Hesse's Far-Right Crimes Jumped 38 Percent in a Year. The State's Answer Was to Let the AfD Keep Talking.

Hesse's Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz spent years insisting the far right was a manageable problem, one violent fringe among several. Its own numbers keep making that framing harder to sell. The 2024 report, presented by CDU interior minister Roman Poseck in September 2025, recorded 1,997 right-wing extremist criminal and violent offenses in the state — up 38 percent from 1,445 the year before, and the highest figure since 2020. The 2025 report, presented last month, shows a pullback to roughly 1,700 offenses — still the second-worst year on record, with more than half of the state's nearly 1,900 identified right-wing extremists classified as willing to use violence.

The number that should worry people more than the crime count is the one about who gets watched. Hesse's AfD was only added to the Verfassungsschutz report for the first time this year, after the Wiesbaden administrative court ruled in June that the domestic intelligence agency may treat the state party as a confirmed 'suspected case' of right-wing extremism. That ruling came on the back of statements from Hesse AfD figures the court itself called clearly indicative of extremist aims. And still: the party is polling at 20 to 22 percent in the state, according to political scientist Dorothée de Nève, even as it struggled to field candidates in four out of five municipalities in the last local elections — a party whose ground organization is thin but whose vote share keeps climbing regardless.

This is the mechanism, not a contradiction. A state agency can spend a decade documenting a rising curve of racist and neo-Nazi violence — the Bundeswehr's own counter-intelligence service (MAD) logged a 26 percent jump in right-wing extremism cases in 2025 alone — while the party that channels that current into parliament keeps growing precisely because the violence and the politics are treated as separate problems requiring separate paperwork. Poseck can call the AfD's national polling numbers an 'alarming development' in the same press conference where he reports the classification that should, on paper, disqualify the party from public office entirely. The contradiction isn't a bug in German Verfassungsschutz procedure. It is the procedure.

The report's other move is familiar to anyone who's watched a state agency manage its own findings: pair the right-wing numbers with a left-extremism scare to balance the ledger. Hesse counted 283 left-wing extremist offenses in 2025, an 83 percent jump the ministry foregrounded almost as hard as the right-wing figures — most of it property damage tied to protests against an AfD event in Neu-Isenburg. Two entirely different categories of harm, one rhetorical trick: 'we're cracking down on extremism' sounds even-handed right up until you notice which side accounts for the overwhelming majority of the state's political violence and which side is organizing in the Landtag.

None of this is unique to Hesse. It is the standard German pattern: document the far right meticulously, classify it correctly when courts force the issue, and then let electoral arithmetic do what enforcement won't. The lesson isn't that Verfassungsschutz reporting is worthless — the numbers are real and useful. The lesson is that naming a threat is not the same as acting against it, and a party can be a documented extremist suspect and a serious contender for a fifth of the vote in the same news cycle. That gap is where the actual danger lives, and no amount of statistical honesty from an intelligence agency closes it. Only organizing does.

Sources

FR: Gefahr von rechts — Verfassungsschutz Hessen beobachtet Neonazis und die AfD
LfV Hessen: Vorstellung des Verfassungsschutzberichts 2024
Zeit: Was will die AfD in Hessen und wo steht sie?
Migazin: MAD warnt vor mehr Rechtsextremismus