Intelligence chief in Thuringia would quit Germany if AfD gains power

The intelligence chief in the German state of Thuringia says he would immediately leave Germany with his family if the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) were ever to join a government.

Stephan Kramer made the comments in an interview with the Israeli Kan channel, parts of which were published in advance on Tuesday and which was to be broadcast in the evening. Kramer was Secretary General of the Central Council of Jews in Germany for 15 years.

Ten years after its founding, the AfD won a top municipal office for the first time in Germany at the weekend - in the former East German state of Thuringia.

That, along with the party's currently good showing in opinion polls, has sent alarm bells ringing among German politicians, anti-racism campaigners and religious organizations.

"The AfD is the parliamentarian arm of a much bigger plot, a revolutionary plot, because that's their agenda, they want to overcome the government, the state, and the whole system that has been established in the Federal Republic of Germany," Kramer said in the interview, which was conducted in English.

Asked by the Israeli interviewer if AfD politician Björn Höcke was a "Nazi in a suit", Kramer said that "he is a right-wing extremist, but this is more or less the same description, but a little bit more polite."

Höcke is the head of the AfD's Thuringia branch, which is classified and monitored by Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, as right-wing extremist.

Germany's top spy Thomas Haldenwang has himself described Höcke as a "right-wing extremist."

Kramer added: "The mothers and fathers of our constitution stated very clearly that there is a red line."

A democracy cannot tolerate the enemies of democracy, he said. He answered the question of whether the AfD was playing with the red line in the affirmative.

On his job as president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Thuringia, he said it was "somehow kind of irony that as a Jew I'm doing that in Germany after the history until '45. Nevertheless, it was also a little victory that a Jew would take over this position."