Double standards

There are political parties with which we do not agree. Some ideas and measures that these parties tackle can be dismissed as not so important or a waste of taxpayers' money [1], only a few seem sensible [2]. Accordingly, it is difficult to take sides with these parties when they are wronged. When an assassination attempt is made on a politician (or whoever), this should actually be strongly condemned by everyone who becomes aware of it. Should. Unfortunately, what is currently happening in reality is somewhat different [3]. This applies not only to physical attacks, but also to other contexts such as verbal attacks, election interference, undemocratic statements or censorship (see below). One is almost tempted to ask the provocative question as to which is currently the more acute problem: violence from the right or violence against the right.

It is questionable, for example, how much violence on the internet actually comes from the right [4, 8], and the party in the Bundestag that has been most frequently affected by violence in Germany in recent years has been the AfD [5]. The problem also occurs in other EU countries, one example being the murder of Francesca Donato's husband, Donato is a member of the European Parliament for the right-wing populist Italian party Lega Nord [9]. In the past, the European Parliament had cut off the microphone of a German MEP who is a member of the AfD [14]. After the assassination attempt on Slovakian Prime Minister Fico, it emerged that it was not a single perpetrator, the USA could be involved; content was deleted from the perpetrator's laptop while he was in custody [15, 16]. In the run-up to the attack, Fico had dissolved the allegedly one-sided public broadcaster in Slovakia [51], launched an investigation into the coronavirus measures in the country [52] and expressed solidarity with Hungarian Prime Minister Orban against foreign policy influences in both countries [53]. He had also correctly predicted that there would be an assassination attempt on a leading Slovakian politician [54]. However, the USA strongly condemned the act [17]. 

Even if one is only supposedly right-wing, i.e. has actually condemned right-wing ideas in a statement, this is portrayed as trivializing right-wing violence, the so-called Nazi comparison is not always allowed [10], but sometimes it is [11]. Some people are allowed to call all kinds of people Nazis or say anything, others are not [11, 12, 13].

The "Human rights instead of right-wing people" campaign by Lower Saxony's sports clubs raises the question of whether currently active "right-wing" parties are incompatible with human rights [7], or whether it is not precisely these parties that have recently been trying to protect human rights, for example compulsory vaccination [2]. In China, at any rate, the Greens are considered far-right [7]. 

The question is the same as with the Fico assassination: what is still an act of an individual, what is already systematic [14, 18]? Is the promotion of democracy in Germany and the EU perhaps going too far [19]? In 2021, for example, the German government spent at least 22.6 million euros of taxpayers' money on combating right-wing extremism [19]. In a children's program about right-wing extremism, ZDF mentions the AfD one after the other [20, 21], and electoral fraud against the AfD is also alleged to have taken place in 2024 [22], while in 2020 the then Chancellor Angela Merkel called for the Thuringian state election, in which the AfD had won, to be reversed [23, 24]. The press already knows about trials against "right-wing" politicians before verdicts are announced [42], there is censorship against the right, even in the run-up to the European elections [43, 44]. If a farmer refuses to sell to members of the Green Party, he is charged with sedition and the police remove his poster [24], while discrimination against unvaccinated people was permitted nationwide, according to the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency; only contraindications could constitute protection against discrimination, but the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) had (deliberately?) defined these relatively narrowly [25, 26, 27]. Political dissidents are therefore not protected by the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency [25]. Extremist, it seems, is what the ruling party declares to be extremist [28].

In this context, the question must be allowed as to whether one must necessarily show solidarity with left-wing extremists or sympathize with them in order to be allowed to oppose right-wing extremists, as Federal Interior Minister Faeser apparently does; she had published an article in the Antifa magazine [29]. Antifa is also listed in the Office for the Protection of the Constitution [55]. Faeser had also called for right-wing extremists to be deprived of their income; she wants to take resolute action against right-wing extremism [30]. Even though the Federal Minister of the Interior has increasingly warned against left-wing extremism in recent times [31], this has been less prominent in the media. Right-wing extremists are seen as the greatest threat, although the difference in numbers is minimal: there are only around 3,000 fewer left-wing extremists in Germany than right-wing extremists [32], although the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has already included the AfD, which is still not banned by the Federal Returning Officer, as a "suspected case" [33]. If these people are omitted, the picture is in fact quite different (see Table 1):

Nevertheless, the Tagesschau, for example, only mentions the content on right-wing extremism in the context of the Federal Report on the Protection of the Constitution [34]. 

