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by Felícia Cabrita and João Amaral Santos
The German authorities are investigating threats of an attack against the President of the Republic of that country, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, organized by a group of the extreme right with possible links with Portugal and requested the collaboration of Portuguese counterparts, Nascer do SOL said.
The case is in the hands of the National Antiterrorist Unit (UNCT) of the Judicial Police (PJ), which, following electronic traffic records on the websites of nationalist groups, located the suspects and searched their homes last Thursday. The operation was concentrated in the Greater Lisbon region.
The German authorities have taken the death threats directed at Frank-Walter Steinmeier – from the Social Democratic Party (SPD in German) – very seriously, but they have also targeted lawyers with left-wing German overtones. In recent months the history of attacks of this type against personalities with charges of fighting the extreme right has been increasing. In July last year, the weekly Welt am Sonntag reported that at least fifteen people, including politicians and journalists, received death threats through emails signed by the National Socialist Underground group (NSU 2.0), which killed ten people. and made two racists. bombings between 2001 and 2007, before allegedly being dismantled by authorities in 2011
The operation in Portugal precisely follows the efforts of the German authorities to curb what they consider to be an increase in the influence of far-right movements, with links to groups and individuals located in other European countries. The number of “politically motivated crimes” – as they are called in Germany – committed by the extreme right in that country reached the second highest level since 2001 (only exceeded in 2016, the year the refugee crisis ‘exploded’) , with the registry of more than 23 thousand cases.
The disclosure of ‘Operation AfD’ lifts the ‘veil’ to the authorities
The investigation comes two weeks after Der Spiegel magazine reported that the Office for the Protection of the Federal Constitution (BfV in German), the German federal secret services, had decided, in late February, to put the extremist party under surveillance. Alternative Law for Germany (AfD), which joined Parliament four years ago as the main opposition party.
According to German media, the BfV’s decision to monitor AfD came as a result of suspicions that the party was trying to violate the German democratic constitution after its platform had been scrutinized for two years.
Following the leak, the German court ordered the investigation suspended. The Administrative Court of Cologne declared that the federal services did not “sufficiently safeguard” the secrecy of the operation and determined that the disclosure of the surveillance program interfered “unacceptably” with the legality of the opportunities between parties in the middle of the electoral year, although the authorities they clarified that the surveillance would not include deputies and candidates for the next regional and federal elections; parliamentary elections in Germany are scheduled for September 26.
The authorities suspect that the leak of information came from the secret services themselves, which has brought back the debate about the presence of far-right sympathizers within the German security forces, despite attempts at ‘cleansing’ between 2017 and 2020 Last year Angela Merkel The government acknowledged having identified 377 right-wing extremists who were part of the ranks of the state forces (319 of which were in the police).
Although the investigation into the AfD has been canceled, the federal cabinet is expected to keep other surveillance measures underway, notably the AfD branches in the former East Germany and the roughly 35,000 members of ‘A Asa’, considered the most radical arm. and neo-Nazi from AfD. – the group officially disbanded in 2020 but its members remain affiliated with the party.
Walter Lübcke’s murder awakens ‘ghosts’
The death threats against Frank-Walter Steinmeier arise when the murder of the conservative German politician Walter Lübcke is still fresh in the memory of the Germans because he defends the reception of refugees.
On the evening of June 2, 2019, Walter Lübcke, 65, a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU in German), Chancellor Merkel’s party, was quietly smoking a cigarette on the terrace of his home in Kassel, Hesse, when he was shot in the head from a close range, becoming the first politician to be assassinated by the far right in Germany since the end of World War II.
The perpetrator of the shooting was arrested a few days later. Stephan Ernst, 47, was already a longtime acquaintance with authorities who, since the late 1980s, had been considered a potentially dangerous neo-Nazi sympathizer. Despite the record, Ernst even tried to set fire to a foster home for Turkish families only 15 years old, the state intelligence services had reduced surveillance in recent years.
Stephan Ernst was sentenced in January this year to life in prison and can apply for parole after 15 years in detention, the harshest sentence in the history of the German judicial system. Markus Hartmann, 44, also went to trial for teaching Ernst to shoot in the woods with the murder weapon, although he always maintained the version that did not know the true intentions of the murderer during the trial. Hartmann was sentenced to 18 months in prison for illegal possession of a weapon.
