And live from London, this is Newsour with Andrew Peach here on the BBC World Service. Good to have your company.

Germany's far-right political party, the AFD, has been classified as an extremist organisation by the intelligence agency.

The alternative for Germany may bid gains in recent elections, standing on

its platform of opposing immigration and getting the second highest vote share. The intelligence

agency, says the AFD, wants to exclude people from the democratic process in Germany based on

their ancestry or ethnicity, which it says is incompatible with the country's constitution.

The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio isn't impressed, he said on ex-Germany just gave

its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That's not democracy, it's tyranny

in disguise. Mikaela Kufner is the chief political editor for Deutschevella and host of the Berlin

Briefing podcast. I asked Michaela to talk me through what's happened today.

Well, finally, we actually heard what essentially is an assessment by Germany's domestic

intelligence service, which is also referred to as the authority tasked with protecting the German

Constitution, that they deem the far-right alternative parties to be extremist. And it's

the city cites concerns over human dignity. And that would relate to actually the first article in the German

constitution, that human dignity is inviolable. And what they base that assessment on, we do not

know the exact quotes or details, because we're not getting a whole copy of this report.

That's also something the AFD is criticizing.

But senior AFD members have in the past not just spoken about remigration,

but specifically in relation to people with a Muslim background,

also German citizens created or alluded to there being, in a sense,

different categories of what a German is. And dividing this into different ethnicities is

something that the German domestic intelligence services say they've now been to establish as being a fact,

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