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.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Banning the opposition – last refuge of ill-fated political scoundrels down the ages.
No one seems to get that though – it’s like censoring the opinions of people you don’t like, why do it, unless you are scared your own position is weak / incorrect / crazy?
As I’ve written elsewhere, maybe if a ban happens, it’s a good thing in the long run. Let’s get this fake love for “democracy” out in the open. If I were the mainstream German parties I would certainly not be contemplating a ban, but instead working out how to make the “shittiest of shit coalitions” work, or turning down the heat slightly so more frogs forget they are about to boil – maybe actually stop some immigration, for example.
I suppose there are two other possibilities though – firstly that these mainstream party leaders actually believe the AfD is Literally Hitler – but I strongly doubt this – and secondly that those leaders realise that this game can’t last forever and they need to go to the next stage to keep it going, so it’s now shit or bust.
It could get interesting, and maybe events in Germany will lead to a wider European renaissance.
My guess would be that there are a real lot of lefties who do believe that everybody who opposes anything they’re in favour is Literally Hitler, because their worldview is binary: Mankind is composed of two groups of people, the good guys and the bad guys. Hitler was a bad guy. Because of this, every bad guy is just like him and anything more complicated is just a very suspicious distraction from the fighting the good fight. That’s how one ends up with people torching Teslas in the USA to “fight fascism”.
Indeed. Not so sure about the leadership.
The last political leader of any German party who had real-world experience with the Third Reich was Helmut Kohl (1930 – 2017). Since then, the official state mythology of the FRG became that the country was really governed by ‘Nazis’ until a revolution which took place around 1968 ended their rule in order to introduce to post-national paradise also known as Best Germany of All Times or Most Free Germany of All Times.
It’s known that the AfD is opposed to this ‘interesting’ piece of historical revisionism, claims that Germany had a largely positive history before 1933 and prominent AfD politicians have even dared to criticize the monstrosity known as Holocaust Monument. They’re obviously literallier Hitler than Hitler himself¹, no leader of a German establishment/ cartel party can let any doubt cast on his firm belief in that and nobody but the closet Nazis of the CDU would ever want to try.
If all of this sounds a bit absurd, it’s not even half as absurd as actual politics in Germany are in this respect. For years, I’ve – half jokingly – used Assuming a baker is a member of the AfD, is he then selling Nazi rolls? as example for a so nonsensical guilt by association construction that I believed nobody would ever actually claim that. Somewhat recently, a bakery in former East Germany whose owner sits on the town council for the AfD was vandalized and We don’t want Nazi rolls! was among the political messages which were left.
¹ Hitler wasn’t intentionally Hitler because there was no Hitler before him which could have served as a severe warning to him. Not so members and supporters of the AfD.
Thanks for the perspective. I tend to assume that politicians are selfish cynics and liars with few if any principles. I guess at least some of the time, they believe at least some of what they say.
I wish I could believe that, but look at what is happening in France, and the French are just letting it happen, likewise Romania, the Netherlands. It seems that people have lost their will to revolt against tyranny, instead they have become docile sheep being lead to the Slaughterhouse.
If the young Germans have any guts they must seperate Germany again and have the East for AfD and start looking toward Russia to rebuild their industries and natural resources.
The money is running out very soon and our own ball less Leader is rushing between China, America or the EU to bail him out. God help us all.
That’s precisely the most important critcism against the AfD: While it’s not overtly in favour of recreating a situation similar to the one after the 30-years-war, with loads of “German inhabited territories” being de facto different states, it has an unhealthy amount of Putin stooges in its rows and possibly even some parrotting the Russian line that Germany between the Elbe and the Oder is Russia’s legitimate bounty of the second world war and ought to be restored to it.
Flocking to a different and certainly much better overlord is not an example of having guts but the exact opposite of it and that Putinistas keep argueing for this just betrays the weakness of their own position.
Well this is very heartening. What surprises me is that the Christian churches are so opposed to the AfD ( is it because they’re all captured by the woke mind virus? ), no surprises regarding who the Muslims are voting for;
”A new INSA survey has revealed that a majority of German citizens now believe that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) could become the strongest political force in the next federal election.
At the same time, nearly half of respondents say the AfD should be treated like any other party, amid attempts by Germany’s legacy party to ostracize the populist faction with an ongoing political firewall.
According to the survey, reviewed by the Junge Freiheit news outlet, 51 percent of respondents believe it is likely the AfD will win the most votes in the next Bundestag election. Only 27 percent disagree.
The findings, presented by INSA head Hermann Binkert on YouTube, point to a growing normalization of the AfD’s rise. Alice Weidel’s party became the second-largest party in the Bundestag after February’s election, but its popularity has continued to rise following the election-winning Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU) decision to team up with the Social Democrats (SPD) to form another Grand Coalition.
