CDU and SPD security politicians warn AfD entry into Saxony-Anhalt government would compromise Germany's intelligence trust chain
Marc Henrichmann, the CDU lawmaker who chairs the Bundestag committee overseeing the BND, the Military Counter-Intelligence Service and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, told Handelsblatt that an AfD-led government in Saxony-Anhalt would expose Germany's entire security architecture to "considerable strain." SPD interior-policy spokesman Sebastian Fiedler said that putting a "far-right, Putin-friendly state government" inside that trust chain would force services to ensure AfD officials "ideally do not know who among them is being watched by the Verfassungsschutz." The AfD's Bernd Baumann dismissed the warnings as electioneering, on the heels of a 41 percent poll lead for the party in Saxony-Anhalt this week.
Marc Henrichmann, the CDU MP who chairs the Bundestag's Parliamentary Control Committee — the body that oversees the foreign intelligence service BND, the Military Counter-Intelligence Service (MAD) and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) — told Handelsblatt that AfD participation in a Saxony-Anhalt state government would put Germany's entire security architecture under "considerable strain."
"When a party with demonstrable links to far-right milieus and a strikingly Russia-friendly course takes on government responsibility, that puts trust to a serious test," Henrichmann said. The country's intelligence cooperation, he argued, depends on trust between the federal level and the Länder, between the services themselves and with international partners; the security agencies would need "to examine at an early stage how sensitive information, sources and operational structures can be best protected at all times."
Sebastian Fiedler, the SPD's interior-policy spokesman in the Bundestag, framed the same problem more bluntly. The AfD, he told Handelsblatt, could find itself sitting "in the form of a far-right, Putin-friendly state government in our own house." He went further on the operational consequences: "When far-right actors are in power, they should ideally not know who among them is being watched by the Verfassungsschutz."
AfD parliamentary manager Bernd Baumann rejected the warnings as a campaign manoeuvre and said the security politicians were "grasping at any straw to demonise the AfD, no matter how absurd the accusations."
The exchange comes against a hard polling backdrop: an INSA-style state poll this week put the AfD at a record 41 percent in Saxony-Anhalt, putting the party within reach of leading the next Land government for the first time. The Verfassungsschutz already classifies the AfD's regional chapters in several eastern states as confirmed extremist, and a Bundeswehr general warned on Friday that Russia remains the greatest security threat to Europe — assessments that the SPD and CDU say are incompatible with handing AfD ministers any role in the trust chain that runs from the Land interior ministries up through the federal services and on to allied intelligence partners.