Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister, is putting forward measures to tackle Germany's rising far right.
Amid a rising popularity of the far right in Germany and a wave of protests against them, Germany's Interior Minister Nancy Faeser unveiled a set of measures on Tuesday to deal with the threat the far right poses.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has shot up in the polls to become the second most popular party, sparking fears they could take control of some state governments.
What are the new anti-far-right measures?
A new law to allow the monitoring of financial flows to extremist groups
A ban on far-right extremists from owning weapons
A ban on semi-automatic weapons
Easier dismissal of public servants who are shown to be on the far right
An early detection system for foreign-backed botnets that "attempt to manipulate the free formation of opinions"
The idea behind the measures is to choke the funding networks of far-right organizations and make it easier to their meetings by passing on information from domestic intellgience to local authorities.
The package also aims to strengthen the country's top court by enshrining its rules into the constitution so as to stop the far right gaining influence over the legal system as has happened in other European countries.
What did the minister say?
"We want to use all the instruments of the rule of law to protect our democracy," Faeser said in a statement. "We want to break up extreme right networks and take away their income streams and their weapons."
The drive was presented in coordination with the heads of the German domestic intelligence agency (BfV) and the federal criminal police agency (BKA).
The AfD sparked huge nationwide protests after it was revealed that they had held a meeting with neo-Nazis in which plans were discussed to deport — of "remigrate" as they euphemistically called it — millions of people, including people born in Germany.
Faeser said that the hundreds of thousands who took to the street gave the government "an encouragement and a mandate."
The interior minister last year described the growth of the radical far-right in Germany as the country's "biggest extremist threat."
Aside from the rise of the AfD, there have been numerous instances of far-right extremist threats in recent years. This includes the revealing of far-right networks with the police and armed forces, and perhaps most notably the discovery of an alleged plot far-right plot by so-called "Reichsbürger" — citizens of the empire — to overthrow the democratically elected government.
Source: Dw
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