Germany’s domestic intelligence service has reported a significant expansion of the country’s far-right extremist milieu, driven in part by the growth of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and an accelerating online radicalisation of minors. The 2025 annual report of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), presented in Berlin, puts the number of right-wing extremists at 58,700 – an increase of more than 8,000 on the previous year – and describes right-wing extremism as the “greatest threat” to the democratic order. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt highlighted a trend toward “younger, sometimes underage” individuals displaying a marked propensity for violence, with the BfV noting that extremist actors are systematically targeting children and adolescents via mainstream platforms and encrypted messengers. The report also records a rise in left-wing extremist violence, including attacks on critical infrastructure, and warns of intensified espionage and sabotage operations by foreign powers, principally Russia.

Viewed from Moscow, the Russian Investigative Committee has released its own data pointing to a 9% year-on-year increase in crimes committed by teenagers in the first quarter of 2026, with over 11,000 cases investigated. Chairman Alexander Bastrykin told a dedicated meeting that the number of violent offences by minors rose by 10%, while the number of children involved in extremist and terrorist-related crimes doubled. The committee’s press service noted a continuing trend of minors being drawn into sabotage and fraud, and Bastrykin linked the phenomenon to what he described as negligent failure by officials to include at-risk children in preventive programmes. He ordered regional authorities to scrutinise budget spending on youth policy and to focus on adults who involve minors in criminal activity.

In Latin America, separate data sets underscore the vulnerability of young people to severe violence. Argentina’s observatory Ahora sí que nos ven recorded 99 direct femicides and 11 linked killings in the first half of 2026, with a woman murdered on gender grounds every 37 hours on average. The report, based on press monitoring, found that 66% of perpetrators were current or former partners and that 15% of victims had previously filed complaints. In Brazil, health ministry figures analysed by the Associação Paulista para o Desenvolvimento da Medicina show that reports of violence against children and adolescents more than doubled between 2020 and 2025, reaching 165,413 notifications last year. Sexual violence accounted for 34% of cases, and the home was the most common setting, with mothers identified as aggressors in 34% of incidents and fathers in 26%.

German security officials attribute the domestic radicalisation trend to a combination of algorithmic amplification on social media, the formation of online fan cultures around far-right attackers, and the AfD’s ideological homogenisation. The BfV report states that liberal-conservative positions within the party have become scarcely perceptible in public, while narratives of “population replacement” are routinely advanced. The AfD, which contests the intelligence agency’s classification of it as a suspected extremist case, has grown to 70,000 members and leads polls in Saxony-Anhalt ahead of September regional elections. The BfV’s vice president, Sinan Selen, said German democracy is under “practically permanent attack” from both internal and external adversaries, with Jewish and Israeli targets remaining a focus for state actors such as Iran. The dossier remains open: the AfD’s legal challenge to its designation is pending, and the interior ministry is pressing for expanded surveillance powers.