German far-right party put on watchlist

Bloomberg

Alternative for Germany (AfD), the biggest opposition group in the country’s parliament, was placed on the domestic intelligence service’s list of organisations suspected of right-wing extremism, Der Spiegel reported.
Prompted by a confidential 1,000-page report about alleged violations of constitutional rules protecting human dignity and democracy, the move allows the agency to conduct nationwide surveillance of the AfD, the magazine said.
Alice Weidel, co-leader of the party’s caucus in the German parliament, said the intelligence service’s actions were politically motivated.
“This is particularly noteworthy in view of the state and federal elections this year,” she said on Twitter. “We will of course take legal action against the unjustified classification of the AfD.”
While groups within the party are already the subject of scrutiny, placing the entire party on an extremist watch list could be a major setback ahead of a series of key state elections and a national vote that will decide Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s successor in September.
“The AfD has often shown that it wants to undermine our democracy,” Katja Mast, a lawmaker for the ruling Social Democrats, said in a tweet responding to the Spiegel article and expressing support for the decision. “It pursues this strategy on many levels.”
The party was founded in 2013 to protest Merkel’s backing for bailing out Greece, and its support surged due to the 2015 refugee crisis. In the most recent federal election in 2017, the AfD became the largest opposition group with just under 13% of the vote. Since then it has slipped to fourth place behind the Greens and the Social Democrats but still polls at about 10%.
Merkel’s CDU/CSU bloc has support of around 33% and is expected to lead the next government after the Sept. 26 vote, possibly in alliance with the Greens.
With a strong power base in the former communist East, the AfD has become a serious threat by appealing to Germans disaffected by Merkel’s globalist approach and unsettled by advances in technology.
Under an agreement in a case at a Cologne court brought by the party, the intelligence service agreed to not disclose to the public if the AfD was put on the watch list while the litigation is pending.
“The right-wing extremists set the tone in the AfD,” Markus Blume, general secretary of the CSU party in Merkel’s bloc, said in a tweet. “We will continue to fight the AfD politically. It doesn’t belong in parliaments.”