Just a hair over a week ago (ten days to be exact), an official arm of the German government declared the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party – now polling as Germany’s most popular party in the country – a ‘right-wing extremist’ group.
Yeah, right – so big deal, no? I mean, they’ve been calling them that forever.
Actually, it was a big deal. It made the epithet an official label, opening the party and every last one of its members to constant, sanctioned (instead of surreptitious) government surveillance. It was also the first necessary step in the process of banning the party from politics/existence completely.
In other words, a patently obvious scheme to remove the competition.
People on the ground there believe the surging popularity of AfD panicked the government into the authoritarian move to save their own butts.
This morning, the Federal Office…
