NRW's Political Crime Numbers Just Hit an All-Time High — the Cops Are Still Calling It Balance

North Rhine-Westphalia's domestic intelligence agency released its 2025 annual report this spring, and the topline number is stark: 13,645 politically motivated crimes recorded across the state, up 27 percent from 10,772 the year before — the highest count on record. Interior Minister Herbert Reul called it a "permanent record high" and reached for the language of balance, warning about "extremism from all sides." That framing does real work, and it's worth taking apart.

Look at what's actually in the numbers. Far-right political crimes rose from 5,641 to 6,268 cases — still, by a wide margin, the largest single category, and still the category state officials themselves call the "greatest threat to democracy." Reul's own estimate puts roughly 4,500 far-right extremists active in NRW, 1,800 of them assessed as willing to use violence. Antisemitic offenses hit a fresh high. None of that is symmetrical with anything.

Left-coded political crimes did rise sharply too, more than doubling from 1,187 to 2,418 — a real jump, and the agency points to sabotage incidents on rail infrastructure and an attempted attack on a substation in Erkrath as the headline cases. But scale and category matter here. A cable fire that delays commuter trains is a property crime against infrastructure. Far-right violence in these same reports runs overwhelmingly through assault, arson at homes, and intimidation aimed at people — refugees, Jews, and anyone visibly left of center. Counting "damaged campaign posters" in the same bucket as firebombs, then presenting the resulting sum as evidence of two-sided extremism, is how a security agency launders a political argument into a statistic.

This is also the same Verfassungsschutz that spent the last two years fighting in court for the right to call the AfD "gesichert rechtsextremistisch" — confirmed right-wing extremist — while the party added tens of thousands of members nationally and currently sits positioned to enter government in Sachsen-Anhalt after September's election. NRW's own report says the far-right scene is working "systematically" to radicalize the next generation, through youth camps and family gatherings, embedding ideology in children too young to be criminally liable. That's the actual growth story in this data. The "record year for extremism" headline conveniently buries it under both-sides arithmetic.

None of this means state repression of the left is imaginary or fine — sabotage prosecutions and the expanded surveillance powers in NRW's new Verfassungsschutzgesetz, in force since April, will be used against organizers, not just against arsonists. But the agency publishing these numbers is not a neutral referee; it is the same apparatus that spent a decade slow-walking recognition of a violent far-right movement it is now, reluctantly, forced to describe as its top concern. Read the report for the data. Don't borrow its frame.

Sources

WDR: NRW meldet mehr Extremismus und neue KI-Gefahren
Verfassungsschutzbericht NRW 2025 (PDF)
Tagesschau: Verfassungsschutzbericht 2025 — Zahl extremistischer Personen so hoch wie nie
Polizei NRW Pressemitteilung