Germany’s spy agency BfV has labeled the entirety of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as an extremist entity.
The BfV domestic intelligence agency, which is in charge of safeguarding Germany’s constitutional order, said the announcement comes after an “intense and comprehensive” examination.
“The ethnicity-and ancestry-based conception of the people that predominates within the party is not compatible with the free democratic order,” the BfV said on Friday.
Hopefully this inspires the other parties to to start the process to see the AfD banned. I know the report might not look like much, because of how obvious the findings are. But previous attempts at banning them have failed because such an official report was missing. So maybe our political system starts getting its shit together.
As we say in Germany: Hope dies last
AFD should be banned… Threat to democracy tf
Learn from history and America. No half measures. If you’re going to label them extremists, you also have to break them.
Greece banned golden dawn as a criminal organisation and while a lot of members splintered into other parties it was overall a success in nearly removing all their influence as a political organisation from Greek politics - so, overall banning the fascist party, at least in one instance, worked.
Wow W Greece 💯🙌🏻
Germany banned the NSDAP in 1923 and it didn’t work out.
Maybe don’t pussy out this time. It’s not like the ban wasn’t effective, it’s that they lifted the ban.
Pretending to know history ass looking MF out here advocating for the continued existence of the Nazi party based on some half knowledge he picked up from a trivia box.
I’m not advocating for not trying. Just saying that “it worked once” is not a good argument. I think the only ideology of a party that was banned in Germany that actually doesn’t matter in today’s political landscape is communism. But there still are nazis even though the NSDAP was banned twice, there still are social democrats even though they were banned for 20 years, etc.
There’s also that more recently, Germany failed to ban the NPD twice and that was this century.
I think the AfD should be banned, but the people voting for them also need to become less stupid, and a ban alone will not do that.
You raise fair points, but I want to circle back to intent. Because what you’re advocating in your last sentence is hurt by your original comment.
The whole point of “it’s happened once before” is to show that something is actually possible. It’s not theoretically possible, there’s a real world example to show it.
Bringing up counterexamples does not change that.
You can show one counterexample. Ten. A hundred. A thousand examples of when something didn’t work. They don’t negate the one time it did.
And to go even further, you should frame all those counterexamples as simply learning lessons. Examples on how not to do it. Because the framing here matters. If you want someone to be smart and try to find a solution, you frame history that way.
If you’re trying to discourage others from trying, you do it the way you initially did.
“The ethnicity-and ancestry-based conception of the people that predominates within the party is not compatible with the free democratic order,”
Great news, but also ironic considering German uncritical support for Israel.
Also ironic is that banning political parties is not compatible with the free democratic order.
Paradox of tolerance and whatnot… It’s not ironic. Not only is it compatible, it is essential to its existence.
Germany supports Israel but they’re also critical of it. They have active arrest warrants for Netanyahu if he ever steps foot in their jurisdiction.
For Germany the ideal outcome would be peaceful continuation of both Israel and Palestine. If protecting one means harming the other, they will take no action. Israel is an important military stronghold against eastern powers and will continue to hold special privileges.
Pray they find a valid legal reason to ban them soon now that they can mass spy on them :)
They won’t ban them. Half the German police are members
They will be banned soon
“But previous attempts at banning them have failed because such an official report was missing.”
Man, this is peak modern society, and the absurdity makes me laugh. I don’t mean that in a derisive way, more in a "wow, making democracy work is haaard ". Hopefully this will lead to something positive though, even if I’m anxious that banning a party like the AfD may lead to some things worsening.
YOU DON’T SAY
Yet the neolibs are not good for the working class. We all got a long road ahead of us. Is everybody ready for conscription and ww3.
AfD are Nazis in all but name. How is it they remain unprosecuted in a nation where swastikas and the Hitler salute are outlawed?
They’re not just nazis, they’re nazis sponsored and funded by putin.
This is documented, but racists would rather support their literal enemy than dare accept changing their worldview in any way.
Foreign anti-interference laws address your first point. If they arent effective, thats easily resolved in parliment.
Don’t conflate foreign interest with genuine opposition, I would be very surprised if there wasnt any. This is the Democratic system working. The hubris of the left is suicidal.
Foreign anti-interference laws address your first point. If they arent effective, thats easily resolved in parliment.
They’re not, they need to be reviewed and improved.
Especially since it’s hard to legislate out foreign influence as they are, by definition, foreign.
It’s not that there is no genuine opposition, it’s that the amount of effort needed to tip the scales is surprisingly small.
