A court in Munich, in southern Germany, has backed this Wednesday that the Intelligence services can investigate and "monitor" the activities of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the federal state of Bavaria for alleged extremism.
The party, the main force of the German opposition and of a xenophobic nature, has been the subject of various investigations both at the federal level and in several states, all linked to its extremist positions, considered by German Intelligence as a "threat to the German democratic order".
Last year, a few months before the party became the second most voted in the parliamentary elections, these government bodies maintained that the AfD was a far-right force, a qualification whose definitive validation was left to the courts.
The ruling comes at a time when the AfD appears behind Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservatives in national polls, just three months before the elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the party could achieve an unprecedented absolute majority that would open the door for the first time to control a regional government.
In Bavaria, Germany's largest state by area, the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the domestic intelligence agency, announced in 2022 the opening of an investigation into the party's activities, which prompted several lawsuits by the AfD.
Two years later, the Munich Administrative Court rejected the party's complaints, concluding that there were indications of actions contrary to the Constitution due to its "ethno-biological conception of the nation".
The same body also considered that the evidence of the party's far-right ideology was sufficiently solid. After a new appeal by the AfD, the Bavarian Higher Administrative Court ratified the lower court's ruling on Tuesday.