Germany's Spy Agency Just Confirmed What Sachsen-Anhalt's Victims Already Knew

Germany's domestic intelligence service released its 2025 annual report this month with a line that should embarrass everyone who spent the last decade calling the far right a fringe problem: 1,395 recorded right-wing extremist violent crimes, up 8.9 percent on 2024's already record 1,281. The extremist scene the agency tracks has grown to 58,700 people, nearly 9,000 more than a year earlier. Assault cases — the numbers where someone actually got hit, not just posted a slogan — rose again too, 985 xenophobic-motivated assaults versus 916 the year before.

None of this is abstract in Sachsen-Anhalt. The state's own interior ministry confirmed this week that 2025 brought the highest number of politically motivated crimes ever recorded there: 4,144 cases, with 3,007 of them attributed to the right. In 2018 that annual count sat at 1,846. It has climbed almost every year since. The Mobile Opferberatung, the counseling service that actually sits with victims instead of producing slides for ministers, logged 229 cases of racist, queerphobic and antisemitic violence in the state last year — and its own staff say that's a floor, not a ceiling, because the far right's strategy isn't always violence you can log. It's presence: enough intimidation that people quietly move, or stop going outside as who they are.

Meanwhile in Saxony, the number of registered far-right demonstrations tells the same story from a different angle. Two hundred thirty-three in 2020. A dip to 88 the following year as the pandemic scrambled everyone's calendar. Then the climb resumes — 145, 367, 360 — and in 2025 it hits 513, more than double where it stood five years earlier. This isn't a scene retreating into anonymous online radicalization, though the Verfassungsschutz report notes plenty of that too. It's a movement confident enough to organize in public, repeatedly, in the same streets where antifascists have been showing up for two decades.

The state's answer to all this is a familiar ritual: a minister reads out the numbers, calls the trend concerning, and proposes another awareness campaign or funding line for a prevention office that will publish next year's numbers showing the same trend continuing. The Verfassungsschutz itself is not an antifascist institution — it's a surveillance agency that has spent as much energy monitoring the anarchist left as it has the neo-Nazis actually setting fires and swinging fists, and its own bureaucratic caution kept the AfD off the "confirmed extremist" list for years past the point the evidence justified it. When even this apparatus can no longer paper over the trendline, that tells you how bad the underlying reality is, not that the system built to catch it works.

What actually pushes these numbers down isn't a better-worded government report. It's the counseling networks that track incidents the police don't record, the antifa groups that physically show up when a march is announced, and the tenant unions and mutual aid structures that make it possible for a targeted person to stay rather than quietly leave town. The state will keep measuring the fire. Building the infrastructure that starves it of oxygen is still, as always, on us.

Sources

Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz: Zahlen und Fakten Rechtsextremismus
Tagesschau: Verfassungsschutz – Zahl extremistischer Personen so hoch wie nie
MDR: Rekordwert – politisch motivierte Straftaten in Sachsen-Anhalt