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The president of Germany’s parliament has promised a comprehensive security review after it was claimed more than 100 right-wing extremists had passes to the building.
An investigation by Bavaria’s public broadcaster (BR) revealed that more than a fifth of the parliamentary employees of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party had either been publicly named as extremists by intelligence services or were members of designated extremist organisations.
Bärbel Bas, Bundestag president, promised a wide-ranging response to the findings, which have raised concerns over the security of German institutions and the country’s ability to withstand threats to democracy.
“We have to think about further — including legal — regulations to ensure protection and security inside parliament,” the Social Democratic MP told the Berlin-based Tagesspiegel newspaper.
“[We] must take action here,” said Yvonne Magwas, Bas’s deputy from the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU), in a post on X. “Freely elected members of parliament are one thing. Rightwing extremist employees are another.”
Magwas called for closer co-operation between parliament and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the domestic intelligence agency, analogous to Britain’s MI5, which monitors extremist activity and can designate German individuals as extremists.
BR’s report, published on Tuesday, said some employees whose names it found on leaked parliamentary pass lists were members of the extremist Identitarian Movement, which believes in the ethno-nationalist segregation of different cultures. It identified others as “neo-Nazis”.
The report did not name any individuals, but it said it had identified advisers to half of the 78 AfD MPs, including officials working in the cabinet of the party’s leader, Alice Weidel.
In a statement, Weidel dismissed the report as “ridiculous and far-fetched” and said it was part of an attempt to discredit her party.
The AfD, which is Germany’s second most popular party after the CDU according to polling, has suffered following revelations of connections between its leadership and Identitarian leaders in an investigation in January.
The party faces a key legal decision this week. In a Münster court, judges are set to decide an appeal case against a BfV decision to classify it as suspected of extremism — a move that would unlock invasive surveillance powers against the party.
With European elections in June and regional elections in the autumn that the AfD is on course to win, the debate around extreme right-wing sentiment in Germany has become increasingly fractious. Some politicians — including Social Democrat and Green MPs — have called for the AfD to be banned.
There is little consensus on how to deal with, or even classify, insurrectionary movements — or how to distinguish them from an AfD currently supported by one in five Germans.
In December, German authorities charged 27 right-wing extremists, members of the Reichsbürger movement, with attempting a coup, the focus of which would have been the Reichstag, the parliamentary building. The plotters had conducted reconnaissance missions of the Reichstag and intended to gain access with the help of sympathetic AfD passholders.
Rules on access to the non-public areas of the Bundestag’s parliamentary estate are notably loose compared with those in the institutions of other major democratic powers.
Currently, only those who have criminal records are screened to see if they pose a security threat. No other vetting is carried out.
The estate comprises the Reichstag building — the imposing Wilhelmine-era building now topped with an iconic glass dome designed by Sir Norman Foster — in central Berlin and a sprawling series of nearby office buildings housing MPs and staff.
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