This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-Right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal Parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.
Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD is accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.
A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated Government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. All their carefully curated talk-show tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “Right wing extremism”, all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would have long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.
Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by Political Editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue”. The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.
Let’s read it together.
Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky”, “too soon” and “simply undemocratic”, and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising”.
The problem… is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down”, Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD Senior President was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.
What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans,” the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.
Perhaps this is why Lautsch backtracks, deciding suddenly that the case for banning the AfD may not be all that obvious after all. She admits that it is “legally risky” because, for a ban to succeed, somebody would have “to prove… that [the AfD] is working to destroy the free democratic order”. This is very hard to do because “it is part of the AfD’s strategy to present itself as the party of true democrats and defenders of the constitution” even though “its representatives have long been working to dismantle the institutions of our Basic Law from within”. Thus, as always, the absence of evidence for anything untoward about the AfD becomes evidence for its malicious, underhanded, democracy-undermining strategies.
Lautsch, desperate to climb out of this circular argument, first seizes upon the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the domestic intelligence agency that has been spying on the AfD for years. She insists that it has “already collected extensive material… which in itself could be used to justify a ban”. Lautsch’s “could” is doing a great deal of work here. The problem is that nobody, least of all Lautsch, has any idea what material the constitutional protectors have compiled. We can, however, try to learn from similar cases where we know more. Back in February, for example, I took a very close look at the information the constitutional protectors had amassed on Hans-Georg Maaßen. It was far from encouraging, and the truth is that if our political goons had anything that could really do in the AfD, we would’ve heard about it long ago.
As Lautsch continues, she strays ever further from making any kind of rational case. The last concrete complaint she raises is her claim that “the AfD is shifting the boundaries [of discourse] ever further in the direction of an ethnic conception” of Germanness, and that at the notorious “secret Potsdam meeting” the AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund said some untoward things about foreign restaurants. She rushes past these points, sensing their weakness, and spends the rest of this section on bizarre and irrelevant matters:
There is also the AfD’s self-representation as the representative of the true will of the people. That in itself has little to do with parliamentary democracy. Anyone who claims to already know the will of the people is unlikely to engage in parliamentary debate. The AfD therefore uses parliament primarily as a stage for staging the inflammatory speeches of its representatives and then distributing them on YouTube and TikTok. These are addressed directly to the “people” – and thus removed from parliamentary discussion.
Literally all politicians claim to represent the popular will and to act in popular interests. None of this is illegal or even remotely wrong. The AfD is an opposition party, excluded by the reigning cartel system from participation in government, and so of course it uses parliamentary debate to criticise the lunatics in charge and use social media to distribute its speeches to supporters. What kind of complaints are these? Does Lautsch really want to ban the AfD because it’s good at TikTok?
It gets even stranger:
The AfD also has cultivated its own idea of the law itself. The idea is that there is a kind of natural, true law that precedes the actual law. In the words of AfD senior member Treutler in the Thuringian state parliament: “There is not only the law, there is also the spirit of the law.” This is the AfD’s most dangerous idea to date, because it can be used to bend the law, which was once set by democratically elected parliamentarians, in any direction. The true will of the people, the true party of the constitution, the true law. We cannot continue to stand by and watch this party co-opt democracy until there is nothing left of it.
The “spirit of the law” is a very old idea; it is generally raised in contrast to the “letter of the law”. The AfD did not invent this problem in legal philosophy. All laws require interpretation that accounts for their spirit and their letter, and anyway Jürgen Treutler is a minor AfD politician who does not speak for the whole party and who was not proposing a new legal approach either. He was merely trying to defend the traditional right of the strongest party – in this case, the AfD – to name the president of the Thuringian parliament.
Lautsch acknowledges that “banning a party with around 50,000 members and millions of voters” presents considerable risks. Among these is that supporting such a ban looks tremendously “undemocratic” and also that “AfD supporters could become more radicalised”.
Interestingly, these fears primarily concern the sensitivities of AfD supporters. But what about the fear of millions of Germans with a history of migration who are afraid of the xenophobia unleashed by the AfD? And what about the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets against it last winter?
