Factbox-Why has German spy agency classified far-right AfD as 'extremist'?

By Thomas Escritt and Holger Hansen

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's spy agency on Friday classified the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as "extremist", enabling it to step up monitoring of the country's biggest opposition party, which decried the move as a "blow against democracy".

The decision by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) was based on findings in a 1,100-page confidential report compiled by experts.

Here are some of the key findings and pieces of evidence cited, according to security officials who have seen the report:

ANTI-MIGRANT INCITEMENT

Party officials frequently described citizens of immigrant background as "passport Germans" and used terms such as "population replacement" to describe what they say is the impact of large-scale migration.

Migrants were often compared to invasive species or described as "knife migrants" or "knifemen".

In October 2023, the party leadership accused the Greens in posts on social media of having a "Population Replacement General Plan", which carried echoes of "General Plan East", the Nazis' label for their plan for a genocide of Jews and other ethnic groups in eastern Europe during World War Two.

Party co-leader Alice Weidel described knife crime in July 2023 as something exclusive to "people from a totally alien culture, from violent cultures ... It doesn't exist in our culture ... It only exists in the cultures of Africa and the Middle East".

Senior party official Hannes Gnauck said on August 11: "We have to be able to decide again who belongs to our country and who doesn't. There's more to being German than a citizenship certificate... We are linked by an invisible band that you don't have to explain."

RACISM

The party youth wing ran a campaign, involving a song, a mini-game and a video clip, that depicted Black men as violent in "an extraordinarily racist way".

ISLAMOPHOBIA

Asserting that there had been 761 mass rapes in Germany the previous year, Weidel in 2023 said: "What we are seeing on German streets is jihad. A religious war is being fought against the German population."

ATTACKING GERMAN DEMOCRACY

AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla described the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022, and the lack of an immediate response, as proof "that this country can't be sovereign. That's not how you react when you're attacked."

He later described mainstream parties as "American vassals".

The Nord Stream pipelines, which brought Russian gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany, were blown up shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Gareth Jones)