Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania's Office for the Protection of the Constitution has more right-wing extremists than ever before - and wants more surveillance, not fewer Nazis

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution counted 2,030 right-wing extremists in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania for 2025 - more than ever since the survey began. The year before that there were 1,950 and the year before that it was 1,855. The curve has been pointing in one direction for years, and it continues to show this direction unbroken, regardless of which government is in Schwerin or which report an interior minister is currently presenting. What starts as a side note in a press conference has long since become a structural problem: a federal state in which the extreme right is not shrinking, but growing, while the state is looking for its answer primarily in new powers of observation - not in the question of why the scene is actually still there, organized and recruiting undisturbed.

Interior Minister Christian Pegel (SPD) calls the growth in politically motivated crimes "historic" - 3,317 cases in 2024, an increase of almost 75 percent compared to the previous year, of which 2,184 were attributed to the right-wing extremist spectrum, an increase of 59 percent. According to the ministry itself, the radicalization of minors is particularly alarming: in May, five young people between the ages of 14 and 18 were arrested nationwide on charges of membership in a terrorist organization, two of them from MV. The ministry's reaction to this was not to expand prevention work in schools or to provide more resources for youth social work in the affected regions. It was a call for the authority to also observe 14 and 15 year olds by the secret service.

This is always the same tension in German security policy: When the extreme right grows, the surveillance apparatus grows first - against everyone, not just against Nazis. Anyone who looks for radicalized young people in encrypted chats, TikTok comments and Telegram channels is inevitably building infrastructure that affects everyone who is there. The actual inaction towards the actual scene - organized right-wing extremist youth networks, which, according to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, are radicalizing themselves "almost invisibly" - is thus transformed into an argument for more state power, which then reaches Antifa structures, migrant self-organization or climate protests as well as, supposedly, the extreme right.

Nationwide, this is not a MV-specific pattern. The Federal Constitutional Protection Report 2025 counts 58,700 right-wing extremists in Germany — a jump of over 8,000 compared to the previous year, parallel to the AfD's membership growth to 70,000. Right-wing extremist acts of violence rose by 8.9 percent nationwide, and the police's total PMK numbers reached a new all-time high of 85,837 crimes. The pattern from MV - numbers are rising, the answer is to expand surveillance instead of disarming the scene - is repeated from Saxony to Hesse, from Bavaria to North Rhine-Westphalia. It's not a slip-up by individual interior ministers, it's government policy: allowing the extreme right to grow while at the same time arming the state with which it will later take over precisely these new powers when it is in power.

What is missing in Schwerin is not a clever algorithm for monitoring young people. There are consequences for the structures that recruit these young people: bans on clubs, consistent persecution of right-wing extremist concert and camaraderie networks, confiscation of the 374 legal firearms that, according to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, are solely in the hands of right-wing extremists in the country. Instead, the domestic secret service has more access to minors, while the scene itself continues to grow in terms of personnel and weapons. In this climate, anti-fascist self-organization is not an option, but rather the only reliable response to a threat that the state has been counting on for years without stopping it.

Right-wing extremist potential according to reports by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania: 2023: 1,855, 2024: 1,950, 2025: 2,030. Source: Ministry of the Interior MV / NDR.