German politician calls for far-right AfD to be placed under surveillance

Germany’s far-right AfD should be put under surveillance after nine people were killed in an extremist gun rampage, a senior politician has said. 

Lars Klingbeil said ‘one person carried out the shooting in Hanau, but there were many that supplied him with [rhetorical] ammunition, and the AfD definitely belongs to them.’

Mr Klingbeil, the general secretary of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), said the anti-immigrant party should be ‘placed under surveillance’ by security services. 

Neo-Nazi gunman Tobias Rathjen killed nine people of ‘migrant background’ in two shisha bars on Wednesday night after posting an extremist manifesto online. 

It follows an anti-Semitic gun rampage in Halle last October and a string of election successes for the AfD, sparking fear of a resurgent far right in a country still haunted by its Nazi past. 

Interior minister Horst Seehofer said after Wednesday’s attack that right-wing extremism was the ‘biggest security threat facing Germany’. 

‘The threat posed by far-right extremism, anti-Semitism and racism is very high in Germany,’ he told reporters in Berlin. 

Mr Seehofer said there would be more surveillance at ‘sensitive sites’, including mosques, and a high police presence at railway stations, airports and borders. 

Increasing numbers of guns are being seized from radical-right suspects, mounting to 1,091 in 2018 compared with 676 the previous year.

Protesters who gathered at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate last night held up signs calling on the government to ‘disarm fascists’. 

Nine people of a ‘migrant background’ were killed in Wednesday’s gun attacks in a Frankfurt suburb, although some were German citizens. 

Parts of the AfD, or Alternative for Germany, were already under close scrutiny from Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. 

The party has rejected all responsibility for far-right attacks, including the Halle shootings last October.  

The AfD enjoyed a surge in support after Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors to more than a million refugees at the height of the European migrant crisis in 2015.  

The party says Islam is incompatible with the German constitution and wants to repatriate the Syrian refugees who arrived that year.  

AfD leaders have also called for a ‘180-degree turn’ in Germany’s atonement for Nazi crimes and played down the Nazi period as a ‘speck of bird s**t’ in German history.  

In 2017, the AfD entered the German parliament for the first time after clearing the five per cent threshold required to win seats.  

This year the AfD has come second in three state elections, all of them in the former East Germany where the far right is strongest and traditional parties weakest. 

The Halle attack took place in what used to be the East, although Wednesday’s attack in Hanau was in the former West.  

Earlier this month, a newly-elected state premier in Thuringia was forced to step down within 24 hours after he was helped to victory by AfD votes. 

The liberal politician had not sought the AfD’s support, but the result broke a taboo against any kind of alignment with the far right.  

Angela Merkel rebuked her own party colleagues for voting with the AfD, while her former heir apparent Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer resigned in the wake of the row. 

Separately, 12 men were arrested across Germany a week ago on suspicion of planning attacks on mosques aimed at bringing about ‘a civil-war-like situation’.