Among AfD voters themselves, belief in victory is overwhelming at 87 percent. However, even supporters of traditionally centrist or left-leaning parties express similar expectations: 63 percent of BSW voters and 60 percent of FDP voters also think the AfD could come out on top. Only the SPD and Greens’ bases remain broadly skeptical.”
https://rmx.news/article/majority-of-germans-believe-afd-will-win-next-federal-election-poll-reveals/
Maybe the pennies are dropping with enough sleepyhead citizens that they’ve let too many eejits like this in and now they’re paying the price. The AfD is needed to at least try and undo some of the damage Merkel and her cronies did;
“Where I come from, there is no law. Where I come from, there are no rules. Where I come from, there is vigilante justice. That’s why at some point, yes, 10, 20 years from now, it will be the same in Germany.”
This Muslim man gives Germany fair warning, the question is whether anybody will listen in time.
“I should tell you something. Whatever you do, you won’t be able to change it. Accept your fate. Just let yourselves go. Neither the AfD nor any other organization will be able to change that.
At some point, your land will be flooded and there will be nothing you can do about it. Nothing.”
https://x.com/RMXnews/status/1915390681012437343
Alternatively, to preserve the Federal Republic, perhaps Berlin could just jettison the parts that were once the now-unmentionable DDR.
Was replacing the deutschmark with another currency a sort of abolition of the identity of the Republic?
This (abolishment of the Germany currency) was imposed onto Germany as condition for allowing the so-called re-unification to take place.
The globalists have already centred their nexus of production around Germany and Poland in terms of fighting an endless war and fuelling the military-industrial complex. Significant British involvement as well. It is quite funny the naivete of these plans given that Russia and China understand very well the necessity of striking promptly and that Europe has no heavy lift equipment. A NATO general said recently that NATO forces simply have no comprehension of the level of violence in Ukraine. They aren’t conditioned to it. Just carry on and see where it gets you.
Off-T, but same country. Reiner Fuellmich sentenced. 3 years 9 months. Not including the 18 months on remand. Absolute farce.
https://truthsummit.substack.com/p/live-reiner-sentenced-3-years-9-months
It sounds almost comical, failing to ban a party because they couldn’t work out who were the activists, the party itself or the ‘establishment’ who had infiltrated it.
It’s absolutely not comical when agent provocateurs from an inland secret service invade a politically unwelcome organization in order to steer it onto a criminal course.
And it now seems that there were problems with the probity of the German election. People not getting their election papers, lack of ID being required, arriving to vote and finding your vote had been cast – all remarkably similar to the US elections.
Its ironic isn’t it that the self believing “Democratic Party’s” have become the very thing they say they are trying to prevent.
If they try to ban the AfD, it will destroy the CDU/CSU coalition. Many decent CDU politicians, and especially CSU politicians, will rightly see it as an attack on democracy itself, and will revolt against the leadership.
I suspect that is why SPD politicians are so keen on the idea.
If they do actually ban the AfD, this will strongly reassert one of the ideological foundations of the FRG, namely, that a party with any real political clout to the right of the CDU/ CSU must not (be allowed to) exist. This will strengthen the CDU for the simple reason that there’s no other choice. The AfD is an establishment party which is firmly in favour of the post-war German order, it’s just that the older establishment parties won’t accept that. Member and supporters of the AfD will overwhelmingly not want to flock to the nationalist parties (which would be outlawed in the blink of an eye if they did) and since founding a successor organisation of the AfD (however that’s defined) would then illegal as well, CDU/CSU is the only alternate choice.
If there are still people who – post COVID – believe the political machinations of the FRG were “democratic”, they’re either dishonest or extremely stupid/ credulous. The German Fundamental Law is meant to be a straight-jacket for Germans they must never escape and that they’re occasionally allowed to pick their favoured colour from a very limited set (black, red, green, yellow and pink, blue to be outlawed¹) which has some effect on the personal composition of the next coalition government which will continue exactly as the last coaltion government because it’s going to be composed of the same parties is just window dressing.
¹ Black – CDU/CSU, red – SPD, green – Bündnis 90/ Die Grünen, yellow – FDP, pink – SED/PDS/BSW/WTF, blue – AfD.
UK parallel:
Cancelled local elections in areas where a cynic might suggest an ‘alternative’political party might be deemed, not suitable?
So let’s see—-Who are really the Nazi’s here? In Germany apparently you will be locked up for criticising politicians. Not very un-nazi like is it? Not very Freedom loving to ban whole Political Parties because they dare to have a different manifesto from your tyrannical one is it?
The ruling anti-fascists will lock up the more obnoxious (seen from their point of view) of their political and journalistic opponents exactly as was designed by their Allied masters starting from 1946. Your conclusion should thus apply to these and not to their German stooges.
I wonder if talking about banning them is just a tactic to smear them as beyond the pale.
About as much as shooting at Donald Trump was just an attempt to express that the electorate doesn’t really support him and nobody ever meant to do him any personal harm.
I love eugyppius, his IQ is so clearly higher than the aggregate sum of all the German politicians he slags off.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” JFK.