Tag: germany

Former Spymasters, a Taped Mouth, and the Market in Cross-Border Snatching

Just after midnight on New Year’s Day 2024, a man and his two children stood near the harbor in the Danish town of Gråsten, watching fireworks over the water a short walk from the house where the children had been living. A witness later told a court in Hamburg that several gray cars had drawn up near the quay in the last minutes of the old year, and that around a quarter past midnight masked men rushed the family and knocked the father, then forty-nine, to the ground. The same witness described one child being loaded into a car while the other fought back, held by two men who carried it by the limbs. The six attackers dragged the children through forest and mud, and both feared for their lives. One of them managed to press an alarm button that Danish police had issued the family after an earlier scare, and cried out into a night where officers were already searching with dogs and flashlights.

It did them no good. By the time the vehicles reached the German frontier the children had been moved to a camper van bought for the operation, and the men had taped the ten-year-old boy’s mouth and bound his thirteen-year-old sister’s hands. One of the kidnappers, an Israeli, told the children to keep quiet or be killed. They were carried more than eight hundred kilometers south to a farm in Baden-Württemberg and held in a mobile home until their mother arrived to collect them and take them to Hamburg.

The mother is Christina Block, heiress to the Hamburg steakhouse dynasty built on the Block House and Jim Block chains, a group of nearly eighty restaurants and a five-star hotel, with several food producers besides, employing some 2,400 people. She is on trial in Hamburg, charged with aggravated child abduction, grievous bodily harm and unlawful detention, facing up to ten years, alongside her partner, the former television sports presenter Gerhard Delling, accused of helping her. She denies all of it.

The men she is accused of hiring were not ordinary criminals. The prosecution’s case and the testimony of the operatives themselves describe an operation brokered by the former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service and carried out by veterans of Israel’s. The skills used to seize two children on a Danish quay were the skills of the state, available for a fee.

The war that produced that night had been running for a decade. Christina Block met Stephan Hensel through friends in 1999 and married him in 2005, and they had four children. Hensel had trained as a banker and gone to work inside the Block business, moving into the meat trade, and then, as happens to executives who fall out of favor in the family’s world, he lost the job. He blames the dismissal on the patriarch Eugen Block and holds it responsible for the collapse of the marriage. They separated in 2014 and divorced in 2018, and the fight moved to money and to the right to decide where the children would live.

It was the children who moved first. In early 2021 the eldest daughter left her mother and went to her father after a holiday on Sylt. That August, Hensel kept the two youngest in Denmark after what was meant to be an ordinary visit, telling the youth welfare office that Block beat the children, a charge she rejects as freely invented. She answered that Hensel had turned the children against her and was holding them away from her and the rest of the family. Hensel’s position was that the children lived with him by choice. A youth-office worker would later testify that his isolation of them looked like a demonstration of power.

On paper, the German courts sided with the mother. The Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg gave Block the authority to decide where the children lived and ordered Hensel to hand them back. He refused, and a Danish court had already granted him provisional custody, so Denmark declined to enforce the German order. In February 2023 a Danish court rejected the return of the children outright and left Block with a visitation right she could not exercise. “I still have no contact with my children, although I have a contact order,” she told Bild in late 2024.

The operation grew in this gap. Germany and Denmark run on separate legal systems, and Denmark sits outside the European framework that would have forced automatic recognition of the German ruling, leaving the matter to the slow machinery of the Hague Conventions. A German court had named Block the parent entitled to the children and could not deliver them across a border fifty kilometers from Hamburg. After two years of stalemate, German jurisdiction lapsed on the ground that the children had settled with their father, and the case passed to Denmark. A woman holding what a German court had called the right to decide where her own children lived watched the German state prove unable to enforce its own decision.

That failure is real, and it is the part of the story that the tabloid account of a monstrous heiress erases. It does not make what happened on the quay defensible, and the record does not let Block stand as a wronged innocent either. The children had run toward their father, not away from him. Her defense in court is that holding the German custody order, she could hardly have kidnapped her own children, and that she had been talking to the security firm only about an assignment for a family hotel. Against that sits her own phone, which investigators say held a diary of schemes to recover the children, from a hired makeup artist to a body double for the father’s new partner. She called it blue-sky thinking that kept her sane, and said she only drove south after someone told her to come quickly because it was about her children.

