BERLIN: A German court ruled on Thursday that the domestic intelligence agency cannot label the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” group, at least for now.
The AfD had challenged the designation, which would empower the spy agency to use broader surveillance powers to monitor it and would embolden political opponents seeking a ban of the anti-immigration party.
The Cologne administrative court’s decision puts the designation on hold pending the final outcome of a legal battle between the AfD and Germany’s intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV).
The court found that there were indeed efforts to undermine Germany’s free democratic order from within the AfD, highlighting its demands to ban Muslim minarets, public calls to prayer and headscarves in public institutions.
But it ruled that the party as a whole was not “shaped by these efforts” such that “an anti-constitutional tendency can be established” to characterise the party in its entirety as extremist.