Understand these tools were developed to control totalitarian societies, influencing democracies is trivial in comparison.
Plausible deniability but they do get in trouble pretty routinely. The last big one iirc was the poster with the two kids saluting each other to form a roofline with a kitchy caption about housing.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/afd-accused-nazi-symbolism-election-germany-hm8dv7nql
“In trouble” in this case is bad press. OP was commenting on prosecution given other stuff that’s illegal in Germany. Or did I miss someone getting arrested for the poster?
Iirc they asked how is it and the article goes into it and go figure it’s the Elon “we didn’t know no better” excuse. They just barely skirt what is and isn’t legal and from what I hear they have a legal team that helps them stay just inside the law while still being outwardly nazi-esk.
Holy shit the times is bad on mobile. Image link for those that want it
Sorry it’s reddit. But it’s actually viewable
One of the main contributors is probably that the last time they tried banned an extremist party on the right (the NPD) it didn’t work because they didn’t present enough evidence according to the courts, that made everyone involved hesitant this time (or at least that is the excuse they used). Or rather, it failed twice, once because they had agents within the party and the other time for lack of evidence. Obviously obtaining that evidence without running into the first problem again is tricky.
Small correction: the NPD was not banned because they were largely irrelevant. They had little to no influence on politics, which is why the court argued that a ban would be inappropriate.
And what will Germany do about it? NOTHING!
They can mass spy on them now and get a valid legal reason to ban them with proof
It’s been led than a day chill.
I’m not super hopeful either, but this is already more than I expected, so we’ll see where things go
Punch left as hard as possible.
entire AfD ‘extremist’
No shit, sherlock, it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
Have you even seen some of the mindblowing excuses people have for why MAGA people in USA are not necessarily extreme?
That it’s for job security, or because of drug trade or all sorts of weird reasons that would absolutely be valid if they weren’t based on falsehoods wrapped in fascism.I’m actually quite surprised that the conclusion is that ALL of AfD are extremists. Maybe if USA had done the same with Trump, and he and his followers were concluded to be extremists, more would have been done to stop him?
But having it said in an official capacity is still important.
Absolutely.
To be fair: it’s really hard to notice of you are completely bound in your right eye, which the BfV traditionally tends to be.
So say they ban them……then what? You think that the most popular political party in the country isn’t going to just reform again while complying with whatever rule got them banned in the first place? Of course they will, and they’ll have the same support, if not more due to the perceived anti-democratic banning of the AfD.
Next stop authoritarian dictatorship I guess? Just ban all elections so they can’t take power?
Crybaby nazis like you crack me the fuck up.
What does it mean if a democracy bans a party that the voters want to elect? Better to ask what failure of the system made that party popular in the first place. We have a similar situation in the US fwiw.
Ruling out foreign interference like astroturfing, genuine Opposition doesn’t come from no where, it comes from suffering in most cases. Failure of elected governments to reflect on their own failure breeds it.
True, but then again we have lived through that already and know that dangerous parties can be elected democratically. That is exactly the reason why we have this mechanism in place.
An anti democratic party has no right to be elected democratically.
Exactly. Democracy is famously the only system which allows to be dismantled through its own tools. That is why the German system is called “Wehrhafte Demokratie” (defensive democracy) to not end up like the Weimar Republic.
The biggest criticism of democracy is that it might become something else.
Usually when it tolerates the intolerant. That’s why we’re fucked in the US. I hope Germany came stop it before it’s too late, I speak some, and was gonna try and emigrate if the need arises.
Intolerance is only an issue when it is equated with violence. There’s no real issue or paradox of intolerance if you equate intolerance with asserting boundaries nonviolently - this is the literal basis of unconditional love.
I fear, that many if not most people do not understand why AFD is an undemocratic party or why this would even matter for them.
I think that problem is closely related to the issue that people think it can not get much worse for them when in reality there is a long, long way down from even the poorest and least represented people in our German society to the poorest people in the worst societies that actually existed in history or even the worst society imaginable with modern technology combined with the rulers from those worst socities in history.
It doesn’t matter what people think when they’re wrong or pig-ignorant.
I understood the post you are replying to as saying “what will AfD voters do when their party is banned?”.
In the case of the Nazis, we don’t know because their party was never banned. We don’t know what would have happened if the Nazi party had been banned.
I would be interested to know if we have historical cases of far-right parties that could have won the elections but were banned before they had the chance.
