The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution may not classify the AfD as a “secured right‑extremist undertaking” until the final hearing is concluded. This was decided by the Administrative Court in Cologne on Thursday, effectively granting the AfD’s urgent application. The parties involved may still file an appeal.
The court found sufficient indications that within the AfD there are endeavors aimed at undermining the liberal democratic constitutional order. However, based on the current evidence in the expedited case, these endeavors have not shaped the party to such an extent that a constitutional‑enemy tendency can be established “in its overall picture”.
The court maintains that a strong suspicion remains that the AfD continues to develop anti‑constitutional aims. The party is said to “partially openly promote political demands that are not compatible with the constitutional order in the form of the human‑dignity guarantee”. Yet the expedited proceedings did not uncover a corresponding influence that dominates the party’s overall picture.
For example, there is no “sufficient certainty” that the AfD wishes to grant only a legally degraded status to German citizens with a migration background. The interpretation of the AfD’s concept of “migration” as a “consequence and mirror” of a “folkish, origin‑based notion of people” by the Constitution Protection Office implies a “programmatic stringency” regarding the AfD’s goals, “which the court cannot derive from the evidence presented”.
On 2 May 2025, the Constitution Protection Office publicly announced that the AfD would be upgraded from a “suspicion case” to a “secured right‑extremist undertaking” based on an internal follow‑up assessment. The points collected during the suspicion‑case processing supposedly confirmed the allegations against the party’s aims and, in significant parts, had become certain. The party’s prevailing ethnicity‑based conception of people was described as the basis for continuous agitation against individuals and groups, who would be broadly defamed. Whole population groups in Germany would thus be degraded and their human dignity violated, reflecting a generally anti‑migrant and anti‑Muslim stance.
Following this upgrade and its public disclosure, the AfD filed a lawsuit on 5 May 2025 and simultaneously lodged an urgent application. In the expedited process-whose electronically managed file now spans twenty volumes with over 7,000 pages-the parties made extensive submissions. The court’s electronic attachments from the Constitution Protection Office amount to a total data volume of 1.5 terabytes.
