Hessen's Court Confirmed What the Spreadsheets Already Showed: The AfD Is the State's Problem Now

Hesse's domestic intelligence agency released its 2025 report this August with a headline number built for cable news: extremist crimes down eight percent, from 2,527 to 2,321. Interior Minister Roman Poseck stood next to it and called the drop reassuring. Three-quarters of everything counted was still right-wing. Violent right-wing offenses, specifically, fell to a five-year low of 30 — while left-wing violent offenses almost tripled, from 15 to 44. Guess which number made the press release's second paragraph.

That framing is the whole trick of a Verfassungsschutz report: it hands you a table and lets you build whatever story you want out of it. Poseck built one where "all extremism" gets flattened into a single scoreboard, so a tripling of a much smaller left-wing number can sit next to a shrinking right-wing one and come out looking balanced. It isn't. The Hessian far-right still logged 1,748 criminal and violent acts last year — fifty-eight times the left's violent total, and still more offenses than every other category in the report combined. A state official calling that picture "reassuring" is not analysis, it's damage control for a scene that keeps growing its membership (1,850 people now, up from 1,790) even while individual case numbers wobble.

The report that actually matters came from a courtroom, not a press conference. In June, the Verwaltungsgericht Wiesbaden upheld the LfV's classification of the Hessian AfD as a confirmed right-wing-extremist Verdachtsfall, rejecting the party's suit outright. The ruling cites AfD officials' own statements — floor speeches, social media posts, named Landtag members — as the court's own evidence that the party works against Germany's constitutional order. This is not a smear by antifascists. It's a state court, reading a state party's own words back to it, and concluding the obvious.

What's revealing is how the state responds to its own findings. Poseck's answer to a confirmed-extremist party sitting in his Landtag is not expulsion from parliamentary privileges or funding — it's a new Verfassungsschutzgesetz letting his agency run online searches and hold minors' data longer. Surveillance expands. The party under surveillance keeps winning seats. Nationally, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz's own tally of AfD-linked Verdachtsfall personnel jumped from 11,300 in 2023 to 28,000 in 2025 — the agency's own statistics confirming a near-tripling in two years, while the institutional response stays limited to watching, cataloguing, writing reports. The state keeps generating paperwork proving the threat is structural and keeps responding to it as if it were procedural.

None of this is an argument for trusting the Verfassungsschutz as an ally — an agency that spent decades surveilling the left while funding neo-Nazi informants (Thüringer NSU-Komplex, anyone) doesn't become trustworthy because this year's numbers happen to confirm what antifascists have said for years. It's an argument for reading past the headline. The CSD protests in Wetzlar, Fulda and Friedberg that Poseck's own report names — organized call-outs from Die Heimat, the renamed NPD, against queer people in small Hessian towns — are the actual texture of what "1,748 offenses" means on the ground. The courts can classify a party. Classification alone protects no one marching through Friedberg with a rainbow flag. That's still our job.

Sources

Hessisches Ministerium des Innern: Verfassungsschutzbericht 2025 vorgestellt
hessenschau.de: Verfassungsschutzbericht für Hessen
Bundesministerium des Innern: Verfassungsschutzbericht 2025 (PDF)