But since that time, the AfD has come under the increasing scrutiny of national and state domestic intelligence agencies tasked with monitoring groups deemed anti-constitutional, culminating last year in the party’s federal classification as a right-wing extremist organization.
Ischinger’s successor, career diplomat Christoph Heusgen, refused to invite AfD leaders for the past three conferences, arguing that a party deemed at that point to have been at least partly right-wing extremist by intelligence authorities had no place at the event. After all, he argued, the conference was founded after World War II by Ewald von Kleist, one of the aristocratic Wehrmacht officers now revered in Germany for having partaken in the failed 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
“I can well imagine that Ewald von Kleist would have supported my decision against the AfD,” Heusgen told German newspaper Tagesspiegel.
Wolfgang Ischinger speaking at the 2023 Munich Security Conference in Munich. He denied that conference organizers invited the AfD this year due to a pressure campaign. | Johannes Simon/EPA
Heusgen stepped aside after last year’s conference, and this year Ischinger is back at the helm. But it was in response to Heusgen’s rejection of the party that the AfD sued late last year to get into the conference this February. The AfD said it was a victim of “targeted exclusion,” according to documents from the Munich regional court seen by POLITICO.
“The plaintiff wishes to be involved in foreign policy and security policy issues in order to have a say as an opposition faction,” the court said. But the court ultimately rejected the AfD’s argument, ruling last December that the MSC, as a private organization, is free to choose whom to invite.
Koch, who was in court on behalf of the AfD parliamentary group, says he pressured the MSC side during the proceeding to invite party members by threatening to come to the conference anyway as guests of the American delegation. Soon after, his party received three invitations, he said.