Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the country’s domestic intelligence agency, has just issued an update on its investigation into the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, classifying it as “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation.”

As German media noted, previously only the AfD’s state associations in certain parts of Germany were classified as such, but the national party was given a lower, “suspected” status.

Der Spiegel explains that the change in classification – underpinned by a 1,100-page report on the party – lowers the threshold for monitoring the party through intelligence means.

“The ethnicity- and ancestry-based conception of the people that predominates within the party is not compatible with the free democratic order,” the domestic intelligence agency said in a statement, quoted by Reuters.

“It aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, to subject them to treatment that violates the constitution, and thereby assign them a legally subordinate status,” Reuters quoted the statement.

The AfD does not consider German citizens of immigrant background from predominantly Muslim countries as equal members of the German people, it added.