The far-right Alternative for Germany party made repeated attempts to delay a court hearing on whether it should be treated as a suspected extremist organisation, accusing judges of bias when they declined to grant a postponement on Tuesday.
If the hearing determines that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) is justified in classifying the AfD and its youth wing as suspected extremist, the security service would be allowed to deploy all intelligence tools against it, from phone tapping to recruiting informants.
Such a ruling would deal a blow to the party just six months ahead of regional and European elections.
The party is now polling in first place in several of the poorer, post-industrial eastern states where its anti-establishment, anti-immigration message is particularly resonant.
The party, which has 78 of the 736 seats in the Bundestag, the German federal parliament, maintains that it is a democratic, non-extremist formation. Regional branches of the party have already been formally declared extremist threats.
The party has slipped in the polls slightly, though it remains second on around 19%, behind the opposition conservatives but well ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats on 15%.
On Tuesday, presiding judge Gerald Buck rejected the party's request for more time to digest thousands of pages of evidence, prompting AfD lawyer Christian Conrad to request the dismissal of the entire panel of judges.
"The applicant rejects the entire Senate out of fear of bias," he said, arguing that the refusal to grant more time was an indication of bias.
Buck rejected that application as a frivolous abuse of plaintiff rights, but the accusations of bias are likely to be popular with supporters of a party that casts itself as an outsider fighting for the common man against the establishment.
The party has faced mounting pressure after the disclosure that senior figures had attended a meeting where the "remigration" of "unintegrated" German citizens was discussed -- widely seen as code for the expulsion of people of non-ethnic-German descent.
That triggered weeks of street protests and statements of concern from titans of German corporate life, which are normally reticent on matters of daily politics.
The BfV first began treating the party as a possible extremist organisation in 2021. A lower court rejected the AfD's appeal against this the following year.
The court in Muenster, in whose jurisdiction the BfV's headquarters in Cologne lies, is expected to issue a definitive ruling on the facts after two days of hearings.
