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
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.
IMHO, if you’re discouraged by reality, that’s not my problem. I don’t like it when people just scream “ban” but don’t actually have a plan beyond that to get 30% of the voters to not vote for the next party that uses the nazi talking points.
You say that all the counterexamples don’t negate the one time it worked, but there is no successful example of banning a nazi party in Germany. They keep coming back. Learning some lessons is exactly what is needed here, because so far the NSDAP has been banned twice, the DVFP has been banned once, the SRP has been banned once, the FAP has been banned once, the NL has been banned once, attempts to ban the NPD failed twice before they lost funding in the third attempt, and now here we are and another nazi party is polling close to 30%.
Last time Germany banned a successful far-right party they tried this, but the new party was also quickly banned. They’re miles ahead of you on this, which makes sense given that the laws were written by people just liberated from the OG Nazis.
Which “successful far-right party” are you referring to that was banned? The only right-wing party banned by Federal Germany is the SRP, and that one was fairly small. All the other attempts ended in a different resolution (i.e. not a party ban).
The NSDAP was banned by the Allied Control Council. Denazification was the Allied Control Council too.
None of this got rid of nazis. The AfD is only the current iteration. For my entire life, there’s always been some right wing extremist party that was big enough to be regularly mentioned on the news. Sometimes they randomly disappear and then another one rises. I even remember cases where one tried to become less extremist and then disappeared as a result of that (e.g. REP).
I’m all for banning them but it’s been 80 years that WWII ended and we still don’t have a real solution that actually works.
You’re right, I actually have that backwards. The SRP, which was banned, was itself a successor to the DRP. Sorry!
I don’t know if it had any seats, but Wikipedia says there were 10,000 members. Interesting to hear there there’s been more that have been worthy of media coverage since then.
I’m not sure one is even possible. Fascism is primally appealing, and every generation assesses the world from scratch. Unless we merge with AI or stop reproducing or something it will always come back. We just have to keep putting it down.