The money behind all of this sits inside a second family war that the coverage mostly leaves out. Block has been a shareholder in the Eugen Block holding company since 2011, yet she does not control the fortune, and she has been in open conflict with her own father over the succession, pushed at times out of the company’s management. Eugen Block, in his eighties and still the group’s dominant figure, told the Hamburger Abendblatt he had nothing to do with the abduction and could say nothing about it. The war over the children was being waged by a woman who had been sidelined inside her own family’s empire by the man who held its purse.

The operatives tell a story that begins long before the camper van. Block and Delling, by the Israeli side’s testimony, started looking for ways to retrieve the children in 2021. An early attempt to brand Hensel and his lawyer as pedophiles failed. Investigators drawing on the security firm’s own data found that in September 2023 there was an effort to plant incriminating material on Hensel, and the charge sheet carries the allegation that the firm was to place fabricated child-abuse material on him to break him in the custody courts. A security contractor is separately accused of watching Block’s Hamburg house so the children could not flee once they were brought there. By the time of the New Year’s operation this had stopped being a parent’s desperation and had become a sustained private campaign, run by professionals, against a man and his household.

The person who connected a Hamburg heiress to an Israeli intelligence cell was August Hanning. He ran the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, from 1998 to 2005, and afterward went into private security. Prosecutors say he put Block in touch with former Israeli intelligence officers and, with a retired police officer, took more than €100,000 from her in connection with the job. A letter from the veteran German private investigator Werner Mauss to the domestic intelligence service in January 2025 named Hanning as the man who had approached the former Shin Bet chief Yaakov Peri to assemble a team. Days later, by the same account, Peri offered to tell the court about Hanning’s role if his confidentiality were guaranteed. Hanning denies all of it, saying he never contacted Peri and knew of no payment.

His name surfaced because of an accident that the author reported on last week. On 6 October 2026 Hanning, the former chief of Germany’s intelligence service, was arrested on suspicion of treason and espionage, a case that grew out of the search of his home in the Block investigation. The man accused of brokering the abduction of two children was found to have a second life worth a separate indictment – and a movie. For the children, the simpler fact holds. The broker was a former chief of the German state’s intelligence service, and the state he once served had lost track of what he did next.

The firm named in the German courtroom is Cyber Cupula Operations, an Israeli outfit whose team, by the reporting around the trial, included former Mossad operatives and ran to at least eight people, most of them Israeli. The man described as the head of the abduction cell is David Ram Barkai, a veteran of the Israeli military’s Unit 504 and, by various accounts, a former Mossad agent. Over four days of testimony he told the court that Block and her lawyer had paid him and his men around €220,000 to take the children from their father and deliver them to her. Prosecutors have charged a second Israeli, Tal Sasson, and sought the arrest of Barkai and of Keren Tenenbaum, who left Germany. One member of the team, arrested earlier in Cyprus, told the court he had taken part not for money but to help the children, having been told their father was evil. He apologized to Hensel, who accepted it.

Above the cell, the name German media attached to the operation is Yaakov Peri, for six years the director of Israel’s internal security service and later a government minister, now president of a private intelligence firm called CGI. Bild reported that Peri assembled the Israeli team. In testimony, Block was asked whether she knew Peri’s name or knew of seven million euros said to have moved to CGI, and she said nothing. Peri could not be reached, his wife saying he was in a clinic. CGI’s chief executive told Der Spiegel the firm had nothing to do with the affair and did not know how its name had become attached to it. Block, for her part, has said the operatives acted on their own and that her late mother had engaged them.

CGI is a business-intelligence company of the kind Israel’s security establishment has produced in quantity, staffed from the alumni of its spy services and sold to governments and corporations around the world. The same firm was hired to review security after the 2019 theft of jewels worth more than a hundred million euros from the Green Vault in Dresden. These are not fringe operators. They are the commercial afterlife of state intelligence, and their client list is a question of who can pay. The defense in Hamburg has leaned on a related point, its lawyer telling the court that none of this could have happened if the police had done their job, which is a strange thing for an accused to argue and an accurate description of the vacuum these firms were hired to fill.

