On: ‘Russian sleeper cell’: Can Germany’s far-right AfD be barred from sensitive...

They call it a sleeper cell. As if it had been smuggled across a border in a crate. No. It grew here, in the soil of Saxony-Anhalt - in towns where the foundries closed and nothing arrived to replace them. German industry drank Russian gas for decades - cheap fuel, a supplier who asked no questions about wages or strikes. The friendship with Moscow was never a conviction; it was an invoice. The party is the residue of that arrangement, homegrown - and the ministers who gasp at its loyalty were its gardeners.

Now the debate: bar it from the classified rooms. Mark the trap. The remedy manages the symptom and spares the disease. Worse, it grants the intelligence apparatus new territory: deciding which elected men may know what. The security state expands inward and calls the expansion self-defence. And the party receives its martyrdom gift-wrapped; exclusion is the finest recruitment poster a reactionary movement could wish for.

Notice, too, what wakes the constitutional conscience. Not the refugees this party hunts, not the Muslims slandered at its congresses, not the fists against its opponents. The alarm sounds when the state’s own files are at risk. Cruelty sleeps soundly here; the paperwork must be guarded. It is not democracy the ministers defend. It is property.

A chancellor once outlawed my own party. The ban taught us to organize deeper - and taught the state that it could rule by exception. Every exception outlives its first target. I have argued all my life that a movement is measured by its dissenters. Apply the test both ways: a party that expels its doubters, a state that answers dissent with locks. Both fail.

The barred door is not the answer. The answer is in those towns: despair, organized, turned against the rule of property.