigative outlet Correctiv linked leading cadres to a 2024 gathering of activists who sketched blueprints for mass deportations. Björn Höcke, the AfD boss in Thuringia, now faces a €13k fine for chanting a Nazi slogan, ‘Alles für Deutschland‘, at a rally.
Mr Höcke once dismissed Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as “a monument of shame.” Courts ruled in 2019 that calling him a fascist was fair comment. Such episodes nourish the state’s case that the AfD tilts not just to the hard right but to the anti-constitutional fringe.
(Europe’s cordon sanitaire) is tyranny in disguise. — Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State
Four eastern states—Saxony, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg—had already deemed their local AfD branches extremist. Each acted after waiting years for pollsters to confirm that voters did not flinch at barbed rhetoric. Lower Saxony’s decision is different. It signals that scepticism of the AfD is stiffening even in regions where its vote share remains modest. Analysts spy a pre-emptive strike: nip growth in the bud before municipal councils normalise cooperation with a movement under surveillance.
A breach in the firewall
Germany is not alone in wrestling with where policing ends and politics begins. France’s government dissolved Civitas, a far-right Catholic faction, in October 2023 after accusing it of “waging war against the Republic.” In Greece, a criminal-court verdict in 2020 shattered Golden Dawn, once the third-largest party in parliament.
When former stalwarts regrouped as the National Party–Hellenes, the supreme court barred them from elections in 2023, calling the outfit “the successor and continuation” of Golden Dawn. Elsewhere authorities tread more lightly, preferring the German model of surveillance short of prohibition.
Yet bans, once imposed, often stick. Civitas’s name now gathers dust in court archives; Golden Dawn’s leaders mull appeals from prison. In each case officials invoked legal tools similar to those now trained on the AfD: laws that arm the state against threats to democratic order. Critics warn that outlawing radicals can martyr them. Proponents reply that letting declared enemies exploit civil rights to bury those rights is folly.
Votes down the road
The next test arrives in autumn. Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, both in the east, elect new parliaments. Polls say the AfD will top the ballot in each. Because every other party refuses a coalition, the newcomers would need an outright majority to rule. That remains unlikely, but the mere prospect of a first AfD-led state galvanises activistsas much as it alarms Berlin. Victory would hand the party seats in the Bundesrat, the upper chamber where Länder shape federal laws.
Lower Saxony’s intervention therefore reverberates far beyond its borders. Should the courts uphold the extremist tag, financial regulators may cut state subsidies; civil-service rules could bar teachers or police officers who hold AfD posts. Corporate donors, already wary after nationwide boycotts, may flee. The party’s leaders, ever keen on victimhood, will cry censorship. But if surveillance uncovers covert funds or plans for mass deportation, the rhetorical shield will crack.
Germany’s post-war founders inserted ‘militant democracy‘ into the basic law for moments like this. The constitution grants expansive freedoms, yet it commands the state to defend itself against those who would end them. Lower Saxony has answered that call. Whether voters agree that the AfD fits the bill is now the central question of German politics. It may also shape Europe’s future struggle with its own insurgent far-right.
