BERLIN — A growing rift between Chancellor Angela Merkel and her own intelligence chief has raised questions about whether Germany’s security apparatus is too sympathetic to the far right to effectively monitor its links to neo-Nazi groups, becoming the latest test for an ever-weaker and embattled chancellor.
Last week, the country’s domestic intelligence chief, Hans-Georg Maassen, questioned the authenticity of a video showing an immigrant being chased by far-right protesters, directly contradicting the chancellor.
Since then, calls for his resignation have increased. But on far-right forums and rallies, Mr. Maassen is being celebrated as a hero and a defender of “truth.”
German news media reported this week that the chancellor wants him gone, but that step could threaten her fragile government, which depends on support from both the left and the increasingly emboldened right wing of her own coalition.
A meeting between Ms. Merkel and the other parties in her coalition ended inconclusively last week and is due to continue Tuesday.
Spies are paid to be invisible — to stay under the radar of the public eye and above the fray of politics. Germany’s chief spy has done neither.
Mr. Maassen’s unapologetic stance has done more than win him status on the far right. It has called into question his political neutrality and revived longstanding concerns about a tradition of negligence inside the German security services when it comes to far-right extremism.
His predecessor was dismissed six years ago, after it became clear that his agency had destroyed documents pertaining to a series of far-right terrorist attacks on immigrants, which had initially been blamed on other immigrants and become known as the “kebab murders.”
An underground neo-Nazi group, the N.S.U., killed 10 immigrants over 7 years through 2007, as paid informers of the intelligence service helped hide the group’s leaders and build up its network. The case has become a byword for the failure of Germany’s postwar security apparatus to monitor and control far-right extremism.
Mr. Maassen was appointed to give the intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a new start. Its founding mission when created in the aftermath of World War II was to protect against the rise of political forces — primarily another Nazi party — that could once again threaten Germany’s democracy.
That has made questions about Mr. Maassen’s political sympathies — and whether he is properly capable of monitoring neo-Nazi groups and their possible links to far-right politicians — all the more troubling to many lawmakers and analysts.
But if Mr. Maassen has not yet been fired, it is because he is a favorite of his immediate boss, the interior minister, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Bavarian conservatives, a key component of the chancellor’s center-right coalition. Mr. Seehofer was an adamant proponent of re-establishing border controls with Austria to head off illegal immigrants, and almost brought down Ms. Merkel’s governing coalition this summer over the issue.
Mr. Maassen and Mr. Seehofer have never made a secret of their disapproval of Ms. Merkel’s 2015 decision not to close the border to hundreds of thousands of migrants coming mostly from the Middle East.
Some suspect that Mr. Maassen’s recent comments, which appeared to deliberately play down far-right violence, were a calculated attempt by him and Mr. Seehofer to further weaken and eventually topple Ms. Merkel.
“This looks like a putsch attempt,” said Matthias Quent, director of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena and an expert on the far right, including the rise of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, now the biggest opposition party in Parliament. “The whole episode shows how much the success of the AfD has weakened the chancellor.”
Two weeks ago, Mr. Maassen gave an interview to Germany’s best-selling tabloid newspaper, Bild, in which he suggested that a widely circulated video of a dark-skinned man being chased by a number of white men, during riotous protests in the eastern city of Chemnitz at the end of August, was a fake.
He later backpedaled on his claims, saying he had been “misunderstood.” It was not the video that was inauthentic, but the interpretation of it, he suggested. Both Ms. Merkel and her official government spokesman had used the term “hounding” to describe multiple witness accounts of migrants being chased by gangs of far-right activists, some of them flashing Hitler salutes and chanting Nazi slogans.
But Mr. Maassen’s initial comments, vetted and authorized by him before publication, were hardly ambiguous: “There is no evidence that the video circulating on the internet about this purported event is authentic,” he told Bild.
There were, he said, “good reasons to believe that this was a case of targeted misinformation” — possibly, he added, “to distract from the murder in Chemnitz.”
Mr. Maassen, a trained lawyer, used the word “murder” even as prosecutors investigating the death of a German man, allegedly at the hands of an Iraqi and a Syrian refugee, referred to “manslaughter.”
It is not the first time that Mr. Maassen has come under scrutiny for what some see as indications of far-right sympathies. He has met several times with senior members of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in at least one case on his own initiative.
In 2015, he met at least twice with the AfD leader at the time, Frauke Petry. According to Franziska Schreiber, a former AfD member, who has since left the party and written a book about it, Mr. Maassen was advising Ms. Petry on how to avoid surveillance by state authorities. Mr. Maassen denies this.
Mr. Maassen has also met at least three times with Alexander Gauland, the current co-leader of the party, who has recently referred to 12 years of Nazi rule as a mere “bird poop” in history.
Mr. Gauland recently defended Mr. Maassen as “a very good top official who had the courage to criticize Merkel’s completely misdirected asylum policy.”
In June, Mr. Maassen shared details from an intelligence report with Stefan Brandner, an AfD lawmaker, a month before the report became public.
At a time when a growing number of politicians are calling for Mr. Maassen’s agency to conduct surveillance of some of the AfD’s regional chapters because of suspected links to far-right extremists, the doubts about his neutrality have intensified concerns that his office might be too lenient on the far-right.
Some regional heads of his agency have urged more support from the federal level, but so far, they say, with little success.
“Instead of monitoring far-right groups that are of concern, the head of domestic intelligence spreads conspiracy theories in a tabloid newspaper; it is incomprehensible,” Mr. Quent said.
The number of politicians calling for Mr. Maassen’s ouster has steadily grown, with the Greens and the Social Democrats, Ms. Merkel’s coalition partners, being the most vocal. Even inside her own conservative ranks, the number of those who consider Mr. Maassen untenable has gone up.
The same is true for voters, polls suggest: almost nine in ten Social Democrat supporters demand that he be fired, compared to one in two among conservative voters, according to a survey commissioned by the Spiegel magazine.
By contrast, only 5 percent of AfD voters want him gone. “Thank you, Mr. Maassen, for the truth,” read one placard, during a far-right march in the eastern city of Koethen last weekend, while far-right bloggers like Oliver Flesch, called him “one of the rare responsible voices up there.”
Still, few now see him lasting another week. A report in the German newspaper Welt reported that Ms. Merkel has decided to let him go — though how to do so without damaging her own government remains unclear.
Asked about the report, a government spokeswoman did not confirm it — but also declined to deny it.
As for Mr. Maassen, he has just asked his boss, Mr. Seehofer for a beefed-up budget to double the number of employees at his agency by 2021, with extra recruits required in particular for counterespionage and anti-Islamist operations.
Source : Nytimes