Although Statista compares right-wing and left-wing extremist crimes, it chooses an unusual presentation [35]. The first page of the data table shows acts of violence, with right-wing extremists leading the sad statistics. Damage to property is listed below this, with left-wing extremists in the lead. Other offenses are only listed on page two, and you have to click through to see them. Propaganda offenses are also listed on the second page, as are other crimes that disappear behind the paywall and are not defined in more detail. One could ask the question here whether right-wing propaganda is dealt with more severely than left-wing or anti-right-wing propaganda [20, 21]. If, on the basis of this question, these crimes are excluded from the statistics and the crimes that are not quantified in more detail are evaluated separately, even though all crimes are of course morally reprehensible and condemnable, a completely different picture emerges (see Table 2) [35]

Now the left-wing extremists are in the lead when it comes to clearly defined crimes [35]. So there are obviously two problems in Germany, and the difference is less clear than it may seem in the mainstream media [33, 35]. In Bavaria, over 100 crimes were recorded by "climate stickers" [36], and climate stickers have also obstructed emergency vehicles in the past [37]. 

The reporting on extremist crimes by official agencies of the federal government is also interesting, here again the Office for the Protection of the Constitution [38] (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Development of left-wing extremist criminal and violent offenses in the years 2012 to 2022 (Source: https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/DE/themen/linksextremismus/zahlen-und-fakten/zahlen-und-fakten_node.html).

If the approximately 15,000 propaganda offenses are also included here, and if these are deducted, the right-wing extremist offenses would be in the same range as those reported by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution for left-wing extremists [39] (see Fig. 2). 

Fig. 2: Development of right-wing extremist criminal and violent offenses in the years 2012 to 2022 (Source:  https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/DE/themen/rechtsextremismus/zahlen-und-fakten/zahlen-und-fakten_node.html).

Against this background, the sad truth is probably that there are currently two threats of roughly equal size in Germany, to which roughly equal numbers of people can be attributed, and that the number of crimes committed by both camps has risen in recent years [40]. A double standard does not seem to be appropriate here, even if politically motivated crimes only make up a very small proportion of the approximately 6 million crimes committed on German soil each year [48] (see Fig. 3) and the number of anti-Semitic crimes per year in Germany is fortunately also relatively low [49]. 

Nevertheless, the Federal Government now wants to take even stronger action against the right and has published a document to this effect; the powers of the Federal Constitutional Court and thus presumably also of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution are to be further expanded, instruments of a defensive democracy are to be "sharpened"; powers to transfer data are to be expanded in order to "encourage further measures by the authorities; potential threats are to be recognized and the corresponding procedures "de-bureaucratized"; the Federal Constitutional Court is to be given access to the real estate transaction register; entry and exit are to be prevented if necessary; a central reporting office for criminal content on the Internet is to be set up, including options for deletion; the Federal Ministry of the Interior is already setting up an early detection unit; the federal disciplinary law was recently reformed in this context. be prevented; a central reporting office for criminal content on the internet is to be set up, including options for deletion; the Federal Ministry of the Interior is already setting up an early detection unit; federal disciplinary law was recently reformed in this context; there are to be further bans against "the right-wing scene"; the Weapons Act is to be reformed; "signals" are to be sent to the population to encourage their political engagement; the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) is to be further strengthened in this regard; the German Sports Youth and the Federal Institute for Sports Science are also involved; the fight against anti-Semitism is to be supported; a contact point for municipal officials and elected representatives is to be set up [41]. How this reads and what it might remind us of is for everyone to decide. Does this mean that the ruling party or "the center" is itself extreme [45, 47, 50]? No, that cannot be the case. That's what the government-sponsored bpb said [46]...