Germany underestimated far-right threat

The discovery of an extremist right-wing terror cell has shocked Germany and put the country's Office for the Protection of the Constitution in a tight spot. The danger from the right has clearly been underestimated, writes the liberal daily NRC Handelsblad: "Just like the Dutch security service, the German judiciary believed the far right hardly posed a threat. In the Netherlands too, for years attention has been focused on Salafists, jihadists, radical animal rights activists and extremist asylum seekers. The Germans also looked only in one direction. ... Now they are rightly being bombarded with questions and accusations. The disclosure by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that a police informer was present at one of the murders has greatly damaged trust in the secret services. The question of where the border between observation and intervention lies for a security service is typical. Evidently the secret services have failed to pool their information. That too is typical. Strictly speaking, the German investigation apparatus is upside down. Was it perhaps blind in the right eye?"

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