Wave of Far-left Violence Against AfD Alarms Even German Authorities
According to the interior ministry, there is now an “elevated abstract threat” against AfD members, particularly from the violent left-wing extremist scene.
The logo of the AfD parliamentary group in the Thuringian state parliament in Erfurt, eastern Germany on September 16, 2025.
Jens Schlüter / AFP
According to the interior ministry, there is now an “elevated abstract threat” against AfD members, particularly from the violent left-wing extremist scene.
Germany’s interior ministry has sounded the alarm over a growing threat to members of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), following a series of arson attacks and physical assaults carried out by far-left extremists.
In the latest incident, a car belonging to Bernd Baumann, the AfD’s parliamentary group leader, was set on fire outside his Hamburg home in the early hours of Monday morning. The blaze destroyed three nearby vehicles.
State security officials are investigating the attack as politically motivated, and an online statement posted on a far-left, Antifa-linked platform and ending with a death threat against Baumann and other AfD members is believed to be authentic.
The attack came just weeks after the Munich office of AfD MP Tobias Teich burned down in another suspected arson assault.
According to Bundestag data, there were 808 recorded attacks on AfD representatives between January and June this year—an average of 4.5 incidents per day—making the party by far the most targeted in Germany.
A spokeswoman for Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told Bild newspaper that there is now an “elevated abstract threat” against AfD members, particularly from “the violent left-wing extremist scene.”
She said extremists were no longer focusing solely on the party as an organisation but increasingly targeting individual members, office-holders, and visible supporters at both federal and local levels.
The ministry noted that the Antifa movement justifies its actions by framing the AfD’s political stance as morally illegitimate, with a “broad consensus” among militants that violence is justified to oppose the party.
AfD leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla described the Hamburg attack as “a direct assault on democracy in Germany,” calling on other parliamentary parties to show solidarity, adding
Such acts of violence have nothing to do with legitimate political debate.
Baumann accused mainstream politicians and media of hypocrisy for remaining silent. “If there had been an arson attack on the car of a politician from the Greens, the SPD, the Left Party or the CDU/CSU, there would have been special broadcasts on ARD and ZDF and a topical debate in the Bundestag,” he told Junge Freiheit.
Zoltán Kottász is a journalist for europeanconservative.com, based in Budapest. He worked for many years as a journalist and as the editor of the foreign desk at the Hungarian daily, Magyar Nemzet. He focuses primarily on European politics.
