Hessen's Far-Right Crime Count Doubled Since 2022. The State's Answer Is a New Surveillance Law.

Hessen's domestic intelligence agency published its 2024 annual report this September, and the number that should have led every headline is this: politically motivated criminal and violent acts in the state rose from 1,243 in 2022 to 1,881 in 2023 to 2,527 in 2024 — more than doubling in two years, the highest figure recorded between 2020 and 2024. Of last year's total, 1,997 offences, seventy-nine percent, are attributed to the far right. Right-wing violent acts alone climbed from 48 to 52 year over year, while the state's own count of right-wing extremists actually stayed roughly flat, ticking up slightly to 1,790. Fewer people, doing more harm, more often. That is not a movement running out of steam. That is a movement that has stopped needing large numbers to generate large damage, because normalization does the recruiting work that used to require street mobilization.

Interior Minister Roman Poseck's framing at the press conference split the difference: he named right-wing extremism the state's single greatest threat while in the same breath foregrounding a rise in left-wing and Islamist offences to insist all extremisms deserve equal concern. That symmetry is the same rhetorical move used every year across Germany's sixteen state offices for the constitution — anchor the far right's dominance in the numbers, then dilute the political conclusion in the prose. The data does not support even-handedness. Seventy-nine percent of extremist crime in Hessen has one source. A minister who says his agency won't "play threats off against each other" is doing exactly that, in the direction that keeps the AfD's radicalization — which Poseck himself references, tied explicitly to a rising tide of right-motivated offences — from becoming the headline his own report proves it should be.

The institutional answer to this is not disarming that movement's infrastructure. It is a rewritten Hessisches Verfassungsschutzgesetz, passed this year, that expands what the same agency documenting the far right's growth is permitted to collect, store and share about the population it is supposedly protecting. More surveillance power for the state, framed as protection from extremists the state's own numbers say it isn't containing. This is the standard German security-state loop: name the far-right danger clearly enough to justify budget and legal expansion, then govern in a way that treats the resulting powers as generically applicable — used against antifascist camps, against pro-Palestinian occupations, against exactly the people organizing against the violence the report describes. The Frankfurt squat and Cologne Rheinmetall protest Poseck cites as left-extremist "escalation" in the same report get named in the same breath as neo-Nazi violence that is rising in real casualties, not symbolic ones.

None of this is unique to Hessen. Sachsen-Anhalt, Thüringen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Bavaria, NRW — every Bundesland's Verfassungsschutz report this cycle has told a version of the same story: record or near-record far-right crime counts, an official response built around new institutional powers rather than material consequences for the organizations and networks generating the violence. The AfD sits in every one of these state parliaments now, drawing on exactly the base whose criminality these reports track, while the security agencies tasked with confronting that base spend their political capital asking for more surveillance latitude instead of using the powers they already have to dismantle it. A "record high" repeated in sixteen separate annual reports is not sixteen separate stories. It is one national trend line the federal and state governments keep choosing to describe as a series of local anomalies.

The lesson for anyone organizing against this is not to wait on the Verfassungsschutz to solve a problem it profits from managing rather than ending. Community self-defense, documentation networks like the ones tracking racist and antisemitic incidents independently of state statistics, and direct confrontation of far-right infrastructure at the local level remain what actually interrupts this trend — because the state agencies charting its rise have shown, report after report, year after year, that naming the problem and fixing it are treated as two entirely separate jobs, and only one of them gets funded.

Sources

LfV Hessen: Vorstellung des Verfassungsschutzberichts 2024
Verfassungsschutz in Hessen – Bericht 2024 (PDF)
Hessen: Reform des Verfassungsschutzgesetzes beschlossen
hessenschau.de: Poseck warnt vor Bedrohungen aus vielen Richtungen