Alice Weidel, leader of the AfD party, has backed the proposal by her party's top candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, to examine the abolition of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Germany's domestic intelligence agency). "Of course I support this proposal," Weidel told the news portal The Pioneer, according to a statement issued on Sunday evening. The agency, she said, "should be abolished in its current form, or at least fundamentally reformed."
Siegmund had said earlier on the podcast "ungeskriptet" that, should the AfD lead the next state government, he intended to look at the future of the state office for the protection of the constitution "with an open outcome." The AfD's Saxony-Anhalt state association is classified by the Verfassungsschutz as a "confirmed right-wing extremist endeavour."
Ahead of the state parliament elections on 6 September, the party and its lead candidate Siegmund hold a commanding lead over their rivals. An AfD single-party government in the eastern German state after the vote cannot be ruled out.
The Verfassungsschutz, or Office for the Protection of the Constitution, is according to Weidel being used for the "observation and suppression of the political opposition." She told The Pioneer it is not an independent authority: the heads of the Verfassungsschutz authorities at federal and state level are political officials and must follow the instructions of interior ministers.
Germany still needs a domestic intelligence service, Weidel said, but any such body must in future be barred from "taking action against the political opposition." She named cyber defence and counter-terrorism as possible tasks for it.
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