The German government has banned the far-right magazine Compact, The newspaper is close to the most extremist wing of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which considers it to incite hatred against Jews and migrants and to serve as a platform for conspiracy theories and far-right movements. From now on, it will be illegal to sell it in paper form, as will the website and the dissemination of content from the associated television channel, which produces videos for social networks.
The announcement of the ban, which is extremely rare in a country that prides itself on being a guarantor of press freedom, coincided with a major police operation in four federal states. Police have been searching the offices of the two companies (Compact-Magazin and Compact-TV) and the homes of their managers and shareholders since early Tuesday morning to seize material and gather evidence.
“The ban is a serious blow to the far right,” said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser. “We are taking action against intellectual arsonists who are fuelling a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and migrants and who want to overthrow our democratic state.” The magazine’s website has already been disabled. “Our signal is very clear: we will not allow ethnicity to define who belongs to Germany and who does not,” stressed Faeser, adding that the German constitution “protects all those who are treated with hostility because of their faith, their origin, the colour of their skin or their democratic stance.”
Magazine Compact The magazine has been published monthly since 2010 and has a circulation of around 40,000 copies, according to the company’s own data, which have not been independently verified. The associated YouTube channel, Compact TV, has around 345,000 subscribers. The publication is well known in Germany as a central player in the propagation of the ideology of the so-called New Right, an ethno-ethnic, authoritarian state that at the same time distances itself from right-wingers who openly advocate National Socialism.
The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jürgen Elsässer, 67, is a former teacher who has veered from the far-left he supported in his youth to the far-right positions he now supports. A writer and activist, he is a regular at AfD events. He has described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “a statesman who defends his people, his country and his state.” His home was one of those searched by police this morning, as shown in a photograph of him opening the door for officers in a dressing gown.
In addition to the AfD, the companies Compact They also have close ties to the far-right Identitarian Movement and the Free Saxony party, which among other things calls for the independence of the eastern German state. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Germany’s internal secret service) had been monitoring the environment of the Compact and a few months ago it officially changed its classification from “presumed extremist” to “confirmed extremist” organization.
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The Ministry of the Interior has concluded that the publications and activities of Compact The organisation is said to be capable of inciting citizens and “encouraging them to act against the constitutional order” due to its “anti-Semitic, racist, anti-minority, historical revisionist and conspiracy theory content”. According to the Office, the media organisation is not only agitating against the current German government, a coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals, but against “the political system in general”. The secret services have confirmed that it uses “resistance and revolutionary rhetoric” and resorts to “distorting and manipulative representations”.
“A blow to press freedom,” says AfD
The magazine has a long history of highly controversial covers. On the cover of last November, the face of Minister Faeser appeared in the foreground, along with several men with foreign features in a threatening attitude and the headline “Asylum Bomb”, referring to the refugee reception policy, which is directly linked to the rise in crime in Germany. On a recent cover, the Reichstag, the parliament building, was shown sinking in a stormy sea with the caption: “Asylum, the flood”. The magazine usually calls prominent German politicians from all parties “criminals”, except those from the AfD. A recent issue featured the leader of this party in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, recently convicted of using Nazi slogans, on the cover together with Donald Trump and the headline: “2024, the change”.
AfD leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla have strongly criticised the decision of the German Interior Ministry and accused Faeser of abuse of power. “It is a severe blow to press freedom,” they said in a joint statement on Tuesday. The ban on the magazine does not directly affect AfD, but the party’s far-right wing has lost the media platform on which it disseminated its content and which wrote complimentary articles about its candidates for the regional elections in September. countries eastern Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg.
Not all party officials were in favour of the magazine’s association, which they felt could be detrimental to them due to its extremism. One of its MPs, Jürgen Braun, claimed on his X account that Elsässer’s “old communist style” was doing “more harm than good” to the AfD, but he nevertheless defended the magazine “against the unconstitutional ban by the radical left minister Faeser”. Braun refers to the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz as “a green-left dictatorship”. The far-right party is considered to be suspected of extremism and in recent months there has been a growing debate about whether it should be banned. In the European elections last June, the AfD came second with almost 16% of the vote, and polls predict it will win the regional elections in September with around 30% of the vote.
Banning a media outlet is extremely unusual in Germany, and evidence of extremism is carefully examined before such a controversial decision is made. Freedom of the press is enshrined in the German Basic Law (the Constitution) and any exceptions must be legally justified. There are two recent precedents, but these were from very small organisations and almost all of them were banned. amateur, as the internet platform Altermedia Germany, in 2016 and in 2019 two small publishing companies in the orbit of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which in Germany (and the EU) is considered a terrorist organisation.
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