Conservative and liberal politicians in the eastern German state of Thuringia are calling for the resignation of the head of the state’s domestic intelligence agency, Stephan Kramer, who —according to a report—is abusing his public office to pursue a political rival, the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.
An explosive article by the media outlet Apollo News revealed that Kramer has chosen to disregard legal and factual arguments while pursuing a campaign against the AfD, effectively weaponising his office for party political purposes. He has also been described as a “serious security risk” and threatened at least one of his employees with physical violence.
Kramer is a member of the Social Democratic Party. He infamously called AfD voters “brown dregs,” and has made no secret of his desire to ban the party, which recently won the state elections in Thuringia, receiving a third of all votes. The AfD is the second most popular party nationally.
Kramer’s agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution of Thuringia (AfV) was the first intelligence agency to designate AfD as a “suspected right-wing extremist” group, and then as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” group. Other states have since followed suit, and the federal agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) has also classified the party as a “suspected extremist organisation,” meaning the government can use intelligence tools to spy on the AfD’s politicians through measures such as phone tapping, intercepting emails, or recruiting informants from inside the party.
These classifications have been cited by the ruling elite as a good reason for banning the party—a proposal that seems to pop up whenever the AfD has just performed well in an election or is rising in opinion polls.
According to Apollo News, Kramer—whose qualifications for the job he currently holds can be questioned, as he is not a lawyer by profession—has been instrumental in stigmatising the AfD by steering the agency in a direction that suits him politically.
At different stages of classifying the AfD as an extremist organisation, he had firstly not consulted with experts, and later disregarded a report that presented legal qualms about upgrading the party’s designation from a “suspected” to a “confirmed right-wing extremist” group. One author of the report said Kramer had threatened him with physical violence.
In 2019, disciplinary proceedings were taken against Kramer after he was suspected of passing on strictly confidential information about internal tensions within his agency to journalists. A letter by Thuringia’s interior ministry, seen by Apollo News, wrote about Kramer being a possible “serious security risk,” who may have committed a “serious criminal offence.”
Nevertheless, Kramer has remained unscathed, his blatant abuse of office ignored, thanks to Thuringia’s former Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (of the far-left Die Linke party) and the former Interior Minister Georg Maier (of the Social Democrats), who have protected him. (The new prime minister of Thuringia, CDU’s Mario Voigt, was elected to office on Thursday, December 12th.)
“The Office for the Protection of the Constitution should be working in accordance with the rule of law,” according to law expert Volker Boehme-Neßler, but it seems that the rule of law is not respected at all when dealing with the AfD—which is ironic, given the fact that establishment parties regularly accuse the right-wing party of wanting to topple the democratic order in Germany.
Following the revelations made by Apollo News, the leader of the liberal FDP party in Thuringia, Thomas Kemmerich, called for an investigation into the accusations and said Kramer should be suspended from his office until he is cleared of all charges. According to Martin Henkel of the centre-right CDU,
If the allegations against Kramer are confirmed, then he is no longer acceptable as president of the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Whether the new government of Thuringia (consisting of the CDU, the Social Democrats, and the left-wing Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht) will deal with the situation, or indeed move to replace Stephan Kramer, remains to be seen—but the revelations themselves paint a bleak picture of how popular anti-establishment parties are being hounded with legal tools in a supposedly thriving democracy.
