The Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, announced on Friday that it would review its security measures after the dismantling of an extremist network which planned to attack it, as part of a coup plan.
“We are going to check in detail which security measures we have to adjust,” Bundestag Vice-President, environmentalist Katrin Göring-Eckardt, told the Funke newspaper group, two days after the announcement of this foiled plan. attack on the Bundestag with weapons.
“There is apparently also a link in this network with the AfD parliamentary group”, the Alternative for Germany, she added, in an allusion to the arrest of magistrate Birgit Malsack-Winkemann , a former member of the far-right AfD party, who sat in the Bundestag between 2017 and 2021.
Twenty-five people were arrested, including an aristocrat or even elite soldiers, during a vast dragnet targeting this cell nourished by the ideology of the “Reichsbürger”, the “Citizens of the Reich”, an extremist movement which has grown with health restrictions. Some 54 people are targeted in total, and further arrests could take place.
The day before, Chancellor Olaf Scholz had expressed his concern about the presumed links of this movement with the AfD.
“The fact that among the suspects is a former AfD MP is obviously striking and very serious,” he told a press conference.
Social Democrat MP Sebastian Hartmann, a specialist in domestic policy issues, demanded that “Ms Malsack-Winkemann’s contacts in the Bundestag be examined urgently”.
“You can think that they were hoping for help from within for their coup plan,” he said.
The AfD, which has 78 MPs out of the 736 in the Bundestag, has remained discreet since the dismantling of the cell, the party leadership saying it “categorically rejects” the alleged violent plans.
One of its MPs, Petr Bystron, called the arrests “the greatest abuse of power in the history of the Federal Republic” and “massive intimidation of the entire opposition”.
On Thursday, criminal police chief Holger Münch said the group had many weapons and was therefore potentially dangerous.
But he had also tempered their strike force somewhat. “It should not be assumed that a group comprising a few dozen (members), perhaps a few hundred, is in a position to really challenge the state system in Germany”.