Germany is dangerously close to banning the AfD

 

Elisabeth Dampier

Germany is dangerously close to banning the AfD

4 May 2025, 2:47pm

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/germany-is-dangerously-close-to-banning-the-afd/

 

Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been declared ‘right-wing extremist’ who are ‘against the free democratic order’ by Germany’s domestic intelligence service. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) can now increase its investigation of the AfD, including tapping their phones, intercepting their electronic communications, and recruiting informants within the party. Public servants, especially those in the police or military, may find themselves fired unless they leave the party. Members of the party may find themselves barred from gun ownership. Some in public sector television are calling for the AfD to be kept off the airwaves. The AfD is being treated as though it were a dangerous fringe group, when in fact it is the second-largest party in Germany.

 

It will probably also mean the AfD is denied more of the generous funding that the German taxpayer provides political parties, putting them at a deliberate disadvantage. Many in the left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD) and some in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) want to push for the AfD to be banned entirely, which has already been discussed in parliament. Many Germans feel uncomfortable about this even if they don’t like and don’t support the AfD: if the government can ban the opposition party, then is this really a democracy anymore?

 

If the government can ban the opposition party, then is this really a democracy anymore?

 

The BfV, which is overseen by the Ministry of the Interior, put together a 1,100-page report outlining their reasoning for the extremist designation and late last month gave it to the Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, of the left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD), who is due to leave office soon after her party came third in the election behind the AfD. Faeser did not submit the report to expert review, which is the common practice, suggesting she wanted to push it through. She concurred with the report’s findings against her political opponents and agreed to the designation.

 

However, that BfV report hasn’t been published and there are no plans to do so, which means the public is reliant on leaks to left-leaning media outlets, presumably by those in government. It’s clear that one of the reasons the AfD is considered extremist is its position on migration, with leaks highlighting that one AfD politician criticised ‘the 100,000-fold import of people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures’. However, the EU’s asylum system operates on those very same principles. We accept female refugees from Afghanistan because the country is considered so barbarous to women. Is the EU ‘against the free democratic order’ by admitting this?

 

The BfV’s report also labels the AfD extremist because it supposedly thinks German citizens with a migration background, especially Muslims, aren’t fully German because they aren’t ethnically German. However, the party points out that they base the definition of who is a German on Article 116 of the German constitution, which restored citizenship to Germans deprived of it by the Nazis: ‘anyone who possesses German nationality or who has found refuge in the territory of the German Reich as a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin, or as the spouse or descendant of such a person, as it stood on 31 December 1937’. German ethnicity has become a sort of Schröndinger’s cat, whereby a large number of the German political elite deny that it exists, unless it comes to asking them to accept the ancestral guilt of what their ancestors did three generations ago.

 

The BfV itself is far from neutral. Its former head, Thomas Haldenwang, under whom this report was first drawn up, quit in order to run as a parliamentary candidate for the CDU this year. The agency is also not independent, reporting directly to the outgoing SPD Interior Minister Nancy Faeser. It is these two parties who will run the country together in coalition and who compete with the AfD.

 

The AfD is taking legal action against the BfV, sending a 48-page warning letter that says legal proceedings will begin on Monday if the intelligence agency doesn’t change its decision. Whatever happens next, this episode has shown that the German elite are radicalising against the people. Voters rejected the mainstream parties last election, with some of their lowest vote share ever. Rather than reflect on that, the CDU and the SPD have formed a coalition to end the debt brake, so they can embark on a spending spree, and are now effectively saying that criticism of Islam or immigration is unconstitutional. I find myself in the odd position of being afraid for my country, afraid that once again democracy will be suspended by those claiming to be its guardians.