Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (literally, the Federal Office for Protecting the Constitution), has released a bombshell: Based on a report of over a thousand pages, the Verfassungsschutz has classified the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party as “confirmedly right-extremist.” Or, to translate from bureaucratese, “extreme-right.” That means that the AfD is now officially tagged as hostile to the constitutional order of Germany.

Regional branches of the party as well as its former youth organization have been given the same label before. The party as a whole has been formally labeled a “suspect case” (Verdachtsfall) for years, which already allowed the Verfassungsschutz to spy on it. This new classification now is not yet a prohibition. It is more akin to an extreme form of official blacklisting: In practical terms, the AfD can still contest elections, citizens can still vote for it, and its candidates can still represent them.

It is also not a crime to be a member of the AfD; there are currently about 51,000. At the same time, members who are also public servants, for instance in the police, may well face individual assessments of their loyalty to the state.

Conveniently, the Verfassungsschutz has not published the report underlying its finding. But its key allegations against the AfD have been advertised widely: Due to its – very real and often brutal – xenophobic rhetoric, the AfD stands accused of systematically offending against human dignity, an ideal explicitly protected as “inviolable” by the very first article and first paragraph of the German constitution (formally known as the Basic Law).

More broadly, the AfD, the Verfassungsschutz argues, advances an ethno-chauvinistic – to translate the almost untranslatable German adjective “völkisch” – concept of the German population that discriminates against those who are not or not entirely of ethnic German descent. That is – full disclosure – Germans such as me, for instance. That as well, the domestic intelligence experts charge, is not compatible with Germany’s constitutional order.

That Germans can, for now, still vote AfD does not mean that the Verfassungsschutz’s new move is a formality. On the contrary, it is a grievous and misguided escalation, in three ways: It allows the government to boost spying on the AfD by surveillance and informers to the maximum. In........

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