Why Germany's Government Can Spy on a Political Party
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You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. The biggest opposition political party in the German parliament is the Alternative for Germany Party. They are nationalist and anti-immigration, and they've been labeled as extremist by Germany's domestic intelligence agency.

That means the agency is now allowed to tap party members' phones and hire informants to monitor them to ensure they're not a threat to Germany's democracy.

It might sound surprising that a German government agency can spy on a political party. And the move has been criticized by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio called it, quote, tyranny in disguise. But Germany's constitution allows for these types of protections. And, as NPR's Berlin correspondent Rob Schmitz reports, it's a constitution that the U.S. helped to write.

September 1946, President Harry Truman's Secretary of State, James Burns, takes the podium in Stuttgart, a city ravaged by war and occupied by U.S. forces. We do not want Germany to become the satellite of any power or power or to live under a dictatorship.

foreign or domestic. This was later called the Speech of Hope, and in it, Burns signaled to his German counterparts that the U.S. was expecting them to draft a constitution that would rigorously protect democracy, human rights, and individual freedoms. The American people hope to see a peaceful and democratic Germany become and remain free and independent.

The American people want to return the government of Germany to the people of Germany. But the American people had strict terms. One point was non-negotiable, and that was that the new German constitution would be a strongly federalist regime. Russell Miller is a law professor at Washington and Lee University, an author of Constitutional Places about the history of Germany's constitution. He

He says the U.S. insisted Germany become a federal state, one where power was decentralized. So it has that significant advantage of splitting government authority, splitting state power, so that no single entity, no single actor can utilize all of state power at any one time. Miller says U.S. General Lucius Clay, who administered occupied post-war Germany, wanted to prevent the return of a dictator like Adolf Hitler.

And we're going to constitutionalize and entrench in the Constitution the tools we need to prevent that from happening again. And one of the distinct elements of this new post-war Constitution is a thing the Germans refer to as militant democracy. This means a democracy that fights any power that would threaten it. There's code everywhere.

built into the constitution that allows the German state to act in illiberal ways in order to protect liberalism and constitutionalism, to protect democracy. This somewhat paradoxical illiberal power is wielded by Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, known in German as the Verfassungsschutz.

Earlier this month, the office labeled the Alternative for Germany party extremist, giving the office special powers to surveil the party, which holds 151 seats in Germany's parliament. But it is a domestic intelligence service. That's what it does. And it provides intelligence for the government about things.

Maximilian Steinbeiss is founder of the Verfassungsblog, a Berlin-based forum for constitutional law. Steinbeiss says that while embedding a domestic intelligence service into the government to protect Germany's democracy may have looked good on paper, in practice, it's been clumsy and at times ineffective. The agency in charge of domestic intelligence has at times in recent history itself been infiltrated by extremists.

Steinbein says it's risky to believe the powers enshrined in the Constitution will protect the Constitution. Only the level of people's respect and education of their Constitution are able to do that, he says.

And the best place in Germany to educate oneself about the constitution is here, in Frankfurt, in what's known as the IG Faben building. Now it is Goethe University, but before Goethe University moved in here in 2001,

It housed the headquarters of United States Army in Europe. Nadine Doktor of the Fritz Bauer Institute gives a tour of this building, one that has undergone a few baffling reincarnations. It was originally built for IG Farben, a German pharmaceutical conglomerate that during World War II developed Zyklon B, the gas that the Nazis used to kill millions inside its concentration camps. After the war, the U.S. Army based its headquarters here.

And in 1948, the heads of the Western German states were gathered here in what was called the Eisenhower Room and ordered to draft a constitution. But when they did, Docter says, the Western German signatories were nervous about what to call this new constitution because of the Soviet occupation of the eastern part of the country.

Because they actually did not want to give up the eastern part of Germany and they hoped for a reunification and therefore they did not name it constitution. So they call it Grundgesetz. Grundgesetz means basic law. The name constitution seemed too permanent at the time. But after reunification in 1990, Germany's government decided to stick with Grundgesetz.

It's not known exactly why, but up until then, the document was serving its purpose. And according to at least a few scholars, this American-influenced basic law wasn't broke. So why fix it? Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Frankfurt. That's the state of the world from NPR. Thanks for listening.

Young men in America are shifting to the right, young women to the left, but that divide goes far beyond politics. I'm Charity Nebbe on the new season of the podcast Unsettled. We'll mine the gender gap in romance, education, health, and safety. Unsettled, a podcast from Iowa Public Radio, part of the NPR Network.

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