Thuringia's Far-Right Violence Never Dipped Below Triple Digits Since 2015 — and the AfD Now Runs the County Where It Spikes

The independent victim-counselling service ezra has tracked right-wing, racist and antisemitic violence in Thuringia every year since 2013. The line only moves one direction: up, then plateaus at a level that would be a scandal anywhere else. Forty-five attacks in 2013. Above 100 by 2015. A record 206 in 2024. Even the 2025 figure of 181 — technically a decline — sits higher than every year before 2022. This is not a spike. It is the new floor.

The county-level detail is the part that should worry anyone who thinks the AfD's local wins are just symbolic. When Robert Sesselmann became Landrat of Sonneberg in 2023 — the AfD's first district-council win in Germany — ezra recorded attacks there jumping from 4 to 20 in a single year, making the smallest county in the state a hotspot ahead of Jena, Weimar and Eisenach. Ezra's project lead was blunt about the mechanism: when perpetrators get institutional cover, the inhibition threshold drops and the number of attacks rises. This isn't correlation dressed up as causation. It's the stated theory of the people who counsel the victims, watching it happen in real time in the one county that gave the far right executive power.

The gap between what ezra documents and what police statistics register is itself the story. Thuringia's official PMK (politically motivated crime) figures for the same period logged only a fraction of the violent cases ezra confirmed through direct victim contact — dozens of assaults that never made it into the state's own count as "Gewaltkriminalität". That's not because ezra pads its numbers; German victim-counselling networks report only cases they can substantiate with the person affected. It's because police categorization routinely files racist assaults as generic assault, or doesn't ask the question that would surface the motive at all. Every time a state minister says the numbers are "concerning," remember he's citing an undercount.

None of this happens in a vacuum from electoral politics. Racism was the documented motive in the majority of ezra's 2023 cases, and attacks on asylum shelters rose sevenfold year over year as deportation debates, payment cards for asylum seekers and forced-labour schemes moved from AfD talking points into mainstream governing-party policy. The far right doesn't need a monopoly on violence when the political center keeps adopting its vocabulary and calling it pragmatism. Sonneberg is the preview: what an AfD district government normalizes today, a state government normalizes tomorrow.

The response ezra itself calls for is not complicated — sustained funding for victim counselling, honest crime categorization, and yes, a serious ban process against the party its own project lead names as "a central support community for right-wing violence." None of that is radical. It's the minimum standard for a state that claims the numbers concern it. What's radical is treating a decade of triple-digit annual attacks as background noise until an election forces a headline.

Sources

taz: Statistik zu rechter Gewalt in Thüringen
ezra Opferberatung Thüringen: Statistiken
ezra Jahresstatistik 2025
ezra: Jahresstatistik 2024 Hintergrundtext