The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) is not allowed to designate the AfD as an established far‑right extremist group until the main proceedings are concluded. The Administrative Court in Cologne ruled on Thursday that it had essentially granted the AfD’s urgent request for re‑classification. The parties may still file an appeal against the decision.
The court found that there were sufficient indications that the AfD pursues objectives that go against the liberal democratic basic order. However, based on the current evidence presented in the urgent procedure, these objectives do not so strongly shape the party that a “favourable overall picture” could lead to the determination of a constitutionally hostile orientation.
The judge remained convinced that a strong suspicion persists that the AfD seeks to foster anti‑constitutional aims. The party is said to “partially openly push political demands that are inconsistent with the constitutional order as embodied in the guarantee of human dignity”. Yet, the urgent proceedings could not establish a corresponding imprint that would govern the party’s overall image.
For example, there is no “sufficient certainty” that the AfD intends to grant German citizens with a migration background a devalued legal status. The interpretation of the AfD’s notion of “remigration” as a “consequence and mirror” of a “folk‑based concept of people” as used by the Constitutional Protection Office, implies a “programmatic rigidity” in relation to the AfD’s objectives that the court cannot derive from the presented evidence.
On 2 May 2025, the Office publicly announced that the AfD would be elevated from a “case of suspicion” to an “established far‑right extremist orientation” based on an internal follow‑up assessment. The evidence gathered during the suspicion case supposedly confirmed the alleged anti‑constitutional aims of the applicant and was further consolidated, allegedly turning into certainty. The Office claimed that an ethnically defined notion of people, dominant within the party, forms the basis for ongoing agitation against individuals and groups that are broadly portrayed as undesirable, thereby devaluing entire populations in Germany and violating their human dignity. This ideology allegedly manifests itself as a generally migrant‑ and Muslim‑hostile stance.
In response, on 5 May 2025 the AfD filed a lawsuit against the re‑classification and the public announcement, while simultaneously submitting an urgent request. In the urgent proceedings, the electronically maintained file now spans twenty volumes with more than 7,000 pages. The electronic annexes supplied by the Office cover about 1.5 terabytes of data.