SPD: Brandenburg's Interior Minister Lange resigns

Brandenburg's Interior Minister Katrin Lange resigned late Friday afternoon. Lange said she did not want to stand in the way of the "necessary unity" within the governing coalition of the SPD and the BSW. She also justified her move by citing the defamation she faced within her own party.

Minister-President Dietmar Woidke, SPD, stated at the hastily arranged press conference in the State Chancellery in Potsdam that he was "emotionally moved." Woidke had once again backed his minister the previous evening at an emergency meeting of the SPD state executive committee. The 53-year-old is considered a close confidante of Woidke, who had long been grooming her as his potential successor.

In recent days, Lange has been heavily criticized by sections of the Brandenburg SPD for her conduct in office. The Young Socialists (Jusos) in Brandenburg had already called on the minister to resign on Thursday, and Lange's Brandenburg an der Havel subdistrict withdrew her nomination as deputy party leader at the SPD party conference in June.

The SPD Potsdam Mitte/Nord local chapter, of which former Chancellor Olaf Scholz is a member, expressed its most blunt criticism of the minister. It is incomprehensible that "the SPD Interior Minister, of all people, is pursuing a course that, in our perception, treats the AfD with leniency instead of fighting it," it said in a statement. "The signal to the rest of the republic is devastating and is being commented on as such."

The displeasure with the Interior Minister has been ongoing since the beginning of last week, when Lange unexpectedly dismissed Jörg Müller, head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Lange subsequently explained that the reason for this was the classification of the Brandenburg AfD as "certainly right-wing extremist," about which she had not been informed.

Shortly thereafter, however, the minister had to admit that she had been fully aware of the classification. However, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Müller, had not officially informed her until three weeks after the reassessment, which was legally acceptable. Müller's dismissal was therefore also viewed as a political maneuver, as Lange had repeatedly expressed public skepticism about classifying the AfD as right-wing extremist. Until then, the party had been listed as a suspected right-wing extremist.

Müller had already served as head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution under Lange's predecessor, Michael Stübgen of the CDU. In this position, the widely respected Müller repeatedly advocated for clearly identifying the extremist tendencies within the AfD. His dismissal therefore also surprised the minister's party colleagues, as the decision to pursue the AfD's direction in Brandenburg had long been made.

According to research by the Süddeutsche Zeitung , NDR, and WDR, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had already planned to upgrade the state association to a secure right-wing extremist surveillance target last November. A corresponding notice had already been submitted. Due to the early federal election, the Potsdam Interior Ministry, under Lange's predecessor, Stübgen, decided not to officially upgrade the AfD until after the election date on February 23.

The Brandenburg AfD, led by state leader René Springer, is considered one of the most radical state associations. State parliamentary group leader Hans-Christoph Berndt is a co-founder of the anti-refugee association "Zukunft Heimat" and is closely connected to right-wing extremist organizations such as the Identitarian Movement and the campaign agency "Ein Prozent."

For more than four years, the Brandenburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution has been gathering evidence of suspected extremism against the state AfD. The collection is said to now comprise ten files containing hundreds of pages. According to information obtained by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution appears to be basing its upgrade on two primary arguments: They claim that the state AfD denies people with a migration background the right to belong to the German people. And they oppose the political system of the Federal Republic. The findings from Brandenburg also play a central role in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution's 1,100-page AfD report.

On Friday evening, the Brandenburg AfD called Katrin Lange the "last voice of reason" in the SPD, as she had sought political confrontation with the right-wing extremists. The SPD's coalition partner, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BSW), also expressed its regret at Lange's resignation. CDU Chairman Jan Redmann, in turn, described the minister's decision as "inevitable." He added that the priority now must be "to restore the independence of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as quickly as possible."