Germany's governing coalition has agreed to give the country's foreign intelligence service the power to secretly enter private homes in Germany, in a major expansion of its powers that breaks with decades of post-war practice.

Under an amendment to a planned reform of intelligence law, reported by Politico and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) would be allowed to enter homes covertly to prepare or carry out intelligence operations. The agreement was reached between the conservative CDU/CSU and the Social Democrats (SPD), the two parties in Chancellor Friedrich Merz's governing coalition.

The BND has traditionally been restricted to operating abroad, with domestic surveillance reserved for Germany's separate internal security services, above all the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). The planned change would give the foreign intelligence agency a domestic footprint for the first time, a step the government argues is needed to counter espionage, sabotage and hybrid threats.

Stricter conditions would apply to homes inside Germany and to the homes of German citizens abroad. Each entry would have to be expressly ordered by the BND and reviewed in advance by the Independent Control Council, the body that oversees the legality of certain intelligence activities. The reform does not give the agency a free hand: the pre-approval requirement is designed as a safeguard for the constitutional protection of the home.

The domestic agency, the BfV, would also gain new powers under the same package. It would be able to investigate organised-crime networks where there is concrete evidence that they support extremists or other actors under surveillance. The coalition argues that state and extremist actors increasingly use criminal networks, for instance to recruit agents or carry out illegal operations.

The reform also covers telecommunications. The BND and the BfV could order operators to preserve existing traffic data temporarily where there is reasonable suspicion that it has intelligence value. Preservation would not automatically grant access: the services would then need to submit a separate request. For the BND, such preservation would generally be limited to three months.

Germany's intelligence architecture separates foreign intelligence, domestic constitutional protection and military counterintelligence, a division rooted in the country's post-war history and designed to prevent the concentration of surveillance power in a single agency. The Federal Constitutional Court has in past rulings constrained the BND's surveillance activities, including foreign communications monitoring, requiring legislative fixes to bring its practices into line with constitutional protections.

The Bundestag held its first reading of the government's draft intelligence law on 24 September, and the reform was scheduled for debate in the following week. Civil liberties groups and opposition lawmakers have historically challenged expansions of intelligence powers through parliamentary debate and constitutional complaints, a pattern likely to shape how the proposal proceeds through parliament.