It remains the case: Bavaria’s constitutional protection agency may keep tabs on the AfD for suspected unconstitutional aims within the party. The AfD again failed—perhaps decisively—in its bid to bar the surveillance in Bavaria through a court ruling.
The Bavarian Higher Administrative Court on Wednesday refused to allow an appeal against a Munich Administrative Court’s decision that had dismissed an AfD lawsuit. The court said the present decision is final and cannot be challenged. The questions raised by the AfD have already been settled in case law, and the objections to the existing ruling do not carry through.
2024: The AfD failed before the Administrative Court
The Administrative Court had, in the summer of 2024, rejected the AfD’s suit challenging the surveillance that had already been announced in 2022. After reviewing extensive material and conducting a three-day oral hearing, the court concluded that there were concrete indications of anti-constitutional aims within the AfD.
For example, the court noted statements that rested on “an ethnically-biological understanding of the people,” it said in its rationale at the time. And the indications of potential extremist tendencies were sufficiently convincing and weighty that it was appropriate to inform the public about the surveillance.
At that time, the court did not grant an appeal. The AfD attempted to seek one through the Bavarian Administrative Court—and failed.
The Administrative Court had “balanced for and against arguments in a way that was not to be criticized and weighed relevant remarks while explicitly considering freedom of expression and the circumstances,” the Bavarian Administrative Court ruled.
The outcome of the Administrative Court is not to be faulted as far as it determines that, in particular, certain statements attributed to the AfD about “remigration,” about defaming people with migration backgrounds or of Muslim faith, about coup fantasies, or about ongoing agitation against the free and democratic basic order surpassed the boundaries of permissible critique of the constitutional system.
AfD lost in several instances
The Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution announced in 2022 that it would monitor the AfD as a whole party using intelligence-gathering methods because there were indications of unconstitutional aims. The AfD had initially challenged this in expedited proceedings and lost in two instances. In the summer of 2024 it also lost on the merits at the Administrative Court.
The ruling comes for the AfD at an somewhat inopportune moment: this weekend the party meets for a state party convention in Passau. The party is set to elect a new leadership for the state. In a high-stakes bid for the chair, Bundestag member Reinhard Mixl is challenging the incumbent state chair, his fellow Bundestag colleague Stephan Protschka.
The state parliamentary group had, at the end of May, elected a new leadership slate. The former chair of the parliamentary group, Katrin Ebner-Steiner, who for years has been known for anti-queer remarks, is no longer the sole leader but shares the post with Ulrich Singer, another member of the delegation.
