The Economist 29Feb2020

42 TheEconomistFebruary 29th 2020

1

F

ive bullet-holesstill scar the window

of Karamba Diaby’s office in Halle, a city

in eastern Germany. No one knows who

fired at the empty building, where Ger-

many’s only black mpmeets constituents

and does routine political work. But Mr

Diaby’s staff do not doubt that the attack, in

mid-January, was racially motivated. A

week after the incident Mr Diaby got an

email warning him to expect the fate of

Walter Lübcke, a pro-refugee politician

murdered last June. The anonymous threat

was signed off with a “Sieg Heil”.

Right-wing extremism in various

guises has troubled parts of Germany for

decades. The Amadeu Antonio Founda-

tion, an outfit that monitors such activity,

says it is responsible for 208 deaths since

1990. But a recent string of incidents has
      left nerves especially jangled. On Yom Kip-
      pur, three months before the attack on Mr
      Diaby’s office, Stephan Balliet, a young
      man armed with home-made 3d-printed
      weapons, tried to break into a synagogue in
      Halle to massacre worshippers; when that

failed he killed two people at random in-

stead. On February 19th in Hanau, near

Frankfurt, 43-year-old Tobias Rathjen

killed nine immigrants and ethnic-minor-

ity Germans during a shooting rampage,

before killing himself and his mother. A

few days earlier 12 men were arrested for

planning attacks on mosques in the hope

of igniting “civil war”. Local officials across

Germany are physically and verbally in-

timidated. Many have quit.

Ministers have belatedly acknowledged

that far-right terrorism is Germany’s grav-

est security threat. Officials count over

32,000 right-wing extremists in the coun-

try; over 1,000 are considered to be primed

for violence. The Centre for Research on Ex-

tremism at the University of Oslo calcu-

lates that between 2016 and 2018 the num-

ber of severely violent far-right incidents

in Germany, most of them targeting immi-

grants or non-whites, far outstripped those

elsewhere in Europe (see chart on next

page). And that was before the recent surge.

Police and security officials have be-

come much better at tackling organised

right-wing threats since botching their re-

sponse to the National Socialist Under-

ground, a murderous neo-Nazi terrorist

cell active in the early 2000s, says Daniel

Koehler of the German Institute on Radi-

calisation and De-radicalisation Studies.

Yet as the response evolves, so does the

danger. Underground far-right networks

remain a serious threat; the suspect in the

Lübcke killing had a decades-long history

in them. But the attackers in Halle and Ha-

nau were both loners who were radicalised

online, had no known connection to estab-

lished far-right groups and were unknown

to the German authorities.

Online groups can, to an extent, offer a

sense of community that other extremists

find in marches, concerts or martial-arts

clubs. They can also nurture “communal

delusions” says Miro Dittrich at Amadeu

Antonio. These often straddle national

boundaries. That helps explain why Mr Bal-

liet, marinated in a toxic brew of online

Extremism in Germany

The threat within

HALLE

Germany is belatedly waking up to the threat from far-right terrorism

Europe

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— Charlemagne is away