The German government has instated a ban on the extreme right-wing publication Compact, alleged to be responsible for cultivating animosity against Jewish individuals, immigrants, and other minority groups. The announcement was made alongside the revelation that police carried out searches across four properties associated with the magazine’s publishers in the early hours of Tuesday morning, seizing evidence and assets. Germany’s federal interior minister, Nancy Faeser, during the announcement identified the magazine, established in 2011 and with a claimed monthly readership of 40,000, as a principal promoter of the country’s burgeoning extremist right-wing ecosystem. Faeser called out the publication for its egregious propagation of hate, especially against Jews, immigrants, and the societal democratic fabric. She noted that the ban was primarily a countermeasure against those inciting a harmful and violent sentiment against refugees and migrant populations. The prohibition and consequent closure of Compact and its popular video division followed a determination by German home security that the magazine and its staff were actively sabotaging the country’s constitutional framework. Jürgen Elsässer, the ex-leftist radical turned arch right-wing ideologue, who is also the founder of the magazine and a usual host on its video channel, professed in a 2022 interview that the magazine’s vein was to fabricate stories, myths, and parables to feed the public discourse, even if loosely based on the truth. He, in an interview with RBB public television in 2022, singled out “the people” as his primary audience, and had professed a couple of years prior to instigate the fall of the Merkel administration. Elsässer’s property was one of the four targeted during Tuesday’s police searches. His critics argue that his so-called parables frequently recur to well-known conspiracy theories involving notions of a global elite, a new world order, and the Third Great Reset.
In the past few years, Compact has been advocating stories around obligatory immunisation, elimination of cash, and a rise in criminal activities by non-citizens. It has amplified its support for Kremlin since Russia’s incursion into Ukraine and is aligned with the political ideologies of Viktor Orbán from Hungary and Donald Trump.
The far-right political party, Alternative for Germany (AfD) — Compact’s political compatriot — deemed its closure as a significant attack on journalistic freedom on Tuesday. Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, leaders of the AfD party, expressed deep worry over the events, stating that such prohibitions represent a refutation of debate and variation of perspectives.
This action from Germany follows Meta’s decision, Facebook and Instagram’s parent firm, to eliminate all Compact’s accounts due to allegations of hate speech four years ago. As of Tuesday afternoon, CompactTV’s YouTube channel remained accessible.
The channel features videos on a range of topics, including a piece on the World Health Organisation’s “questionable plans” and suggesting that the next “global conflict will commence in Rostock”.