Well, let’s hope we’re about to see that. My guess is mass protests all over Germany and even more massive counter protests right next to them.
An anti democratic party has no right to be elected democratically.
True. But who decides what is an anti-democratic party? And by what guidelines?
“Why is the AfD classified as extremist?”
First section in the linked article.
That’s a way of defining it - but is that a legal standard?
The applicable law is Article 21 GG:
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Political parties shall participate in the formation of the political will of the people. They may be freely established. Their internal organisation must conform to democratic principles. They must publicly account for their assets and for the sources and use of their funds.
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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 shall be unconstitutional.
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Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, are oriented towards an undermining or abolition of the free democratic basic order or an endangerment of the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be excluded from state financing. If such exclusion is determined, any favourable fiscal treatment of these parties and of payments made to those parties shall cease.
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The Federal Constitutional Court shall rule on the question of unconstitutionality within the meaning of paragraph (2) of this Article and on exclusion from state financing within the meaning of paragraph (3).
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Details shall be regulated by federal laws.
Key point here is “seek to undermine or abolish the free and democratic basic order”, quoth the BVerfG:
The free democratic basic order can be defined as an order which excludes any form of tyranny or arbitrariness and represents a governmental system under a rule of law, based upon self-determination of the people as expressed by the will of the existing majority and upon freedom and equality. The fundamental principles of this order include at least: respect for the human rights given concrete form in the Basic Law, in particular for the right of a person to life and free development; popular sovereignty; separation of powers; responsibility of government; lawfulness of administration; independence of the judiciary; the multi-party principle; and equality of opportunities for all political parties.
It’s their own definition so push come to shove they’re going to add to it. Overall though the lines aren’t new and haven’t shifted, that’s a quote from a judgement from 1952.
Paragraph 3 is new, that has been introduced after banning the NPD (now “Die Heimat”) failed not because they would not be opposed to the free and democratic order, but because they were judged to be too impotent to do anything about it. Previously banned parties include the NSDAP, not under this law but by the allies, then the SRP as it was a successor of the NSDAP, and then the KPD not for being communist but for being run by the KGB and laying siege to parliament. Bans of the FAP and NL failed because the BVerfG said they’re not parties so they were banned as associations, instead. Last case is the NPD, the first attempt failed because the state had so many moles inside that the court saw itself unable to distinguish between state and party actions, the second as already said because they’re yes, hateful assclowns, but also pathetic. They’ve been excluded from state funds for six years, the case will have to be judged anew in 2030.
Ah, that’s very interesting. Thanks!
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The highest german court does. It’s beholden only to the constitution. The guidelines are are quite strict and very specific:
“Parties that, in view 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 must be declared unconstitutional (cf. Art. 21(2) first sentence of the Basic Law). According to the Federal Constitutional Court’s case-law, the mere dissemination of anti-constitutional ideas as such is not sufficient. To be declared unconstitutional, a party must also take an actively belligerent, aggressive stance vis-à-vis the free democratic basic order and must seek to abolish it. In addition, specific indications must suggest that it is at least possible that the party will achieve its anti-constitutional aims.” From the website of the court
The constitutional court.
The same court that rules if laws are in accordance or in violation of the constitution.
No need to play one off against the other. Yes, there are many things that need to change systemically. Yes, the AfD is a real danger and needs to be banned. Simple as that.
We had the dixiecrats whose entire position was wholly unconstitutional.
We have them still, but we had them before too.
That’s a good parallel - AfD like the Dixiecrats and now the GOP MAGA base have a geographical stronghold (in this case the “new states” of former East Germany)
An alternate future without German reunification is interesting to imagine, ditto one without a Aus Civil War where the south just seceded
Basically.
If we’d let the south secede, we’d have a glorious north, but poor Mexico would have to deal with methed-up rednecks attacking every time college-football season ended.
The paradox of tolerance. Parties that violate the social contract of mutual tolerance deserve to be banned.
The paradox of tolerance isn’t a helpful answer here. Banning the party won’t make the bigots within it become unbigotted, which is the real goal.
In a similar way a straitjacket won’t make the patient less suicidal but it will prevent them from cutting their own wrists. It is not meant as a long-term solution.
I don’t disagree, but to lean into your analogy: I worry that we don’t have any viable long term solutions here, and I’m very nervous about how that will affect the fallout from a ban. My own stay in a mental health ward comes to mind, because it took years after that point before I was able to get the kind of support that helps someone build wellness long term. The hospital stay did the job, in the sense that I’m still alive, but my mental health was probably worse in the initial aftermath.
