In Germany, the most radical fringe of the far-right party was placed under surveillance this Thursday. The police believe that this movement represents today the "main" danger for the country's democracy, 75 years after the end of Nazism.
The most radical far-right movement in the country currently had around 32,000 supporters, including "13,000 people ready for violence". Figures that keep increasing. "We know today that democracies can fail when they are destroyed by their internal enemies, this is the warning that our story throws at us," said German intelligence chief Thomas Haldenwang during a press conference.
Great Replacement and Holocaust
Among them, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has clearly identified the “Wing” movement, the ultra-fringe of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the main opposition force in the national chamber. deputies. Estimated at 7,000 members, out of the 35,000 that the AfD has, this movement is led by Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD party in Thuringia and recently at the origin of a major political crisis in the country after trying to do alliance with the moderate right of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
This 47-year-old man and his supporters in particular challenge Germany's culture of repentance for Nazi crimes. Björn Höcke has called the Berlin Holocaust Memorial a monument of "shame" in the past. They also regularly raise the threat of a large "replacement" of the native German population by immigrants.
The increased powers of the intelligence services
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution justified its decision by considering that it had found that "the Wing" and its officials could be described as "extremists" and had "implicated" in their speeches and actions "strong symbols of our democratic regime "as well as" human dignity "and" the rule of law ". This placement under surveillance comes after a review of more than a year of speeches and publications of members of this movement belonging to the party founded in 2013.
Concretely, this decision gives increased powers to the services in charge of internal intelligence, in particular the possibility of spying on telecommunications of the members of this organization, of storing personal data, of recruiting informers and of using undercover agents. This treatment is reserved in Germany for the most extreme organizations, considered as a potential danger to the State and suddenly struck with the seal of infamy. On Twitter, the AfD denounced a “political instrumentalization”. This police sanction comes against a backdrop of renewed far-right terrorism, with three attacks committed in less than a year.
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