Germany has banned the far-right magazine Compact, which it accuses of incitement against Jews, immigrants and other minorities.
Announcing the ban, Berlin’s federal interior ministry said that police officers had also searched properties in four states linked to the magazine early on Tuesday morning to collect evidence and confiscate assets.
Federal interior minister Nancy Faeser described the magazine, founded in 2011 and with a reported monthly circulation of 40,000, as the “central mouthpiece” of Germany’s rising right-wing extremist scene.
“This magazine incites hatred, in an unspeakable way, against Jews, people with a migration background and our parliamentary democracy,” she said. The ban was a response to “intellectual arsonists who are stirring up a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and migrants”.
Already classified by authorities as extremist and nationalist in 2021, the closure on Tuesday of the magazine – as well as a popular video subsidiary — came after German domestic intelligence concluded the magazine and its staff were working to undermine the country’s constitutional order.
The publisher of the magazine, and a regular presenter on its video channel, is Jürgen Elsässer, a former leftist radical turned far-right ideologue.
In an 2022 interview, he described the magazine’s formula as “creating narratives, fairy tales and allegories … that are not the truth but which keep the popular discourse going”.
“My target audience is the people,” he said told RBB public television in 2022. Two years earlier he described in Compact the magazine’s aim as working to “topple this regime” of then-chancellor Angela Merkel.
Mr Elsässer’s private home was among the four properties searched on Tuesday morning.
Critics say that what the publisher calls allegories are most often familiar conspiracy theories involving a “globalist elite”, a new global order and the so-called Great Reset.
In recent years Compact pushed narratives about compulsory vaccination, the abolition of cash and a surge in crime by foreign nationals. It has stepped up its pro-Kremlin line since Russia invaded Ukraine and backs the politics of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump.
On Tuesday the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), a political ally of Compact, called its shutdown a “serious blow to press freedom”.
“We are watching events with great concern,” said party leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla. “Banning a press organ means a denial of discourse and diversity of opinion.”
Germany’s move comes four years after Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, removed all of Compact’s accounts over hate speech complaints. At lunchtime on Tuesday the YouTube channel CompactTV was still online.
Among its video offerings was a report on the “dubious plans” of the World Health Organisation and how the next “world war will begin in Rostock”.
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