The method on display in Gråsten belongs to a wider pattern. Seizing a person by force across a border and delivering them to where someone else has decided they belong is the privatized retail form of something states have made routine. On 3 January 2026 the president of the United States announced that American forces had struck Venezuela and “captured” its president, Nicolás Maduro, flying him out of the country “in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement” to stand trial in Manhattan, a fifty-million-dollar bounty on his head. The abduction in Denmark happened two years before that, so the point is not imitation. The taboo against reaching across a border to take a person has dissolved at the top, and the men who built their careers performing such operations for states are now for hire to anyone with a grievance and the means. A sidelined heiress bought it for a custody fight.

The custody fight ended within days. A German court ordered the children returned to Denmark, and Block complied. She had held them for a long weekend. In the time since, a Danish family court has given Hensel sole custody, and a higher Danish court has barred Block from any contact with the children. Danish authorities say the two children want no further contact with their mother. They now live with their father at a secret address under changed names.

The operation worked, for about a day, and the working of it destroyed the thing it was meant to secure. A woman who believed, with a German court order behind her, that the law had abandoned her children reached outside the law and lost them completely. The children were the one party in this with no lawyers and no say, taped and bound in the back of a van while adults who had run the secret apparatus of two states collected their fees. The courts that could not move two children to safety across fifty kilometers of border proved able, once they had been taken by force, to move them only further out of reach.

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Europe Simply Needs War

Merz does not care about the fate of Germany or its people. Here we are on precisely the week of October 5th and Merz is saying that Russia staged some armed attack on Leipzig airport. He is publicly stating that Germany is effectively at war with Russia. The EU is crumbling and the AfD has beaten Merz to a pulp, so its now time to go out with a bang and declare war has already begun.

Here is Merz declaring that Brussels is indeed very concerned about the rise of of what they call far-right parties that are anti-EU with the common thread being their migrant policies. The nature of that concern has also now shifted significantly. The current anxiety in EU institutions is not just about the imminent “exit” threat, but also I hear they fear a growing strategic objective by these parties to weaken and obstruct the EU from the inside.

They don’t worry the exit scenario, since they are pros at manipulating elections as they did in Italy, UK, Hungary and Romania or use the courts to block separatists as in Barcelona. They are now also examining the draft strategy document from AfD lawmakers, which shifts away from calling for an immediate German withdrawal from the EU and eurozone. Instead, it proposes prioritizing the reform of the EU into a “union of sovereign nations,” and advocates for a membership referendum only if those reforms fail. In other words – take back power like over migration.

This shift is partly pragmatic. The AfD is currently isolated in the European Parliament, and more moderate right-wing parties, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, have openly criticized the AfD’s “anti-European” stance. Dropping the exit demand makes the AfD a more palatable ally for these larger far-right groups.

This strategic change creates a more difficult problem for the EU than a simple exit campaign that they can fight with rigged elections. Here, a referendum requires a party to convince a majority to take a radical step. In contrast, internal disruption only requires enough power to block, dilute, and redirect policy from within the system. The EU’s existing tools, which were designed to reassure citizens about the benefits of membership, are ill-suited to counter this kind of internal gridlock. This is why they rigged both the Romanian and Hungarian elections.

Parties like the AfD and Hungary’s Fidesz can exploit unanimity rules to veto EU-wide decisions. For example, Hungary has blocked crucial sanctions and loans for Ukraine, and the far-right Patriots for Europe group has worked to dilute the Green Deal and the Migration Pact. This dysfunction then becomes campaign material for these parties, who position themselves as defenders of national interests against a “paralyzed” Brussels. This was why the Hungarian government has repeatedly accused Ukraine of interfering in its elections to remove Orban. Sources in Washington reveal that Ukraine is also interfering in US elections funding the opposition of anyone in Congress who is against sending money to Ukraine. Israel has been doing the same.

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The Spy Chief Who Was Caught by Accident

In February 2003, the intelligence that August Hanning’s service had handed to Washington turned up in Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council, in the case for invading Iraq. On the morning of 6 October 2026, masked officers walked Hanning, now eighty, out of his house near Münster in handcuffs, on suspicion of attempted treason and espionage. The secrets that undid him had been sitting on a hard drive in that house, and some of them had been shared with Berlin by its allies. The United States is the first of those allies.

