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Seat of the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe: AfD fails with urgent application
Photo: Uli Deck / dpa
The AfD failed before the Federal Constitutional Court in an attempt to temporarily prohibit the Office for the Protection of the Constitution from disclosing the number of members of the "wing".
The court rejected the party's urgent application because of insufficient justification, as it announced in Karlsruhe on Thursday.
It is not about the classification of the AfD as a suspected right-wing extremist case.
In this case it was instead decided whether the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) was allowed to make public how many members the "wing" of the party, now officially dissolved and classified by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, had and should still have.
The AfD wanted to obtain a so-called interim decision, which forbids the BfV from making such a mention until an urgent decision was made.
The Cologne Administrative Court had rejected such an interim regulation, and a complaint to the Münster Higher Administrative Court was unsuccessful.
The party then moved to the Federal Constitutional Court, which now also ruled against them.
The AfD should have demonstrated that the interim decisions made earlier were based "on a misunderstanding of the meaning and scope of their basic rights," said the Karlsruhe judges.
But she did not do this sufficiently.
The party had also failed to explain in a comprehensible manner that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution actually wanted to announce the number of members of the "wing" before the administrative court's urgent decision.
AfD complains of a "stigmatizing and defamatory" effect
The AfD had argued that the number of "wing" members was fictitious.
Their announcement had a "stigmatizing and defamatory" effect because it attached a meaning to the political views represented by the "wing" that they did not have in the party.
In another urgent procedure in Cologne before the administrative court on the classification of the party as a suspected case, the decision is still pending.
The Cologne administrative court had initially also rejected an interim regulation.
On March 5th, however, after the media reported on the internal BfV decision on the classification, the decision was made.
For the time being, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is not allowed to classify or treat the AfD as a suspected right-wing extremist case.
This applies until the administrative court decides on a corresponding urgent application by the party.
The judges justified their rethinking at the time with the fact that the BfV had not adhered to a previously given so-called standstill promise.
Rather, the information was "pierced".
Negotiations continue in Cologne on both - the classification as a suspected case and the publication of the number of "wing" members.
As expected, the two AfD chairmen Jörg Meuthen and Tino Chrupalla did not rate the decision in Karlsruhe as a defeat.
It was "not a setback in the matter," said Meuthen, because the court had not decided whether the number of supposedly 7,000 "wing" supporters in the AfD communicated by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution was correct.
Chrupalla said that a decision on the matter had to be "awaited".
Hessian administrative court recently for AfD
The dispute over the number of members is relevant for the AfD.
It was only at the beginning of March that the local administrative court in Hesse gave the AfD the right to file a lawsuit.
Now the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution there has to change passages in the protection of the Constitution report for 2019.
The background was that the state office had given the number of supporters of the "wing" in the Hessian AfD as around 600.
A dissemination of this reporting should be refrained from "in any form," the judges said.
In addition, the state of Hesse has to correct in a press release that the reporting was unlawful, according to the court in its final decision of March 3rd.
The decision had caused joy in the AfD, because at the core of their argumentation it accommodates that there is no precise information about the number of supporters of the »wing«.
The Hessian judges of the 7th Senate of the Administrative Court had ruled that the Hessian Constitutional Protection Report 2019 stated on several pages that the "wing" in Hesse had a "partially estimated / rounded - right-wing extremist potential of 600 or a potential of right-wing extremists / personal potential of up to had to 600 people «.
However, the court stated that there were no "factual indications" for these figures.
The stated value, which is also decisive for the classification of the group and the external impact, "does not withstand a plausibility check," according to the Administrative Court.
For years, the "wing" had been run nationwide as an internal network in the AfD, largely by AfD politicians Björn Höcke and Andreas Kalbitz.
The Thuringian AfD state and parliamentary group leader, Höcke, dissolved it last spring after the network was classified as right-wing extremist by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution - and consequently also by the state offices.
Kalbitz, in turn, lost his AfD membership last May due to a federal board decision brought about by co-party leader Meuthen, but continues to sit as a non-party member of the Brandenburg AfD parliamentary group.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution doubts whether the dissolution of the "wing" has diminished its influence in the AfD.
For example, Jörg Müller, the head of the Brandenburg state office, declared last May: "For us, the announcement by Björn Höcke and Andreas Kalbitz is a sham resolution."
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sev / AFP / dpa