Thuringia's Ezra Count Just Hit 206 Attacks. The AfD Calls That a Talking Point.

Four attacks a week. That's what the independent counseling service ezra logged across Thuringia in 2024: 206 documented cases of right-wing, racist, and antisemitic violence, at least 315 people directly hit. It's the highest number ezra has ever recorded, beating the previous record — set two years earlier — by a wide margin. Police statistics, which count far less because officers routinely fail to classify these acts as politically motivated at all, put the same phenomenon at a fraction of that.

The geography tracks the politics with uncomfortable precision. Attacks in Gera doubled year over year. Erfurt, the state capital, again topped the list with 46 cases. Landkreis Sonneberg — the district that elected Germany's first AfD Landrat, Robert Sesselmann, in 2023 — has stayed a hotspot ever since his win, exactly as ezra's project lead Franz Zobel predicted at the time: when the far right wins institutional power, its footsoldiers feel safer doing the beating.

This isn't abstraction. Ezra's report singles out a case in Erfurt where four young men beat a group of friends because one of them carried a Young Left tote bag. It names the Gerasche Jugend, a neo-nazi youth clique that shows up weekly at AfD member Christian Klar's Monday marches in Gera and has assaulted a gay couple in the street. It documents the arson attack on former SPD local councillor Michael Müller's house in February 2024 — after which Müller left the state for good. Queerphobic attacks in Thuringia nearly tripled over the previous year. None of this reads like isolated incidents. It reads like a youth movement rebuilding the street presence that 1990s neo-nazi gangs once had, with social media doing the recruiting this time.

Ezra draws the 1990s comparison deliberately: rural areas losing any counterweight, young perpetrators, and — the genuinely new ingredient — a parliamentary party supplying ideological cover instead of just tabloid panic. The AfD doesn't need to order these attacks. It needs to keep winning, keep normalizing "remigration" as a talking point, and let the street do the rest. That's precisely the mechanism a Princeton study on hate crime and AfD voters already found: nearly half of AfD voters endorse hostility toward refugees even when it turns violent.

The funding for ezra itself runs out at the end of 2025. A state watching its documented attack rate climb every year for a decade is currently deciding whether to keep paying for the only agency that counts the bodies accurately. That decision will tell you more about Thuringia's actual priorities than any Landtag debate on "wehrhafte Demokratie" ever will.

Sources

ezra: Jahresstatistik 2024 background text
IDZ Jena: Thüringer Zustände 2025
taz: Statistik zu rechter Gewalt in Thüringen (Sonneberg hotspot)