For years, German authorities have been telling us that the far-right threat was manageable. Yesterday, the numbers said otherwise. A classified report revealed that 60,000 individuals in Germany are now classified as far-right extremists, a figure that exposes not just the scale of radicalisation but a profound failure of surveillance and social foresight.
I walked through Berlin’s Neukölln district this morning, past a kebab shop where the owner, a Turkish-German man, told me he has stopped reading the news. “It’s like watching a fire move underground,” he said. “You don’t see the flames, but you feel the heat.” That heat is now quantified by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution: 60,000 people ready to act against the state.
To put that in context: it is larger than the German army’s active deployment in Afghanistan at its peak. It is a city the size of Flensburg, populated entirely by people who believe the republic is illegitimate. And yet, the intelligence services were caught off guard. How?
The answer lies in a slow cultural shift that has been happening in plain sight. Far-right ideology in Germany is no longer confined to skinheads in bomber jackets. It now inhabits polite dinner parties, suburban Facebook groups, and even police forces. The 60,000 figure includes 14,000 who are considered “violent” and 2,000 with “military training.” But the rest are the foot soldiers of a quieter insurgency: teachers, engineers and civil servants who have been radicalised online and in their local Stammtisch.
One can trace the roots to 2015, when the refugee influx cracked open a demographic fault line. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) normalised xenophobic language, and the security apparatus, still traumatised by Cold War-era leftist surveillance, failed to adjust. They were looking for bombs when they should have been looking at chat logs.
But let us not be too quick to blame the spooks. This is a social problem masquerading as a security one. The 60,000 did not appear overnight. They are the product of decades of economic anxiety in the former East, a weakened welfare state, and a mainstream media that gave airtime to bigots for the sake of “balance”. Every time a pundit asked “Why are people worried about immigration?” without challenging the premise, another soul slipped into the abyss.
The human cost is already being tallied. Last year, far-right attacks killed nine people in Germany. The victims were immigrants, politicians and random strangers caught in the crossfire of a cultural war. But the true cost is the erosion of trust. When one in every 1,400 Germans is considered an extremist, ordinary life becomes a lie. Your neighbour might be one of them.
What happens now? A reshuffle of intelligence chiefs? Increased funding for the Verfassungsschutz? These are bandages on a haemorrhage. The real work is sociological: rebuilding a shared story that makes people feel seen without resorting to hate. Germany has done it before. After the war, it built a democracy from ashes. But the fire this time is not in the Reichstag; it is in the hearts of 60,000 citizens.
At the kebab shop, the owner handed me a plate of dürüm. “They want to send me back?” he said, pointing to the street. “But I was born here. My children were born here. Where is ‘back’?” He laughed, but his eyes were cold. That is the look of a man who has realised the state cannot protect him. And that is the real intelligence failure.
