Who Watches the Watchers? Germany's Scramble to Bar a Far-Right Government From State Secrets

BERLIN — For decades, European security officials have treated the possibility of a far-right party governing in Germany as a theoretical problem for the continent's intelligence architecture. The election in Saxony-Anhalt has turned that abstraction into an immediate operational question, and the answer is being worked out in classified corridors in Berlin, Brussels and Paris.

The trigger was the regional vote held on September 6, 2026, in which the Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 44 percent of the ballot and became the first far-right party to win a German state election since 1945. The party, led at state level by co-leader Ulrich Siegmund, is now attempting to assemble a coalition government. Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany's 16 Länder, which enjoy substantial autonomy — including authority over policing and domestic intelligence — under the country's federal system. That detail is at the heart of the current alarm.

The concern is straightforward once stated plainly: what happens when a state's domestic intelligence service is monitored by the very people it is meant to spy on? Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the BfV, has spent years running informants inside the far right. An AfD-led state government with control of the interior ministry could, in principle, use routine intelligence channels to identify them.

"That is the nightmare scenario," said Jacob Ross, a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. "If the AfD takes the interior minister's job, which oversees police forces and intelligence, they would potentially gain access to the files concerning their own surveillance. One of the great fears in the intelligence community, and in German politics more broadly, is that they would then move very quickly to find out who inside their own ranks is reporting on them."

Official figures say the far right is already the single biggest domestic threat to German democracy. In its annual report published in June, the BfV said the number of right-wing extremists in the country had risen significantly, to 58,700, a figure it linked to a surge in support for the AfD. The bureau's own tracking of the party has been contentious: it classified the AfD as a right-wing "extremist group" last year, a move suspended in February after the party mounted a legal challenge. The national party now carries the label "suspected extremist" pending a court ruling.

Its Saxony-Anhalt chapter, however, retains a "confirmed extremist" designation. That status carries consequences: the local branch is actively monitored by federal intelligence, including undercover officers. Those officers are precisely the assets most at risk of exposure should the party gain control of the state's security apparatus.

The stakes are not confined to German domestic politics. The wider fear is that sensitive material on German, European and NATO security arrangements could migrate to Moscow. Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said before the election that he opposed handing classified information to AfD officials should they enter regional government, pointing to what he described as their undeniable close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The backdrop is a war in Ukraine and a rising wave of hybrid attacks attributed to Russia, an environment in which allied governments are scrutinising the reliability of every partner.

Anton Shekhovtsov, director of the Austria-based Centre for Democratic Integrity and a specialist on the European far right's connections to Russia, considers those fears well founded. With Hungary's Viktor Orban out of power, he argues, the AfD is now the largest and strongest pro-Russian party anywhere in the European Union — a position built on extensive, long-standing links with Moscow. In his view, that makes the party a structural weak spot for both Berlin and Brussels as they formulate policy toward Russia.

France appears to have moved first among the allies. According to the French investigative and satirical weekly Canard Enchaîné, France's domestic intelligence agency notified its German counterpart last week that it intended to withhold sensitive information on far-right extremists and on Russia in the event that the AfD forms a government in Saxony-Anhalt. The disclosure is notable for two reasons: it confirms that the concern has migrated across borders, and it suggests that existing intelligence-sharing arrangements contain discretionary channels through which sensitive material can be withheld when a partner is judged too compromised.

Whether such withholding is legally or practically possible remains open. Federal authorities control much of the classified reporting on foreign and security policy, but the BfV's own operational files on extremism sit in a grey zone between federal competence and state-level interior ministries. Experts question whether Berlin can draw a durable line around the AfD without damaging the intelligence cooperation that requires routine sharing with state police and security bodies.

For the coalition talks, the issue is now a condition rather than a controversy. Any partner entering government with the AfD inherits questions about who has seen which reports, and about which officers were reporting to the BfV. The party, which is fighting the extremist designation in court, has succeeded in suspending that designation once already; the pending ruling could redraw the boundaries of what may lawfully be shared.

For European allies, the episode raises a question that will outlast Saxony-Anhalt's government: if a party deemed a security risk wins a state election, who decides what it is allowed to know? Germany has spent seven decades building safeguards against the far right entering power. The new test is whether it can also build them against the far right obtaining knowledge.