Wolfgang Streeck, reviewing Ronen Steinke’s »Verfassungsschutz: Wie der Geheimdienst Politik macht«:
Maaßen made public the notes for a speech he had given at a secret international meeting of domestic intelligence services. In them he claimed that the SPD, Merkel’s coalition partner, had ‘radical leftists’ in its ranks. The SPD demanded Maaßen’s dismissal, and in November 2018 he was sacked.
His successor, Thomas Haldenwang, was also a CDU member, though of a more Merkelian sort. According to Steinke, in January 2021 he was about to publish a report announcing that his office had found the AfD suspect of anti-constitutional ‘extremism’ and was placing it under formal observation (which would allow intelligence methods such as wiretapping and infiltration by undercover agents), when he was called to Seehofer’s office. The draft report, which Seehofer had been sent, had cited a prominent AfD politician saying ‘Islam does not belong to Germany.’ Seehofer’s problem was that he and other leading CSU members had repeatedly used those same words.
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In the summer of 2023 Friedrich Merz, the new CDU leader and a long-standing opponent of Merkel, ended the battle between the CDU and CSU, and declared, as Merkel had, that the AfD should be seen as an enemy rather than as a potential coalition partner. Facing regional elections in September 2024 in three eastern states where the AfD was leading the CDU in the polls, as well as a federal election a year later, Merz bet on what was effectively a grand coalition of ‘all democratic parties’ united in a ‘Kampf gegen Rechts’, a battle against the right. (This was not without risk: quite a few of the CDU’s fellow combatants consider Merz and his party to be more on the other side than on their own, while many of Merz’s supporters would prefer a Kampf gegen Links.) This battle involved erecting an institutional, political and social ‘firewall’ against the AfD, with the aim of excluding it from elections – not quite getting it banned by the constitutional court, but with much the same effect.
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As long as a party is judged to possess a covert substructure that might allow it to attempt the overthrow of the state – as might have been the case with the SRP and the DKP – the argument for banning it is relatively easy to make. There was no suspicion that the NPD had such a capacity, however; or that the AfD does.
For some time, the four Staatsparteien (the CDU/CSU, Greens, SPD and Free Democrats), which describe themselves as ‘democratic’ as opposed to ‘populist’ or ‘extremist’, have co-operated to exclude AfD MPs from parliamentary business as far as legally possible, for instance by keeping them out of key parliamentary committees. There have also been various forms of social ostracism: for example, the management of the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, at the behest of the state government, disinvited a number of AfD politicians from its opening ceremony, for which all parties in the Berlin parliament traditionally receive free tickets. In March the Bundestag football team announced that AfD MPs and their staff would no longer be allowed to play. But since the Kampf gegen Rechts began, support for the AfD has remained fairly steady, around 15 per cent. (In early July, two weeks after the European elections, the AfD came second in a nationwide poll, with 16.9 per cent, one percentage point above its result in the elections and close to its highest ever poll result of 17.2 per cent in 2023. The AfD was followed by the SPD on 14.6 per cent. As a rule of thumb, what the battle against the right removes from the party’s support in West Germany is balanced by what it adds in the East.) Earlier this year, the AfD reported that its membership has exceeded forty thousand, an increase of more than 60 per cent on 2023.
Whereas the BfV used to operate more or less behind the scenes, under Haldenwang and the SPD’s Nancy Faeser, minister of the interior since 2021, public announcements on investigations into AfD-related right-wing activity have become common. Today the BfV and its Länder equivalents inform the public of their work not only in yearly reports, but also in regular press conferences. Their labelling of enemies of the constitution can be challenged in administrative courts, but it takes time for cases to be heard. Decisions on the status of potentially ‘extremist’ individuals and organisations are made in camera, without those under suspicion being interviewed. Despite its past disasters, Verfassungsschutz agencies are still highly respected by a German public eager for reassurance. Once someone is placed under observation, declared ‘suspect’ or classified as a ‘proven extremist’, the media always notes this status.
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Today, the BfV and the sixteen Landesämter form a central pillar of an institutional regime that bridges state and civil society, and aims at the manufacture of political consent and what has recently come to be called ‘social cohesion’. Underlying this is the peculiar readiness of German elites to carry out orders even before they are given, which means that they may not have to be given at all. Visitors from countries with a tradition of accepting or even respecting eccentricity, such as the UK, France and Italy, or from a country as fundamentally disorderly as the United States, tend to be struck by the monolithic appearance of German politics and society, the way everything seems to fall in line with everything else. This is enabled by the interplay between institutions, formal and informal, and by a culture that perceives dissent as selfish and as a threat to social and political unity (it’s also seen as pointless). A recent example is the wave of accusations of antisemitism against protesters, many of them from outside Germany, who have voiced their horror over the Israeli destruction of Gazan society.