That’s right, it would be positively undemocratic to ignore the “fears of millions of Germans” who don’t like the AfD by not banning the party. That’s just how democracy works: whenever the right people get afraid of the right party, you have to ban it. When the wrong people get afraid of the wrong party, however, bans are absolutely not in order. I and millions of other Germans are absolutely terrified of the Greens but that doesn’t count, because the Greens are a democratic party and we’re undemocratic for being worried about them.
At this point Lautsch comes to the awkward problem of authoritarianism. She assures us that we needn’t worry too much about this. As long as authoritarian actions are decided by democratically elected bodies and approved by courts, they’re totally fine:
It is true that a party ban is an authoritarian measure, but it is an authoritarian measure of a constitutional state. The Federal Constitutional Court only imposes it if the strict legal requirements are met. And the decision to initiate a party ban proceedings is taken democratically – in the Bundestag, in the Federal Council or by the democratically elected federal government. [boldface mine]
Upon contemplating the likely consequences of banning the AfD, Lautsch becomes positively ecstatic:
And as a weapon of the constitutional state, a party ban is extremely effective. It is not for nothing that the AfD is doing everything it can to escape this fate. A ban by the Federal Constitutional Court would result in the party being dissolved, its infrastructure destroyed and its assets seized. Establishing replacement organisations would also be prohibited. AfD representatives would immediately lose their mandates. Of course, this would not get rid of the AfD members. But the party would be eradicated from the public sphere – and from the political competition. In any case, the two parties that have been banned in the Federal Republic of Germany so far – the KPD [i.e., the Communist Party of Germany] and the Nazi-successor SRP [i.e., Socialist Reich Party] – dissolved into insignificance when they were banned in the 1950s.
The SRP and the KPD were banned in 1952 and 1956, within a decade of the founding of the Federal Republic, as West Germany emerged from wartime occupation and faced down the Communist threat in the East. We were still being folded into the liberal West back then, with all the awkward (and overtly illiberal) political engineering that entailed. I find it pretty shocking that Lautsch thinks these are reasonable precedents, but she runs with them, concluding that “there are democracies that manage without banning parties, but Germany is not one of them”.
Rather, it is part of the core of German self-understanding as a ‘defensive democracy’ to be able to defend itself against the enemies of democracy with the authority of the constitutional state if necessary. You can criticise this tendency to call on extra-parliamentary authorities such as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution or the Federal Constitutional Court, but to turn away from them at the moment of greatest threat to this democracy would be fatal.
Yes, a ban can fail. But those who are not prepared to protect democracy with all the means at the disposal of a constitutional state ultimately surrender it to its enemies. That is the greatest danger.
Germany is the only self-described “defensive democracy” in the entire liberal West. We have our ridiculous constitutional protectors and our other political enforcement mechanisms, because ours is a provisional state thrown together in haste in 1949. We were allowed democracy only within specific boundaries, to prevent the people from voting their way back into Nazism or into the Soviet bloc. That time is past. Fascism is gone and the Berlin wall came down when I was a child, but our rulers just won’t let the postwar era go away. It is always and forever 1933 or 1938 or 1952 or 1956 here in the best Germany of all time, where our rulers govern not to solve present problems, but to beat back the phantom past, and they are going to keep us mired in this dark and hopeless political timewarp until we are all ruined or they are cast out of power, or (more probably) both.
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Describing the state where the Lautschs of this world are still forced to rule over a majority ethnically German population they always keep wishing away, longing for the day when the hordes of foreigners they keep importing as fast as they can have finally fixed this ghastly problem, as defensive democracy is a very appropriate mistranslantion.
The best English translation of wehrhafte Demokratie is probably militant democracy.
Considering that this ethnic conception of Germanness has been part of the German basic law since 1949 and was absolutely unquestioned by anyone until the SPD-Green coalition led by Gerhard Schröder started to “extend” German citizenship laws in the early 2000s and Angela Merkel made the CDU toe the same line roughly 10 years later and that this is about administratively disenfranchising about ⅕ of the German electorate, I think the democracy should be dropped from this term. Militiant SPD-CDU-SED-Greens-and-FDP oligarchy, ie, essentially a revival of the political organisation of the GDR, where only parties approved by the ruling establishment may exist and even these only if they know their place, would fit much better.
