The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now Germany\u2019s largest opposition group and even topped several opinion polls \u2013 briefly putting it ahead of now-Chancellor Friedrich Merz\u2019s center-right party \u2013 in the weeks after February\u2019s federal election. <\/p>\n
At the same time, the AfD is facing growing calls for an outright ban, most recently from another major political party. <\/p>\n
In May, the country\u2019s domestic intelligence agency formally classified the AfD as an extremist entity that threatens democracy. In a 1,100-page report, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or BfV, also laid out its findings that the party was racist, anti-Muslim, and devaluing of \u201centire segments\u201d of Germany\u2019s population. <\/p>\n
That move, which enables the BfV to better monitor the group , has reignited attempts to impose a ban, despite the party claiming a significant 20.8% of the vote in February\u2019s national election \u2013 the best performance by a far-right party in the country since World War II. <\/p>\n
The AfD has also enjoyed very vocal support from the Trump administration, with Tesla billionaire Elon Musk \u2013 who has since left his position in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) \u2013 urging Germans to vote for the party in the run-up to the election. More recently, both US Vice President, JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have criticized Germany\u2019s decision to classify the AfD as extremist. <\/p>\n
On Monday, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which is currently serving as the junior coalition partner in Berlin\u2019s conservative-led government, voted unanimously to begin efforts to outlaw it. <\/p>\n
Yet the legal path to banning the AfD is lengthy \u2013 and largely unprecedented. <\/p>\n
Set up to avoid a repeat of Nazi rule, Germany\u2019s political system operates on the basis of streitbare Demokratie<\/em>, or \u201cmilitant democracy,\u201d meaning it is a democracy \u201cdetermined and able to defend itself.\u201d <\/p>\n In other words, the German state can actively defend itself against internal threats to its democratic principles and constitutional order, including through the banning of political parties. <\/p>\n However, two criteria must be met by Germany\u2019s Federal Constitutional Court to form a legal basis for a ban. <\/p>\n Firstly, the party in question must be found to work against the country\u2019s free democratic order, demonstrating an \u201cactively belligerent, aggressive stance.\u201d Secondly, the party must be popular enough to pose a tangible threat to democracy, a provision created in 2017 and called \u201cpotentiality.\u201d <\/p>\n Parties found to meet the first criterion, but not the second, can be prohibited from accessing public campaign financing, but are allowed to continue with other activities. <\/p>\n \u201cThe opposite is true: its size demonstrates that it fulfills the criterion of \u2018potentiality.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n To begin the process of banning a party, a formal request must be made to the federal court. This request can only be made by either the government itself, the Bundestag,<\/em> Germany\u2019s lower house of parliament, or the Bundesrat,<\/em> the legislative body that represents the country\u2019s 16 regional states. <\/p>\n The court then decides whether to begin proceedings or throw out the application as unsubstantiated. <\/p>\n It must hold a full trial, examining thousands of pages of evidence and hearing witnesses, and considers whether the party violates the constitution in practice, Holterhus explained. <\/p>\n The court can then declare a party unconstitutional. The party would then be dissolved and banned from all political activity. It would also be prohibited from creating any substitute organizations. <\/p>\n At least two-thirds of the court\u2019s justices must be in agreement in order to make the declaration. <\/p>\n In practical terms, if the AfD were to be banned, its sitting lawmakers would receive an automatic loss of mandate at the regional and federal level as well as in the European parliament. <\/p>\n Of the 152 seats the AfD currently has in the Bundestag<\/em> , 42 are direct seats, where the respective candidates individually won the districts by majority. These 42 districts would need to vote again to fill the seats with new candidates from other parties. The other 110 AfD seats, which are allocated using a party list system, would remain vacant until the next election cycle. Similarly, the AfD\u2019s seats in the European Parliament would remain vacant. <\/p>\n In either case, this would result in a shifting of the majority ratio, meaning that the seats of all other parties would gain a higher significance. <\/p>\n The German Federal Constitutional Court has only banned two parties in the country\u2019s history \u2013 and both were in the early postwar years. The Socialist Reich Party (SRP), a successor to the Nazi Party, was outlawed in 1952. Four years later, in 1956, the far-left Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was also banned. <\/p>\n Repeated attempts \u2013 in 2003, 2016 and 2021 \u2013 to ban the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) have failed. Although the court in 2017 openly acknowledged the party was unconstitutional, it found that it didn\u2019t pose a significant threat to the constitutional order. In January 2024, the court approved the freezing of the NPD\u2019s state funding for six years. <\/p>\n Overall, Holterhus believes that it is difficult to impose a ban on a political party in Germany. \u201cA party ban is considered a measure of last resort against the enemies of a democracy,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n The rise of the AfD has triggered widespread unease, with protesters calling for it to be outlawed \u2013 most notably in early 2024, when tens of thousands of demonstrators descended on cities across Germany after it emerged that senior AfD party members had discussed a plan to deport migrants en masse. <\/p>\n Yet German lawmakers remain divided over the issue, with some fearing the move could backfire and fuel far-right sympathies. <\/p>\n Pointing to its classification as a right-wing extremist organisation, SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil told party members at a conference Monday that efforts to ban the AfD should begin. <\/p>\n \u201cThe moment the domestic intelligence agency says this is a confirmed right-wing extremist party, there can be no more tactics,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Yet Merz\u2019s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) \u2013 which leads Germany\u2019s coalition government \u2013 is hesitant. <\/p>\n German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, a member of the Christian Social Union (CSU) \u2013 the CDU\u2019s Bavarian sister party \u2013 poured cold water on the SPD\u2019s motion. Speaking to German news podcast \u201cTable. Today,\u201d he said that \u201cdecisions made at the SPD party conference are not yet a mandate for the interior minister.\u201d <\/p>\n Merz has himself expressed caution over the move, telling newspaper Die Zeit in May that he is \u201cskeptical\u201d of procedures to ban political parties. <\/p>\n The AfD\u2019s unparalleled public approval, not to mention support from the Trump administration, a powerful transatlantic ally, means its prohibition could have significant reverberations. <\/p>\n Some opinion polls found that, in the weeks after the Germany\u2019s election , support for the AfD had crept up even higher than its 20.8% official result, briefly making it the most popular party in the country. <\/p>\n National polling agency Forsa in April found that the AfD was polling at a record 26% \u2013 putting it two percentage points higher than the CDU, on 24%. Currently, Forsa shows the AfD at 24% \u2013 four points behind the CDU. <\/p>\n With the AfD\u2019s support reaching such heights, Holterhus sees a risk of creating a \u201cmartyr effect\u201d in the case of a ban, with the AfD \u201cstaging itself as a victim of political opponents.\u201d This, he said, could result in further radicalization of some of its supporters and even politically motivated violence. <\/p>\n Lengthy legal proceedings, he said, could further heighten the AfD\u2019s platform while the move also risks the \u201cwrath\u201d of the Trump administration and could play into the populist narrative of an \u201cundemocratic Europe.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now Germany\u2019s largest opposition group and even topped…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1970,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Adding fuel to the fire?<\/h2>\n