Conspiratorial sovereigntism is understood to be the endeavor to (re)establish individual or popular sovereignty and an inherently natural system against the prevailing social and political order. The milieu of "Reichsbürger" and other sovereignists has grown during the coronavirus pandemic. The investigations against two suspected terrorist groups from these circles in 2022 highlighted the danger of their ideology.
The most important findings of the report are, among others:
- Conspiracy ideological sovereigntism is part of the extreme right in Germany.
- The area in which sovereigntist content resonates is larger than the figures of 23,000 members (2022) from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution suggest.
- Via "alternative" media channels on Telegram, the primary social medium of the protests, "Reichsbürger" and other sovereigntists were able to normalize their specific content during the pandemic.
- "Reichsbürger" adapted and transformed QAnon conspiracy narratives
- The number of violent acts with a sovereignist background has been rising since 2017.
This has resulted in the following policy recommendations:
- Sovereignist networks must be focused on more closely.
- Investigating authorities and domestic intelligence services should adjust the classification of "Reichsbürger" and "self-administrators" to an independent form of extremism and classify conspiracy-ideological sovereignism as right-wing extremism.
CeMAS and the "Landecker re|con project" make anti-democratic trends and developments easier to recognise at an early stage, they analyse them and derive counter-strategies and recommendations on action for civil society, politics and security authorities.