–OpEd-
BERLIN — Should the AfD be banned?
The debate is finally taking place in the German Bundestag. A cross-party initiative of parliament members led by the former Federal Government Commissioner for Eastern Europe, Marco Wanderwitz (CDU), is presenting its motion in committee to ban the Alternative für Deutschland party this week. It will be debated in the Bundestag plenary session in the coming weeks.
There are, predictably, plenty who would rather bury the issue: the plan is too risky, comes too early, it’s too undemocratic. Perhaps the necessary political momentum isn’t yet there. But the reasons why we should ban the AfD are right in front of our faces. Sayings like “We will hunt them down,” Brownshirts slogans, deportation fantasies: facts like these have become so common that we have grown used to it.
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Even the catastrophic opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD senior president was able to effectively suspend parliamentary proceedings for hours – was not necessary for the ban to become legitimate: it was a legitimate move all along. The only thing that has been lacking is political courage.
Yes, a ban procedure is risky, both legally and politically. Legally, it is risky because you have to prove, based on countless individual statements, that AfD is working to destroy the democratic order. It is no easy task: AfD’s strategy is to present itself as the party of true democrats and defenders of the German Constitution. Although in reality, its representatives have long been trying to dismantle the nation’s main Constitutional institutions from within.
Enemy in Parliament
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution has already collected extensive material against the AfD, which in itself could be enough to justify a ban. But there is no reason to wait for the evaluation of every last statement made by an AfD official. The first point of order is to understand the party’s political strategy.
The AfD is shifting the boundaries further towards an ethnic concept of ‘the people.’
AfD portrays itself as a representative of the genuine will of the people. This is worrying in itself: it has little to do with parliamentary democracy. If they already know and statutorily represent the will of the people, then what are elections for? It is unlikely such a party would ever truly engage in a parliamentary debate. AfD members instead use parliament as a stage for inflammatory speeches to be spread on YouTube and TikTok, which allows them to bypass the parliament and address “the people.”
But what people? The AfD is shifting the boundaries further and further towards an ethnic concept of people. At the so-called secret meeting in Potsdam, they invited the Austrian fascist Martin Sellner, who demanded the deportation of citizens with a migrant background. Saxony-Anhalt’s AfD parliamentary group leader Ulrich Siegmund said foreign restaurants should be banned from his state, and that life in Saxony-Anhalt should be made as uncomfortable as possible for foreigners.
Threat to democracy
The AfD has its own idea of the Constitution and the nation’s laws. Their idea is that there is a kind of natural, true law “preceding” the laws. In the words of AfD senior president Treutler in the Thuringian state parliament: “There is not only the law, there is also the spirit of the law.”
This is AfD’s most dangerous idea to date. Because it allows official laws, established by democratically elected parliamentarians, to be bent in any direction. Only AfD knows the true will of the people, it is the true constitutional party, it will respect the true law: doesn’t all this sound unsettling? We can no longer watch as this party takes over democracy.
This brings us back to the political risks of a ban. Of course, the ban of a party with around 50,000 members and millions of voters must be widely discussed and carefully prepared. The Bundestag is the right place for such a discussion. But many political leaders are already shying away, they fear AfD supporters could become more radicalized, they are afraid that the voters will call them undemocratic.
It seems like they do not want to antagonize AfD supporters. But what about antagonizing the millions who are immigrants or first or second-generation Germans, afraid of the xenophobia unleashed by the AfD? And what about the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets last winter to protest against it?
Authoritarian but legal
It is true that a party ban is an authoritarian tool, but it is a perfectly legal authoritarian tool. The Federal Constitutional Court only imposes it if the strict legal requirements for it are met. And the decision to initiate proceedings to ban a party is made democratically – in the Bundestag, the Bundesrat or by the democratically elected federal government.
And as a weapon of the rule of law, a party ban is extremely effective: that’s why the AfD is doing everything it can to escape this fate.
Other democracies manage to go further without resorting to party bans, but Germany is not one of them.
If the Federal Constitutional Court were to ban the party, the party would be dissolved, its infrastructure would be destroyed, and its assets could be confiscated. The establishment of replacement organizations would also be prohibited. Members of parliament would immediately lose their seats.
Of course, AfD members would not disappear because of this. But the party would be eliminated from the public eye, and from political competition. The two parties previously banned in the Federal Republic, the Communist KPD and the Nazi party SRP, disappeared into insignificance with the ban in the 1950s.
There are democracies that manage to go further without resorting to party bans, but Germany is not one of them. To remain a democracy, Germany must resort to the authority of the rule of law if necessary. Yes, a ban procedure can fail. But anyone who is not prepared to protect our threatened democracy by all means possible will ultimately hand it over to its enemies. That is the greatest danger.