(This comment brought to you from the UK, where the Reform party (not nearly as bad as the AfD, but still racist shits) made heavy gains in recent local elections.)
Better to ask what failure of the system made that party popular in the first place.
In the case of the US, it was propaganda by a hostile country, and by malefactors of great wealth whose interests aligned with that hostile country. In the former case, an act of war; in the latter, treason.
Completely agree. But wanted to note that by that definition the US should be at war with half the world after all the foreign government meddling it has been doing for the last century
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2766
It’s BRICS, they want to control a new world currency, and they started WW3 for it. They convinced greedy oligarchs here that they would be in charge and important, “corporate monarchy,” and the oligarchs ignored what happened to Jack Ma and all those Russian oligarchs
We had that situation in 1930s Germany and it was decided to address issues instead of banning Hitler’s Party even when they could.
There are other banned parties as well (such as the SRP, which was the new NSDAP basically), having large overlap with the AfD. It’s not bad for democracy, if the requirements for banning are clear and enforced equally.
Is it the result of a broken “system”, or of one working as intended?
It buys us time to elect a party capable of making good changes. As long as a conservative or centralist government is in power I would agree with you that the root causes will not change, in fact with Friedrich Merz and the grand coalition things will get worse faster. But if we can buy the population some time not going fully into fascism we can hopefully point to the decline into fascism brought on by the CDU/SPD/FDP and elect politicians that actually care to serve Germans.
I think it’s important to treat the rise of fascism, the growing wealth inequality, the new wave of media, as a flu we have to fight but also get through. We need to build up anti-bodies against these things. That means taxing wealth, strengthening unions, breaking up monopolies, etc.
It buys us time to elect a party capable of making good changes.
That’s a nice thought and obviously you know more about the AfD and German politics than I do, but on the US side I can say that the Democrats have learned absolutely nothing. Even after two terms of G.W. Bush (2000-2008), one of Trump (2016-2020), one lucky escape* (Biden 2020), and Trump now in a 2nd term, the Democrats make the same mistakes that they always have. It’s a safe bet that 2028 in the US won’t be any better.
It would be great to hear what kinds of remedies are under way in Europe to fix the status quo as you describe. If anything like that is happening, it doesn’t make the news over here. I can say that nothing seems to be happening in the US beyond some meaningless posturing.
I think in the US we’ve seen a small rise in characters like Bernie pulling in new blood along the same ideological lines like AOC which didn’t feel present 20 years ago. I also think Obama’s tenure was sold to the public as a period of progress and change and I think in all actuality whatever good it did it wasn’t enough to steer the boat. To me that was the sign that the US was likely too far gone from a political standpoint to recover. BUT if there is a chance, I think the past 25 years have been a clear enough signal to me that things must drastically change for things to get meaningfully better. Trump is the dark side of that “drastic change” coin and we’ve yet to see what the good side looks like but I would argue the US is running out of time to figure out which side of the coin is going to come up the winner.
Britain is seeing a minor rise in Wealth Inequality awareness. I think that knowledge could be the exact anti-bodies the world needs distributed to reverse this course. In Europe wealth taxes, capital gains taxes, etc are higher than in the US but still not enough. Unions are also more prevalent, at least in Germany. I like to compare it by saying both the US and Germany are on the same graph of declining living standards and for the exact same reason, Germany is just a decade or two behind the US. We still have a lot of power in the hands of the people, but it seems to me that the media is still able to whip up 30-40% of the population into being conservative despite their best interests and something like another 30% being too moderate to make a difference.
Right now we have a conservative government, things will only get worse while they’re in power, but if the wealth disparity conversation continues anywhere in the world and billionaires are removed from the population, the entire world benefits. If the next progressive government enacts a tax plan like Die Linke’s or takes step to removing land lords from existence or provides a UBI I think the results will speak for themselves rather quickly.
It’s a big pendulum, right now in Germany and the US it’s swung to the right (yours further than ours) but it all comes down to how effective the left swing can be. Take hold of all the power you can at the local level, form a union, conquer the state level offices, and educate people. That’s the best advice I can give.
Thanks for the good thoughts and it’s interesting (I guess not that surprisng) to hear that Trump and MAGA are, for now, even worse than the AfD if I understand what you’re saying. I’m pessimistic about local activism here being good for anything at the moment. Changes have to made at the federal level, which for me mostly means kicking out the Democrat establishment. The idea of AOC running against Chuck Schumer in a primary would be an example of that, though I don’t know if she would have a good chance of beating him. I’d say she has no serious chance of being elected president in 2028. Of course I’m open to being surprised.
