If a right-wing party in, say, France can be seen as interesting or even dynamic as it inches closer to the center (we mean vous, Marine Le Pen), it is not necessarily so, for obvious historical reasons, in neighboring Germany. 

There are new reports that some members of the German far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD party, secretly met with extremist neo-Nazis and businessmen in a hotel last fall. This is  sparking fresh calls for the party to be tossed out of the Bundestag, though it is polling higher than the three governing parties. 

The German investigative website Correctiv cites the secretive meeting attended by high-ranking politicians from the AfD, neo-Nazis, and influential businessmen in a hotel near Potsdam last November. The report has shaken up German politics, with some lawmakers supporting a ban on the AfD — but for the moment  the federal government has taken no steps in that direction.

“I have a certain sympathy for [such a ban], no doubt about it,” the regional administrator of the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Daniel Günther, says in an interview Wednesday with Hamburger Abendblatt. “We see how dangerous they are. Even here in Schleswig-Holstein,” Mr. Günther, a member of the Christian Democratic Union, adds.

In 2017 the German Constitutional Court opposed a ban on the extremist National Democratic Party, which was perceived as a party with little influence at the time. This time things are different. Confronting a popular party like AfD would not be done without some element of political risk. According to a recent poll, the AfD is more popular than any of the coalition parties with 22 percent support, positioning it behind only CDU.

AfD is also leading by wide margins in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg — the three states where elections are due this year, according to a poll published by ntv on Thursday.  Over the summer the first AfD-affiliated mayor was voted into office, in a town of Saxony. The German tabloid Bild regularly sounds the alarm over the rise of the AfD.

It is little wonder that the justice minister, Marco Buschmann, has implied that attempts to crush the populist party would not be without risk because, as he recently stated, doing so would bring “the threat of a p.r. victory for the AfD.” 

As for the secret meeting in November, participants reportedly discussed “remigration” and were presented with a plan to expel unwanted residents in Germany, such as “non-assimilated citizens.” The meaning of that was not necessarily restricted to immigrants, raising the specter of the fate of Germany’s Jewish population in the earlier years of the Third Reich. 

Chancellor Scholz, who has been semi-invisible and is now one of the least popular leaders in Europe, stated on X, “Anyone who opposes our free democratic basic order is a case for our Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Judiciary.” The AfD doubled down, responding that what was discussed at the hotel could not be linked to the AfD as a party.

“The AfD will not change its stance on immigration policy, which can be found in the party programme, because of a single individual’s opinion at a meeting that was not an AfD event,” a party representative said in a press statement. Yet many high-level politicians are calling for the AfD to be watched more closely.

It may already be under surveillance. A German court recently ruled that the party could be categorized as a “suspicious entity.” The Social Democratic Party co-chairwoman, Saskia Esken, told ntv that “we shouldn’t wait until the AfD is too relevant,” while Germany’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, told Stern magazine that “nobody should underestimate [the] danger.”

“We are once again seeing that it is necessary and right for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to keep a very close eye on … how enemies of the constitution connect with AfD representatives and which inhuman ideologies are propagated there,” Ms. Faeser added.

The radius of AfD’s surging popularity is spreading ahead of European Parliament elections next June. Some center-right parties in various European countries are already working to build conservative coalitions that exclude the AfD. 

If, though, the party’s popularity grows in the coming months, as is likely, it could become close to impossible to ignore. That could even make it tempting for Euroconservatives to team up with the AfD — and not in secret — as another, more Teutonic way to drive a wedge between their center-right parties and the dominant progressive blocs within the EU.