And let’s not forget: Evchen Ricarda Honecker Lautsch’s most important mission is to fight fascism. Just as they did in the GDR when they built the Berlin Wall.
I wonder if Mr Wanderwitz is supportive of this ridiculous carry on, because I know the AfD are opposed to this offensive nonsense. Can you imagine the reception a load of bolshy Christians would get in Saudi, Pakistan, and the like, if they did similar? I think we’ve seen how life is for minority religions in Islamic countries. But the reason Muslims do it over here in Europe is because they can, because the treacherous Leftards are aligned with them and allow it. Strangely enough, I’ve not read of any Christians going apeshit and running around stabbing loads of people in the name of Jesus Christ lately.
This is precisely why I’m not a free speech absolutist. Nobody should be allowed to call for caliphates just like nobody should be allowed to show support for terrorism. What people do online is a different story but certainly out in public like this there should be zero tolerance. They’ve taken our liberal democracies, our freedom of expression and tolerant attitudes towards others and used them against us, now there’s no going back;
”The first pro-caliphate protest in Hamburg caused a lot of consternation and outrage in the German media when it took place earlier this year, but now it looks like they are set to become a regular occurrence.
Just like past protests in support of establishing an Islamic caliphate in Germany, another one on Sunday night demanding the introduction of Sharia law in Germany saw thousands attend. The videos, once again saw masses of Islamists screaming, “Allahu Akbar,” along with other pro-Islamic chants.
Muslim Interaktiv, the group behind the demonstrations, reported that 5,000 took part. The group is active in Germany organizing rallies, including protests against Israel’s war in Gaza in Palestine.
Past protests were treated with a shrug. Hamburg police chief Frank Schnabel told ZDF in April that he saw no legal grounds for banning the organization. Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann also made a similar statement, saying that the call for a caliphate is “politically absurd” but not a punishable offense.
Even more remarkably, Thomas Haldenwang, the head of Germany’s Office of the Protection of the Constitution, a powerful domestic spy agency, also brushed off the caliphate protests, simply stating they are a “conceivable” form of government. Notably, he is the same spy chief rabidly opposed to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and has actively spoken out against the party in a highly politicized manner.
German teenagers who danced and sang “Auslander Raus” (“Foreigners Out”), faced arrest and massive police responses. Teens caught singing the song on video faced widespread public witch hunts, which have seen them lose their jobs and smeared on the front cover of newspapers across the country. In the most famous case on the island of Sylt, German left-wing politicians called for the ”maximum penalty” and years in prison against those caught simply singing the song during private events.”
https://rmx.news/commentary/pro-sharia-law-protests-are-becoming-a-regular-thing-in-germany/
If these were Germans openly calling for reintroducing the monarchy, they’d be arrested as extremely dangerous right-wing terrorists in no time. For the core of the German establishment parties people who aren’t German simply cannot do anything wrong. Claiming they can would be hostility to foreigners (Ausländerfeindlichkeit) and thus, totally German and Nazi.
Fairly recently, about 12,000 SPD-luminaries, among them 35 MPs, signed an open letter to the government to protest about what they called inappropriately mixing immigration and security policy. It claimed that immigration wouldn’t cause terror attacks by immigrants and that people demanding border controls, deportation of foreign criminals and rejected asylum seekers and generally, repressive immigration policies would only seek to shift the Overton window. It further spoke against reducing welfare payments to asylum seekers who (illegally) came from other EU countries, stop-and-search by the police in crime hotspots and data sharing with other EU countries for the purpose of determining the identity of prospective immigrants. Instead, it demanded that much more money must be put into fighting right wing extremism and propaganda for The Democracy®.
And that’s the German centre-left position. The Greens and the former SED are much extremer in this.
