NRW's Far-Right Crime Count Hit a Record. The State's Answer Was a Law That Watches Everyone Else.

North Rhine-Westphalia's interior minister Herbert Reul stood in the Landtag this year and called the numbers a "Dauerhöchststand" — a permanent record high. Far-right politically motivated crime in Germany's most populous state rose from 5,641 cases in 2024 to 6,268 in 2025. That's not a spike. It's the fourth straight year of growth, and it tracks a state that has spent that same stretch expanding surveillance powers rather than confronting why the far right keeps recruiting.

Reul's own numbers tell the story if you let them run past one year. NRW counted 3,453 far-right offences in 2022, 3,549 in 2023, then the count nearly doubled to 5,641 in 2024 and kept climbing in 2025. Antisemitic crimes hit their own record too — 786 cases, up 13 percent — a pattern that maps directly onto the far right's post-October-7 opportunism, using a war three thousand kilometres away as cover to normalize Jew-hatred at home. None of this is subtle. It's visible, documented, escalating, and it is happening under a CDU-led interior ministry that has had four years to notice.

What did Reul actually do with that data? He used the same press conference to spotlight a smaller, newer trend — far-left offences more than doubling from 1,187 to 2,418 — and folded both into a single "politically motivated crime" narrative of two extremisms in equal peril, alongside a new Verfassungsschutzgesetz that gives the domestic intelligence service more room to use AI-assisted monitoring against "extremist structures." A law drafted in response to a demonstrable far-right escalation is being sold as neutral, applicable to whichever "phenomenon area" the state decides to point it at next. Anyone who has watched a Verfassungsschutz office over the last decade knows which side of that ledger gets the softer touch in practice: the agency that spent years underestimating the NSU network and calling neo-Nazi cells informants has no track record of treating far-right violence as the priority its own numbers demand.

The sabotage incidents Reul cited — a cable tunnel fire near Duisburg, an attempted attack on a substation in Erkrath — are real and someone in NRW's antifascist and climate movements should be honest about what tactics build power and what tactics build headlines for the interior ministry. But scale matters: those are a handful of incidents inside a category still five times smaller than far-right crime, and the minister used them to justify a surveillance expansion that will fall hardest on organizers, not on the roughly 1,800 people NRW's own Verfassungsschutz already classifies as violence-ready neo-Nazis.

The lesson from four years of rising numbers isn't that Germany needs a bigger domestic intelligence budget. It's that naming the far right as the state's own chief threat — as Reul himself did, on the record — has to mean something more than a press conference before the next report shows the same curve, one year further up.

Sources

WDR: NRW meldet mehr Extremismus und neue KI-Gefahren
NRW Verfassungsschutzbericht 2025 (Innenministerium NRW)
NRW Innenministerium: Verfassungsschutzbericht 2023
Polizei NRW: Verfassungsschutzbericht 2025 press release