Czech fascist movement is partnering with extremists in Germany, counter-intelligence confirms

The Czech SPD invited Junge Alternative representatives to an internal meeting of the party in Prague last month. “SPD Prague is establishing cooperation with the AfD cell in Bavaria,” the Prague cell of the SPD posted in mid-April to its Facebook profile.

A photograph taken in the Czech lower house showed the chair of the SPD in Prague, Josef Nerušil, along with other faces of that movement and a man holding a sign with the German party’s logo – Yuri Kofner. He is one of the faces of Junge Alternative and thanks to his German-Russian roots is known to be one of the party’s Russian connections.

“We are chiefly planning cooperation between our youth organizations, a consultation on political subjects in our common interest, and research collaborations between think tanks in the right-wing environment,” Kofner posted to his Instagram about the April visit, boasting that he had also met with former Czech President Václav Klaus. He returned to Prague a few days later to be a panelist for a seminar in the Czech lower house called “Young People and Politics” which was held on Friday, 28 April by the SPD’s Institute for Freedom and Direct Democracy before attending an internal meeting of the party leadership on Saturday.

The event was attended by representatives of the younger generation of politicians from other affiliated, “patriotic” parties, such as Belgium’s “Flemish Interests” or the Slovak movement “We Are Family”. As Kofner posted to Telegram, his speech to the SPD representatives in Prague was “on the role of Junge Alternative as the AfD’s ‘engine for innovation’ ” – and less than a week later, the AfD youth organization was officially designated an extremist organization by German authorities.

Dublin to Vladivostok will be Russia

AfD sympathizer Kofner (35) was born in Germany but has Russian roots and also lived in Russia between 2010 and 2019. He graduated from the famous State Institute for International Relations in Moscow (MGIMO), which prepares not just diplomats, but members of the Russian secret services.

After returning to Germany, Kofner began working for the AfD in the Bavarian state legislature as a clerk specializing in the economy and energy, and state-level legislators quote his background materials during their negotiations. Because of his long-term residency in Russia, however, he did not pass the security vetting undertaken by Bavarian counter-intelligence and therefore is not allowed access to secret documents, according to the online news server of Bavarian Radio (Bayerischer Rundfunk).

Kofner has also been an advocate and promoter for many years of what is called “neo-Eurasianism” – simply put, he advocates the idea of a Eurasian Empire “from Dublin to Vladivostok” controlled by Russia, the main spokesperson for which is Alexander Dugin, an ideologue at the Kremlin. Kofner leads a Munich-based NGO called the “Center for Continental Cooperation”, which has been striving, through lectures or publications, to “liberate Europe from American hegemony” and to end “the Great Replacement of the autochthonous European population through mass migrations of non-European nations”.

Today the Institute’s website is no longer operational, but it once listed the MGIMO among its partners along with the Council on International Affairs in Russia, which was co-founded by the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Russia and includes Dmitri Peskov, spokesperson for the Kremlin, among its leadership. Kofner has also previously boasted of taking a selfie with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and has attended the Valdai Discussion Club, which until recently was understood to be one of the main platforms through which Russia spread its view of the world.

A 2017 lecture by Kofner in Munich, Germany is still available on the Russian International Affairs Council website. It offers insight into his thinking: “Against the backdrop of a decadent Europe, Russia, because of her ongoing conservation of her cultural and historical identity, including her European identity, has been becoming even more and more European than Europe herself. The same goes for Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary), but to a lesser degree.”

Summer in Crimea

The Austrian and German media have also mapped Kofner’s contacts to the extreme-right in both countries over the past decades. He contributed to Compact, an extremist magazine, and collaborated with the Austrian identitarian movement.

Two days after the disputed referendum on the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014, Kofner participated in a press conference in Simferopol and assured the inhabitants of the peninsula that they need not fear their standard of living would decline after the Russian annexation. According to available news reporting he was in Crimea that summer to attend the “Crimean School of Eurasian Integration”, a summer residency for youth which, according to recordings made at the time, was held “by what is now a Russian lake.”

From a Czech perspective, it is worth mentioning that Kofner also comes from the same AfD state cell in Bavaria as another distinct figure connecting the German ultra-right with Russia, Petr Bystroň, an AfD MP in the Bundestag with Czech roots. Czech news server HlídacíPes.org has repeatedly described Bystroň’s ties to extremist circles in detail, and he has also been surveilled by Bavarian counter-intelligence.

It is also worth recalling Bystroň’s originally secret trip to Belarus last year, where dictator Lukashenko is an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin in his aggression against Ukraine. When the trip came to light several months later, Bystroň told journalists he had wanted to see for himself to what degree Belarus could be considered a “neutral creator of peace for Ukraine”; he also recently visited Czech MP Jaroslav Foldyna of the SPD in Prague.

The “Prague Samurai”

Czech MP Tomio Okamura (SPD) himself was in contact with another important “Russian connection” to the AfD several years ago, Manuel Ochsenreiter. That German publicist and publisher of the ultra-right magazine Zuerst! (First!) is not known to the broader Czech public, but he used to be a regular guest on the Kremlin’s Russia Today television channel and was an “election observer” in eastern Ukraine, although the European Union called the vote held in the self-proclaimed pro-Russian “republics” illegitimate.

Ochsenreiter died suddenly in 2021, but he had been close to the above-mentioned Dugin. According to Die Zeit weekly, Ochsenreiter opened the door to high politics in Russia for AfD politicians.

In 2017, immediately after the Czech elections to the lower house, an interview by Ochsenreiter with Okamura was published in Zuerst! In a photograph taken at that time in the center of Prague, he is smiling next to Okamura, whom he portrays in the interview as the “Prague Samurai”, a Czech political hopeful with a grand vision.

Naturally, the SPD itself never mentions its ties to extremists or pro-Kremlin figures and continues to insist it is not a pro-Russian party, just like its partners in Western Europe, and it also insists the recent seminar in the lower house was just an ordinary meeting of young, “patriotic” political hopefuls. “The SPD is neither pro-Brussels, nor pro-Russian, nor pro-China, nor pro-American because it is the interests of the Czech Republic toward which the movement is oriented. Mr. Kofner represents the AfD, a German political party, in a similar way. I am not aware that AfD has anything of what you mention in its program,” Nerušil, the chair of the Prague SPD, said when confronted with the CV of one of the guests invited to his seminar in the lower house; the AfD’s youth organization has now been officially labeled as extremist by German counter-intelligence, but such a verdict has yet to be issued against the party itself, which for now is still surveilled statewide as a “suspicious case”.