The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has filed a legal complaint against two senior government officials in Thuringia for advocating that the party be considered for surveillance over its links to right-wing extremists.

The AfD's Thuringia branch lodged the complaint against state Interior Minister Georg Maier and the president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Stephan Kramer, at the Federal Constitutional Court in Weimar.

The complaint accuses both state ministers of making false allegations against the AfD when they announced in September that the state BfV office was reviewing whether the party warranted surveillance, AfD Thuringia spokesman Torban Braga said.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alexander Gauland Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch - but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alice Weidel Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II. Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Frauke Petry German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Björn Höcke The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year - leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Beatrix von Storch Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts - but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Marcus Pretzell Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andre Wendt The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andre Poggenburg Poggenburg, head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alexander Gauland - again ... During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks ... and again Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andreas Kalbitz The Brandenburg state AfD chief admitted in 2019 to attending a 2007 rally in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party at which a swastika flag was raised. "Der Spiegel" had published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of "14 neo-Nazis" who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally. Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of "curiosity." Author: Dagmar Breitenbach



The allegations sparked negative media coverage of the party, Braga said, with many outlets suggesting the Thuringia branch was anti-constitutional and cooperating with right-wing extremists.

The BfV, which has not yet completed the review, has previously placed the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and some members of the Left Party under surveillance.

Extortion allegation

The AfD's complaint also accuses Kramer of abusing his authority as state BfV chief a day before Björn Höcke was elected to lead the party's Thuringia branch. Kramer, it says, tried to "extort" AfD members against voting for Höcke by insinuating that his election would pave the way for surveillance.

Watch video 02:05 Share Chemnitz to see more protests Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/340e5 Far-right groups plan more protests in Chemnitz

Höcke is considered the face of the AfD's extreme right-wing. He marched alongside thousands of nationalists and leaders of the anti-immigrant PEGIDA group in eastern Germany in August and had previously described Berlin's Holocaust monument as a "memorial of shame."

Stefan Möller, a state parliamentary spokesman for the AfD, said Maier and Kramer's actions were reminiscent of anti-democratic measures in communist East Germany.

"The domestic intelligence service and the interior ministry are not, unlike in the former East Germany, there to hound and vilify inconvenient opposition parties like the AfD," he said.

Thuringia was one of five states that joined West Germany after the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1990.

Formed in 2013, the AfD entered the Thuringia state parliament for the first time in 2014. It currently has 12 seats in the 91-seat assembly.

Watch video 26:02 Share Georg Pazderski on Conflict Zone Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/39YHp AfD deputy leader on DW's Conflict Zone

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