Thuringia's Far-Right Violence Never Went Away — It Went Routine

Ezra, Thuringia's independent victim-counseling service for the targets of racist, antisemitic and far-right violence, published its 2025 tally this June: 181 attacks, at least 292 people directly hit, including 24 children. That is not a spike. It is the fourth year running that the state has logged more than three racist or far-right attacks a week, and it comes one year after 2024's record of 206 — the first time the count broke 200 at all. The people counting this are not the police. They're a church-affiliated counseling service running on precarious federal grant money, because the state's own crime statistics undercount what victims actually report.

The pattern in the numbers is the story. Rassismus remains the dominant motive — 103 of 181 cases, 57 percent — followed by attacks on political opponents (33) and, worst trend line, queerphobic violence, which nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024 and stayed elevated into 2025. Erfurt, the state capital, remains the epicenter with 35 attacks, ahead of Jena and a newly visible cluster in Ostthüringen — Altenburger Land, Gera, the Landkreis Greiz — serious enough that ezra opened a new regional office in Gera in August 2025 just to keep up. These aren't isolated incidents from a scene fringe. Ezra's own staff describe a resurgence of organized neo-Nazi youth groups deliberately creating "Angsträume" — zones of fear — through visible aggression against leftists and queer people.

What makes 2025's numbers land harder than 2024's is the context ezra spells out: 2025 was not a "Superwahljahr." There was no state election to inflame things, no campaign season generating extra street violence — attacks tied to political office-holders actually fell from 8 to 3, protest-related incidents from 12 to 7. Strip out the electoral noise and the baseline of everyday racist and homophobic violence barely moved. That's the definition of normalization: violence that no longer needs a trigger event, because it has become part of the ambient texture of public transport, apartment blocks, and walks to work. Ezra catalogs a man beaten on a tram in Erfurt for wearing a Star of David, two Black women assaulted during a ticket check, a gay man kicked on the ground after being knocked into a concrete bin — all in 2025, all outside any election cycle.

And the state's response to this pattern is to threaten the infrastructure that documents it. Ezra operates through the federal "Demokratie leben!" program and Thuringia's own DenkBunt initiative — both funding lines now under political pressure, both vulnerable to exactly the kind of state election ezra's project lead points to nervously: Saxony-Anhalt's upcoming vote, where a shift in the governing majority could mean counseling infrastructure gets defunded outright. This is the actual mechanism of the far right's advance in Germany's east: not just winning votes, but making the agencies that track its violence unaffordable to keep running. When the AfD or its allies get a hand on state budgets, victim support is one of the first line items to go, because a service that can say "181 attacks, verified" is a service that keeps contradicting the story that the far right is a marginal, media-invented phenomenon.

None of this requires speculation about what might happen if fascists consolidate power in a German state — Thuringia already elected an AfD plurality in 2024 and lived through the coalition math that followed. The lesson from four years of ezra's data is that the violence doesn't wait for governing majorities to shift. It's already routine. The only open question is whether the people tracking it, and the counseling networks supporting the people living through it, still have a budget next year.

Sources

ezra: Jahresstatistik 2025 — Alarmierend hohes Niveau rechter Gewalt verstetigt sich in Thüringen
ezra: Jahresstatistik 2024 — Erstmals mehr als 200 Angriffe registriert
IDZ Jena: Thüringer Zustände 2025