Among the roughly 2,000 classified files the former German intelligence chief is accused of keeping at home were reports from foreign partner services. They covered Iran’s nuclear program and the Russian military, and some carried the secret markings of allied agencies. The Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, is one of the main channels through which American intelligence moves into and out of Europe, which makes the files a retired spymaster is accused of trafficking, in part, Washington’s.

Hanning led the BND from 1998 to 2005 before moving to the Interior Ministry. Arrested alongside him in Bavaria was a second man, identified under German privacy rules only as Manfred D., once Hanning’s office manager and afterward chief of staff to a run of later BND presidents until this past March. Prosecutors say the two agreed in the spring of 2010 that Manfred D. would feed his former boss secret material for money, and that he did so until June 2022, handing over about 2,000 classified documents, many of them the briefings prepared for the weekly intelligence meeting at the Chancellery, where the heads of Germany’s security agencies trade assessments. Hanning was to profit from the material through the private consulting business he built after leaving the state. In at least one case he used it to prepare an analysis for a foreign intelligence service, and he kept up a long exchange with a second foreign officer.

What that costs the service’s partners is the part German officials are not trying to soften. A leak on this scale is treated inside the trade as an absolute catastrophe: a partner that shared its intelligence with the BND now has to assume this intelligence may have left the building, and the ordinary answer is to cut the supply. The United States is the largest of those partners. American intelligence reaches the BND, and flows back out of it, on the understanding that Berlin can hold it, and a former chief hoarding partner-service reports on a drive at home is that understanding coming apart. Inside the BND and allied services the fear that secrets were leaking through Hanning had circulated for years without proof. The proof arrived by accident.

German security officials call it a chance find. In September 2025 the Hamburg state criminal police searched Hanning’s home and offices for evidence in a case unrelated to espionage, the abduction of the children of the steakhouse heiress Christina Block. Sorting the seized material, investigators came upon the storage device holding recent top-secret BND files that Hanning had no right to possess. The federal prosecutor took the case in May 2026. The abduction trial is its own lurid business, and one strand of it reaches Hanning: the Hamburg prosecutor says a security firm called System 360, run by Hanning and a retired city police officer, had tried to seize the same children in 2022 and to smear their father with a planted drive of child-abuse images. Hanning denies it, and is reported to have accepted more than 100,000 euros for linking Block to a private Israeli intelligence company that carried out the job.

The intelligence that reached Powell came from a single man. Rafid Ahmed Alwan, an Iraqi who turned up at a Munich refugee center in 1999, told German intelligence a story about mobile biological-weapons laboratories in Iraq; the BND passed his reporting to the Americans in 2000 while refusing to certify it and declining to let the CIA near the man. The one American who met him, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, came away doubting him, and the German service doubted him too. In December 2002 a cable reached CIA Director George Tenet carrying a letter from Hanning, confirming that the BND would not permit direct American access to the source. Powell built the biological half of his case on Curveball all the same. The laboratories did not exist, and the source was later written off as a fabricator. The partnership that fed Washington the mobile-lab story is the same one whose files a kidnapping warrant has now found on a retiree’s hard drive, and the official who signed the letter to Tenet is the man in the dock.

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Germany’s Former Spy Chief Arrested In Biggest Espionage Scandal Of The Century

August Hanning, former head of the German BND foreign intelligence agency, which is Germany’s equivalent of the CIA, has been arrested on espionage charges in a shocking and unprecedented situation in which a country’s top intelligence officer and head of a national spy agency was caught spying for another state.

The 80-year-old faces formal charges including “treasonous espionage, spying out state secrets, attempted treason, and espionage” – according to German media. While an official statement from the prosecutor’s office has not yet identified the foreign service he’s suspected of working for, Israel has been widely named, also given this past well-documented associations and links.

Curiously, Hanning’s arrest at his home in Nordwalde in western Germany comes a full two decades after he left the top intelligence post. He served as BND chief from December 1998 to November 2005 before moving to the Federal Interior Ministry.

In short, it appeared he not only illegally held on to thousands of classified documents, but used them over the years to peddle influence – including preparing a presentation for a foreign intelligence service based on the internal government docs. What’s more is he was covertly obtaining new documents even many years out of office.

Israeli media itself is highlighting that the way Hanning was caught actually involves shady Israeli operatives:

The affair rocking Germany involves thousands of classified documents, suspected payments, contacts with foreign intelligence officials and a surprising connection to Israel: The investigation that led to its exposure actually began with the case involving the abduction of millionaire heiress Christina Block’s children, in which Israelis were also implicated.