It does not have to ban it. Simply inspecting its foreign funding is enough.
They are not banned by the way… Just classified as far right…
This is an important step in the long and arduous process to disallow a party, though.
Politically, yes. When it comes to law, no. It’s certainly convenient to have a 1000 page report to file as evidence but as far as opening proceedings is concerned the only requirement is that you’re the government, have a majority in parliament, or a majority among states.
As you pretty much confirmed in your own reply, it’s both an inherently political and legal process. While this isn’t technically a mandatory step, it’s effectively a necessary one.
It wasn’t necessary for previous cases: The SRP (NSDAP successor) and KPD (run by the KGB, laid siege to parliament) had no political hand-wringing attached to them, legally they were also pretty much open and shut cases. Banning the NPD was never politically contentious, but needed some work for the legal part so it took a while for proceedings to be opened.
That is: It’s not necessarily a long and arduous process.
The reason it’s such a slog with the AfD is because it didn’t start out as a Nazi party – it slowly, over multiple internal putsches, turned into one. It got normalised, simply by people becoming accustomed to its presence, at about the same speed at which it radicalised. Had it started out with the programme it has now it would have long since been banhammered.
These people got Hitler in power once.
It means that a stopgap is needed before voters do something that they will only regret in hindsight.
Addressing issues is definitely important too, though part of the reason for extremist and populist parties like that becoming popular is that they have hijacked the public political discourse with fake issues (e.g. immigration, stirring up hate towards minorities,…) which essentially serve as a scapegoat for the voter’s actual frustrations with the current system (e.g. wealth distribution, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs for young people, fears that changes in the world will reduce their standard of living or anger that they already did,…)
Our founding fathers envisioned the electoral college as the counterbalance against someone dangerous taking power. The guardrails were always there, they just never really worked as intended.
because that being the reason for the existence of the electoral college is a propaganda myth. the real reason is that virginia wanted to play king maker and was the early united states’ california. the reason virginia wanted to play kingmaker is that their economic power was built through slavery. the thing where the electoral college skews elections by giving more electoral power to states with more wide open land? yeah. that’s not an accident. that was just the system that was most favorable to slave holding southerners. alexander hamilton just pitched to northerners that “well this is fine actually, see, we can use this system to prevent someone truly incompetent from taking office” and people ever since have misinterpretted that as being the point. it would be nice if we could propagandize it into the truth, but the last chance to do that has come and past, and it’s time to confront that the electoral college was never going to save us because it was never meant to save us.
This is what we need to do with The Heritage Foundation and MAGA in the US. The extremes are usually bad whether they’re left or right.
Saying “the extreme left is also bad”, in the context of the US having a massive Republican/rightwing extremist problem that’s regressing the country and plaguing the entire world, is like the captain of the Titanic going “But sand dunes are also not great!”
No, it’s not whether left or right. The right are the ones trying to put people in camps.
Better to guillotine people instead, right?
When you start eluding towards banning democratic parties, you lose all credibility
What are you even referring to? I assume you talk about the Nazi party AfD, which by no means is a democratic party. As a reminder: democratically elected != democratic party. And why do you think the left is banning them? They are not even in charge… But anyway, I really do hope they ban these fascist assholes before they get into power and replay the third reich.
Most of the “left” is also pretty openly supporting Israel’s genocide. No, it’s not just the extreme right that’s bad.
You need to meet the actual left, not right-of-centre parties like the US Democrats. Only in the USA does anyone think the Democratic Party is “the left”. The left itself is very much not supportive of Israel’s genocide.
And now we steer the discussion back to Israel, so everybody stays home and the right wins like they want.
Fucking morons, letting yourself be played like instruments .
Sure, go have a civil war. Let’s see who is the benefactor of it and who is looking for a reason to implement martial law, and has basically beging for it for years.
Extremists all get played by the same source.
[citation needed]
Well, look at the vast majority of our democrat politicians…
American Democrats =/= political left
I understand, but I think that was the point the first guy was trying to make.
It was a pretty bad point. They were entering a discussion about extremes and brought up center-right politicians.
If you see that extremely moderate (aka Democratic, aka not left) position as the “extreme left”, then people who would ban cars are basically ISIS for you?
Keep in mind the agency is run by the Government for the Government of the day with people appointed by the Government.They are far from free of their own political agenda.