Can you imagine the reception a load of bolshy Christians would get in Saudi, Pakistan, and the like, if they did similar? … Strangely enough, I’ve not read of any Christians going apeshit and running around stabbing loads of people in the name of Jesus Christ lately.
Well, a lot of bolshy Christians (more precisely Jews, even more precisely Zionists) have done exactly that in an area that used to be called Palestine. Their immigration was also unfettered, even promoted, and they sensibly (in their opinion) armed themselves over the decades to the teeth.
And now they are going ‘apeshit’ murdering literally thousands upon thousands of indigenous men, women and children, dropping untold numbers of 2-ton bombs all over the place, even in neighbouring countries, with a clear preference for hitting schools, hospitals and refugee camps to extract maximum casualties. A recent hospital bombing resulted in patients and locals being burned alive before the eyes of others unable to help – just like the good old days when heretics were burned at the stake.
Apparently 25% of the world’s population are Muslims (31% Christians), the overwhelming majority of whom are just as peaceful and non-murderous as you and I.
I am also against unrestricted immigration and the practice of primitive religious beliefs, but unfortunately our governments are not. Hopefully that will change but in the meantime you should be happy that the immigrants entering our countries are not so organized and do not have such massive financial and political support as the Jews had and continue to have. Otherwise the immigrants could equally arm themselves to the teeth and take over our countries!
“Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany”
Didn’t they help create the “crises”, with help from a load of other dodgy individuals and institutions worldwide?
That’s the exact problem: They cannot do anything against these crises because they’re the direct outcome of policies they’ve pretty much been ordered to implement (German governments may not formally be subservient to the UN and the American left – although this is anything but clear – but they’re always going to act as if they were).
There’s something about Germans and democracy…….
There’s something about foreign powers forcibly installing a ruling caste primarily tasked with keeping a thumb on the population they’re supposed to rule. I congratulate you to the discovery that this isn’t exactly democratic. It actually isn’t.
They just want to be sure that none of that horrible strengthening of the family and the economy, elimination of cultural degeneracy, and pride in their history and culture that happened in the 1940’s ever happens again.
Yeah but there was that thing called the Holocaust.
Rabble. That’s not a clever way for Eva Ricarda Lautsch to describe 20% of the German electorate.
The left in Germany is the descendents of the national socialists and communists. Naxis were socialists, just like the current socialists. Hitler nationalised many institutions and out commiserations into all private businesses and made sure they worked for the state. He took control of trades unions and all other state and private and voluntary organisations. That is socialism. The east German communists morphed into West German socialists, and their poisonous influence is weaving its way through rhe German social and political system. Their media is riven with communist believers. Germany if buggering up Europe again! That country should have been broken up into 10 mini states n
The left in Germany is composed of:
During the first world war, a group called USPD (independent social democrats) split off from the SPD because the core SPD nominally supported the German war effort instead of sticking to the internationalist socialist cause. A part of this group later merged back into the SPD when it had become a, if not the, ruling party, of Germany. The remainder formed the Moscow-oriented KPD. This means that (organizationally) ⅔ of the German left predate the emergence of National Socialism in the 1920 by quite a while (the SPD was orginally founded in 1863) and the remaining ⅓ is an outgrowth of a heavily Jewish-influenced school of political philosophy which begat so-called critical theory and thus, anything-woke of today.
The claim that the left in Germany is the descendents of the national socialists
is thus, frankly, completely idiotic.
Just swop RUK for AFD and we have the same situation here.
“And what about the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets against it last winter”…..Funny that when you consider it was the establishment parties that whipped up hysteria and encouraged people to take to the streets against the AFD. How desperate and pathetic.
In America, you demonstrate government, in Soviet Russia, government demonstrates you!
These demonstrations were literally called for by the present German government and attracted people with signs displaying slogans like Against nation, state and capital!
Scholz (German chancellor) considered this a fine show of the population’s committment to democracy. As far as I know, post-war governments organising street marches against the domestic opposition had been literally unheard of outside of the former Warsaw Pact so far.
So, what level of “democratic” support will Reform need to reach before the calls for them being proscribed as too extreme right begin?