International reports at the time: “According to prosecutors, August Hanning, who once headed Germany’s domestic intelligence service, allegedly approached Peri [ex-Shin Bet head], now owner of the Israeli consulting firm CGI Group, to organize a team of Israeli operatives for the abduction. The team allegedly assaulted Hänsel, kidnapped the children, smuggled them into Germany, and handed them over to Block. A Danish court later ordered her to return the children to their father.”

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Merz Pledges €1.35 Billion More to Ukraine, Vows to Keep Fighting Russia…The War Machine Grinds

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz arrived in Kyiv on 4 October 2026 by special train, as air-raid sirens and explosions sounded over the capital, and used the trip to lock in another round of weapons, money, and industrial cooperation rather than any concrete path to a ceasefire.

Berlin’s package, as described by German officials to Reuters, is straightforward. Germany will release €1 billion in military aid already budgeted and €350 million for repairs to Ukraine’s energy system, while finalising a joint production deal covering drones and related systems. Merz travelled with Economy Minister Katherina Reiche and executives from defence and energy firms, including companies tied to interceptor drones and longer-range weapons.

The visit was not a diplomatic probe. It was an arms-and-industry mission staged under fire.

Merz’s own framing left little room for de-escalation. “If Russia is not stopped, it will turn its war machine against us sooner or later,” he said on arrival, according to German reporting of the trip. He told President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that Ukraine could continue to count on German help. That is the logic of indefinite support: Russian power must be worn down in Ukraine, or it will eventually be turned on Europe, so the flow of interceptors, long-range systems with ranges above 1,000 kilometres, and repair money cannot be allowed to stop.

Winter attacks on power plants are treated as a reason to spend more, not as a reason to force a settlement before the heating season.

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German Students on Strike Against Mandatory Military Service

German youth do not feel like going to war for their Globalist overlords.

We have been reporting here on TGP about how the lust for rearmament has befallen Europe in the wake of the war in Ukraine.

As is usually the case, Germany is one of the most engaged countries in this process.

In order to have sufficient manpower to make the Bundeswehr a formidable fighting force, Berlin is floating the idea of reinstating the compulsory military service.

Read: POWDER KEG EUROPE: German Men Now Have to Ask the Army for Permission to Leave the Country for More Than Three Months

But before such decisions are even implemented, students and teachers across the country are going on strike to protest against the possible reintroduction of the draft.

BBC reported:

“One of the organizers of the strike, Bela Breitner, from School Strike Against Compulsory Military Service said the federal government was ‘serious about gradually reintroducing compulsory military service’.

At one protest in Hamburg, demonstrators waved flags and held up banners emblazoned with the words ‘We won’t take part in your wars’.”

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Gates used vaccine funding to pressure governments – Merkel

Bill Gates turned the vast financial resources of his foundation into political leverage, using its wealth to pressure governments to spend more on vaccination, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said.  

In the Meckel & Matthes podcast released by Handelsblatt earlier this month, Merkel warned that uncontrolled corporate power could leave governments doing “what the corporations order.” She said she first saw the danger not with the rise of artificial intelligence, but when Gates set up his foundation, which had more money “than the development budgets of major industrialized countries.”  

An unelected billionaire had effectively put himself on a political footing with elected leaders, according to Merkel.  

“He was suddenly received at least as warmly by some heads of state in the world as I was,” Merkel recalled. “And then he also had the power – by virtue of his money – to exert moral pressure.” If governments failed to provide enough funding for the international vaccine alliance, “we were immediately in a bad light,” she said.  

Gates would then tell African leaders that “Merkel had been stingy this year,” she recalled. “And with that, he had gained considerable power.”  

The vaccine alliance Merkel referred to is Gavi, a public-private partnership involving governments, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank and private donors. The Gates Foundation was a founding partner, providing $750 million in seed funding, and has since contributed billions of dollars to the organization. Germany became a major Gavi donor during her chancellorship, pledging €600 million for 2016-2020 and another €600 million for 2021-2025.  

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Friedrich Merz Again Calls For An End To Online Anonymity

German Chancellor and CDU leader Friedrich Merz is once again advocating for an end to online anonymity.

