I fear they will try to ban Alternative für Deutschland.
I spent many months last year saying this would not happen, and my reasons were fourfold:
- Key figures in the major parties, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the SPD and Friedrich Merz of the CDU, opposed banning the AfD.
- Marco Wanderwitz’s much-publicised initiative to ban the AfD was therefore a doomed movement among Bundestag backbenchers, overhyped by idiotic German journalists. As I predicted, it went nowhere.
- Throughout much of 2024, the AfD was strong enough to be a problem, but not quite strong enough to cause prohibitive difficulties for the political cartel that runs the Federal Republic. It persisted in a sweet spot that ruined the risk-reward calculus of trying to ban it.
- Through last summer, the NGO-coordinated and government-led ‘fight against the Right’ succeeded in seriously damaging AfD support. If the AfD could be kept in bounds via propaganda, a ban seemed additionally unlikely.
None of these considerations apply anymore: support for banning the AfD is building within both the SPD and the CDU. Much more serious efforts to the ban the party are on the horizon; the Wanderwitz clown-show is yesterday’s foible. The AfD seems increasingly immune to state media propaganda and Leftist political agitation.
More important than all of that, however, is the fact that the CDU has proven vastly more incompetent than I or anybody else anticipated. Through its own failures it is making the AfD into the strongest political party of the Federal Republic. Soon it will begin to threaten outright majorities in the East. This was going to happen sooner or later, but the CDU has accelerated the process massively. Things that should’ve taken years are now happening in weeks or months, and that is very dangerous. It is far from inconceivable that the AfD will end up with a minister president (i.e., a governor) in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or Sachsen-Anhalt following the state elections in 2026. And however that turns out, the 2029 federal elections will be a nightmare. By then the AfD will be so strong that all other parties will have to form the world’s shittiest of shit coalitions to keep it out of power.
CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann warned in January that “if we in the democratic middle don’t stop illegal migration, the fringes will become so strong in the next election that they will be able to govern alone”. Well, it turns out that the “democratic middle” has no interest in stopping mass migration, not even to ensure its own political survival. Men like Friedrich Merz and Lars Klingbeil are like automata, locked via institutional imponderables on a predetermined course of national and political self-destruction. Unable to change their politics, they will try instead to remove the AfD from the map. If you can just ban the opposition you don’t have to solve problems, you don’t have to win arguments and you don’t have to persuade voters of anything.
Last October, Merz said he would be open to banning the AfD, if and when the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) upgrades its political status. Later thinly sourced reports have Merz emphasising again at a closed CDU meeting that he would be “open” to banning the AfD, but that this would have to wait until “just after” the February elections.
At issue is a long-awaited report on the political crimes of the AfD from the domestic intelligence agents of the BfV. As of now, the BfV classifies the AfD as being “under suspicion of Right-wing extremism”. This has been the case since 2021, and the classification has allowed the BfV to use its wealth of spy agency tactics against the party. Its tap their phones, reads their emails and sends its agents to infiltrate AfD ranks.
These operations have generated a wealth of material, on which basis the BfV has been preparing a new assessment for many months. Everybody believes this assessment, when it does emerge, will find the AfD guilty of ‘proven Right-wing extremism’. This finding will in turn provide political justification for initiating ban proceedings against Germany’s most popular party. Perhaps because the BfV knows this is not just any other report, but rather a document that will make the case for changing German politics forever, it is taking its time. The Federal Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the BfV, has emphasised the “very extensive and complex” nature of the assessment, which is still being compiled. Even when this document is finished, it won’t be released until a new government forms under Chancellor Merz and a new BfV chief can be appointed.
Powerful elements within the SPD, including Saskia Esken, Matthias Miersch and Ralph Stegner, are unwilling to wait. They are demanding that the BfV disgorge its precious assessment as soon as possible. The reason is clear: banning the AfD will involve a years-long complex judicial proceeding at the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, and they want to have the AfD good and forbidden before the next federal elections in 2029. There is not much time to spare.
The AfD says that it is unconcerned by all of this. Co-chair Alice Weidel has called plans to prohibit her party “baseless” and “utterly futile.” I understand her defiance, and I would probably say the same thing in her situation. But, I am not so certain attempts to ban the AfD will fail.
I give them a one-in-three chance.
The Anglosphere is littered with misinformation about the potential and actual prohibition of political parties in Germany, so allow me to clarify a few things.
As I have said many times, the Federal Republic is a “defensive democracy”. These words describe a unique political system designed to prevent the recurrence of National Socialism and also to serve as a bulwark against the Soviet bloc during the Cold War.
Our politics are accordingly subject to considerable overtly illiberal restrictions. Among these is Article 21 (2) of our Basic Law, which declares “unconstitutional” those “parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany”. According to later jurisprudence, this means that parties must demonstrate an “actively belligerent and aggressive stance towards” the democratic order; merely having ideas inconsistent with democracy or the German constitution is not enough. Finally, to be subject to prohibition, a party must be in a position to achieve its anti-constitutional goals. Tiny political organisations with no prospect of altering the course of German politics have a powerful defence in ban proceedings.
Banning a party is a complex process. You need either the Bundestag, the Bundesrat, or the federal government to apply for a ban with the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. When we talk about Bundestag initiatives to ban the AfD, we are talking about nothing more than this initial application. Thereafter, the court begins ban proceedings. These can last for a very long time and their outcome is highly uncertain.
Only two parties have ever been banned in the history of the Federal Republic. They are the Socialist Reich Party (SRP), a successor party to the NSDAP, and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Konrad Adenauer’s government initiated ban proceedings against both organisations in November 1951. It took the Federal Constitutional Court a mere 11 months to ban the SRP, but the case against the KPD dragged on for years, finally concluding in 1956. In the end, it too was banned. The assets of both parties were seized and they lost their seats in the state and federal parliaments. Crucially, both parties were minuscule compared to the AfD today. The SRP was an upstart regional party with support confined to Niedersachsen and Bremen. The KPD was more established, having won just under 6% of the vote in the 1949 federal elections, but still it was nothing comparable to the AfD today.
More relevant for present attempts to ban the AfD, are the two failed efforts to prohibit the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).
In 2001, the Federal Government, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat jointly applied for a ban, but 15 months later their application failed for intriguing procedural reasons. The judges found that the NPD was so thoroughly infiltrated by government spies and informants, that it was impossible to distinguish between unconstitutional things the party itself did and said, and unconstitutional things intelligence agents got the party to do and say.
In 2013, the government – specifically, the Bundesrat – tried to ban the NPD again, after its representatives found their way into two East German state parliaments. After 37 months, the constitutional judges voted against a ban, arguing that the party was too small and electorally irrelevant to pose a threat to the German democratic order.
While the latter finding will not help the AfD, there are at least two rays of hope in all of this:
- As soon as the Bundestag or the Government applies for a ban in Karlsruhe, the BfV will be required to pull all of its spies and infiltrators out of the AfD. They will effectively destroy the human intelligence operation they have spent the years since 2021 building. Unless the BfV and the Government both believe the chances of a ban are good, they won’t even try – for this reason among others.
- The Interior Ministry under Nancy Faeser has for years refused to support a ban, even though it oversees the BfV and has direct insight into the case that the BfV is building against Alternative für Deutschland. If it had anything really powerful to use against the AfD, we would have seen ban proceedings already.
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