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A police officer blocks a route on a lateral thinker demonstration in Munich
Photo: Aaron Karasek / imago images / aal.photo
The interior ministers of the federal states will meet in two days to discuss the security situation in Germany.
Now there are calls in advance to monitor right-wing extremists and corona deniers more closely.
Saxony's security authorities, among others, are registering an increasing radicalization of "lateral thinkers" and other opponents of the corona protective measures.
"The idea of violent resistance to democratic rules is now one of the typical standard demands of the movement of Corona deniers," says the President of the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Dirk-Martin Christian.
Even under the influence of right-wing extremists, so-called Reich citizens and anti-Semites, the anti-corona protests became more and more aggressive in the course of the pandemic.
With increasing violent attacks on police forces and journalists and verbal attacks against the Saxon Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (CDU) clearly "red lines" have been crossed.
In Thuringia, too, one sees the rise of right-wing extremist circles with concern.
Interior Minister Georg Maier (SPD) therefore hopes for expanded powers for the protection of the constitution to monitor right-wing extremist financial flows.
"Right-wing extremists have various sources of income to finance their structures and activities," Maier told the editorial network Germany.
In order to effectively combat right-wing extremism, it is therefore necessary to take a closer look at their national and international financial flows.
"Identify the perpetrator before an act"
A large part of the financing activities of right-wing extremist organizations are "not in the criminally relevant area and therefore generally outside the focus of the police." It was therefore "to check in the short term whether the intelligence services have sufficient options for tracking transactions for terrorist financing," said Maier.
He advocates an expansion of the powers of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in this area.
With a view to criminal offenses of radicalized corona deniers and vaccination opponents, the North Rhine-Westphalian Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) also emphasized the importance of online police and intelligence services.
"We have to identify perpetrators before they commit an act in order to be able to prevent implementation in the first place," Reul told the RND.
"That only works if the police and the protection of the constitution are allowed to track down and evaluate the information on the Internet."
mrc / dpa / AFP
