Brandenburg’s regional government has appointed a new domestic intelligence chief tasked with stepping up efforts to ban the surging right-wing AfD party. Wilfried Peters, a veteran jurist, officially took office on Monday as head of the Brandenburg branch of the Verfassungsschutz (Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, responsible for monitoring threats to the democratic order). The move is widely interpreted as part of a blatant political offensive. The goal: to find a legal path to outlaw the AfD, the patriotic, anti-immigration party currently leading the polls in the region.
The appointment of Peters, a jurist with a long track record at the Berlin Administrative Court (a court that handles disputes between citizens and the government), was directly pushed by Brandenburg’s new Interior Minister, René Wilke, a former member of far-left party Die Linke who has had no formal party affiliation since May of this year. Wilke made no attempt to hide his intentions during an interview with public broadcaster RBB: he wants the new head of the domestic intelligence service to “put an end to extremists,” and although he did not name the AfD directly, he made it clear the party was included. A stance very much in line with that of the left-wing SPD.
This is not a new situation, but it is escalating. At the end of May, Brandenburg’s own Verfassungsschutz was forced to temporarily stop classifying the AfD as a “confirmed extremist organization” following a legal challenge by the party. Since then, the party remains under surveillance as a “suspected case,” meaning it is being monitored but not officially labelled extremist.
The appointment of Peters is a direct response to that unstable legal context. According to Wilke, his judicial experience should ensure that the Verfassungsschutz’s actions are “clean, well-founded, and legally sustainable,” which seems to be an implicit admission that they have not been up to now. But beyond words, what is emerging is the construction of an institutional apparatus with the sole purpose of finding a formula to ban a party with strong social support.
The numbers speak for themselves. According to the latest polls from June, AfD stands as the leading political force in Brandenburg with 32% of voting intention, while the SPD of current regional Prime Minister Dietmar Woidke falls to 23%. The response has not been political, but administrative and judicial, reinforcing a clear pattern: when the electorate doesn’t vote as the establishment wishes, the system responds by criminalizing dissent. It’s a practice that is becoming increasingly common in the European Union under Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.
Wilke claims that his aim is for citizens to regain confidence that the Verfassungsschutz acts “without political motivations.” But the mere fact that the top priority for the new chief is to neutralize a legally constituted — and massively supported — party, contradicts that statement entirely.