Merz spoke at the Chancellery in Berlin on Tuesday, where he received the winners of the 61st federal “Jugend forscht” youth research competition, and took their questions. The event was streamed live by the government.

One of the participants asked Merz about introducing a real-name requirement on the internet, and how it could be reconciled with the work of informants, investigative journalism, and the need to sometimes be able to communicate anonymously.

Merz’s answer did not address the question of journalism at all. Instead, he spoke about the difficulties in establishing who is behind an online message, and who to hold responsible, as well as the proliferation of messages generated by bots.

“Please, nobody come to me with free speech. This has nothing more to do with free speech,” Merz said. Free speech, he continued, is “at best” a libertarian understanding of politics out of parts of the United States, “that I personally do not share.”

A liberal society, he went on, must be able to protect its citizens “from false information, from personal denigration, from discrimination.”

Merz, who “grew up in the analog world” said he often wonders if the digital world should be allowed to have “completely different rules.”

In the old world, he said, if a newspaper published false information, one could take action against it, and this, he said, created a certain “hygiene.”

In the digital world, Merz is unhappy that people can use pseudonyms, abbreviations, or made-up names, “and we have enormous difficulty establishing at all who is responsible for it. Is it the platforms or is it the authors themselves? And if so, who actually are the authors?”

He mentioned the “coarsening of manners” and the role of bots in generating messages. According to Merz, his party’s (CDU) competitor, AfD, had benefited in Saxony-Anhalt from messages generated by bots.

It is essential to protect personality rights and “our democracy,” Merz said.

He did allow that there are good reasons to allow for anonymous expression, but did not go into any of them.

It’s also important to note that Merz was not announcing any new policy, bill, or law, and was answering a question from a teenager.

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Non-Germans Considerably Overrepresented in Bavarian Murder Suspect Statistics

Non-Germans are massively over-represented among suspects in murder and manslaughter crimes in the German state of Bavaria, police data uncovered by the AfD has found.

Murder and manslaughter are on the rise in Bavaria, the conservative south-eastern German state, and new police statistics suggest the state’s comparatively small but growing migrant population is a contributing factor.

According to the data acquired by the immigration-sceptic Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, there were 405 cases of murder and manslaughter in the state in 2025, up ten per cent from the 366 recorded in 2024.

Of the 466 suspects identified for those crimes in 2025, only 246 held German citizenship, despite German citizens being the overwhelming majority of residents in the state.

A total of 220 suspects were said to hold foreign citizenship, representing over 47 per cent of suspects, up from 42 per cent the year before. The figures suggest — given 18 per cent of people in Bavaria are non-German citizens — foreigners are considerably more likely to be suspected of murders and manslaughter than German passport holders.

Die Welt reports that the largest single group of suspected killers in 2025 cases were Romanians, followed by Syrians, Turks, and Afghans.

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Germany: Top CDU Politician Floats Banning AfD Days After Its Landslide Win

Barely after the ballots were counted in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany’s political establishment began discussing possible legal action against the election winner.

After the AfD captured 43.8% of the vote, senior CDU politician Hendrik Wüst called for the first structured federal-state examination that could eventually open the door to a party-ban proceeding, the German press reports.

The move comes at an extraordinary moment. Voters handed the AfD its strongest result in the state’s history while Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU crashed to just 17.2%, leaving Germany’s governing conservatives facing uncomfortable questions about why so many voters have walked away.

Instead of brushing aside the ban debate, Wüst wants to formalize it. The North Rhine-Westphalia premier has proposed a working group bringing together federal and state officials, constitutional lawyers, intelligence authorities and other experts to examine the AfD and possible legal consequences.

Wüst insists the outcome mustn’t be decided beforehand. The group, he says, could recommend a prohibition proceeding, some other legal response or ultimately something short of either.

Even so, the timing has poured gas on an increasingly heated argument. A party that had just received the backing of nearly 44% of Saxony-Anhalt voters now finds itself at the center of renewed discussions over whether Germany’s institutions should explore removing it from electoral politics altogether.

Wüst says constitutional protection, not electoral arithmetic, should determine the issue. If investigators conclude that the legal conditions for banning the AfD have been satisfied, he argues, Germany’s constitutional institutions would have a duty to pursue the matter.

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