https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/world/europe/germany-afd-far-right-extremist.html
Isn't there a clause in your constitution to ban extreme Right parties?
by flagellat-ey
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/world/europe/germany-afd-far-right-extremist.html
Isn't there a clause in your constitution to ban extreme Right parties?
by flagellat-ey
30 comments
Oh oh I know I know! Probably nothing.
There is a clause to ban parties that are actively working against the constitution, not parties of any particular political persuasion.
That being said, I do hope that they find proof AfD falls in this category and will be banned.
That can actually happen.
Should have begun at least 3 years earlier…
But that requires investigation. First the investigation has now concluded.
Art 21 (4) GG: The Federal Constitutional Court shall decide on the question of unconstitutionality pursuant to paragraph 2 and on the exclusion of state funding pursuant to paragraph 3.
Article 21 (2) of our constitution allows parties to be banned if their “objectives or the behavior of their supporters are aimed at impairing or eliminating the free democratic basic order or endangering the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany are unconstitutional.”
Bundestag, Bundesrat or the government can request this but the surpreme court has to decide on it.
If the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution didn’t screw up in their work, this is a step towards this, but lets see if the other parties, especially SPD and CDU/CSU aren’t cowards.
The only direct consequence is that the domestic intelligence services may now use more advanced approaches to monitor and infiltrate the AfD. It doesn’t have any direct consequences on a ban.
Extremist parties can be banned in Germany, but the domestic intelligence service has no say in this. The ban has to be requested by the parliament at the constitutional court, and they decide if a ban is appropriate. The information collected by the intelligence service that led to the classification as an extremist party can, however, of course help the constitutional court to come to the same conclusion.
“Isn’t there a clause in your constitution to ban extreme Right parties?”
It would be a stupid constitution if there were such a clause.
Imagine the Intelligence agency (or any other agency) could disband any political party by labeling them “Extremist”. That wouldn’t be democracy.
Also, there are left extremist as well.
The Verfassungsschutz is not our intelligence agency, no matter how often Rubio says it is.
There isn’t an automatic ban, there is the ability to ban them. Which is a whole process that would take years. It is also questionable what is actually achieved by that. It’s not like the people with those views go away just because you ban the party. They can just form another one, with different leadership and different name.
According to one version of events that’s how we got the AfD in the first place. The AfD started out as a centrist EU-critic party. At that time the far-right party was the NPD, which we had already tried to ban once (which was rejected by the courts). A second attempt to ban them was started, and coincidentally that’s when more and more far-right members started suddenly joining the AfD, gradually turning it into a far-right party. In some ways a more dangerous far-right party because they didn’t already have the far-right reputation and were able to win supporters with a much cleaner slate.
The AfD will sue, courts will find that this was legal, and then nothing will happen for a while. Maybe they put some spies into the organization but I doubt things will come of that.
Than the US will liberate us /s
Anyone who has publicly supported afd better watch themselves. They might get a visit from the authorities. 😂
It’s a good question. A political party is just a representation of a sentiment in a given society. If people didn’t identify with AFD it would have 1-2% following.
The question is not what you do with the party but what you will do with circa 10 million Germans who supported it.
Because you can’t administratively make people change their views.
As you can see from the reaction of the established parties and most of the media, this is unlikely to change anything at all.
Nothing. They are 30% or more of the electorate. The centrists let them hang around while it suited them as an excuse to turn right, now deal with the consequences democratically like you wanted.
It was not an intelligence agency but a court that decided the party as a whole is extremist.
But I wonder myself how we are going to act on this court decision. This is probably the last opportunity for us to dismantle the organization. Which is not going to make them go away but throw them back a few years and give our constitutional parties a chance to regain the trust of pcitizens who gave them their vote.
They already have a lot of parliamentarians in many cabinets and seats in some task forces where those are distributed by quota. I wonder what is the procedure for those politicians. Are the parliamentarians going to stay on their seats and remain „partyless“ for the time being? That would be a disaster. I don’t want a convicted neonazi party member to have a seat eg. in a task force whose job it is to supervise our intelligence service’s activities or decide on a state‘s curriculum.
What is the approach to prevent that the organization does not just transfer their capital to some safe bank accounts and then just reboot under a new brand?
These are truly interesting times to live in.
The Problem is that AFD actually has a lot of voters they had approx. 25% of total votes. And i am pretty Sure that they have more than 25% of German citizens behind their political Agenda … If you now ban Thema the consequences can be terrible. It can start with Protests and could end way worse than what happened at the Capitol in the US … If you bear in mind that Most of their supporters also do Not Care to use force to gain what they want
well…murder is banned in most regions…still it happens. if the pop. wants murder they do large scale murder.
it all depends if there’s enough desperate people, who are willing to aggress
Nothing will happen.
Most likely nothing will massively change. It’s possible that AfD will lose a couple percentage points of support from purely protest voters, and that a few more communes will refuse to rent venues to AfD for events.
I don’t expect that a prohibition procedure will be initiated, given the balance of power in all of the three bodies who could theoretically initiate it.
Finally, I do not agree with the mainstream German shortsighted analysis that only sees AfD as a problem, ignoring the fact that a very big part of AfD’s policy platform has been adopted by CDU/CSU and FDP, and that the SPD and the Greens have also shifted noticeably towards the right.
I wouldn’t shed a tear if AfD were to be banned, but if anyone thinks that this would be enough to undo the authoritarian turn, they are dangerously deluded.
I mean, if you want the new and more extremist party to have 35% of the votes, sure, let’s ban AfD.
Goodness gracious whiteys, how do you even dress yourselves when you get out of the bed?
Nothing. Sadly
I did nazi see this coming. Silence the opposition. Sounds like 1933 all over again.
Kind of strange timing. The new government and minister of interior will take their oath on May 6th. In 3 days.
Why did they make this move not a few weeks ago BEFORE the election. Now with 20.8 % they are a serious competition to the established parties.
First of all, it’s not the intelligence agency, but the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
The immediate effect of this is that now the mainstream parties have a little more leverage over the AfD; for example, they can more easily justify denying AfD politicians the opportunity to chair parliamentary committees (these committees form an important part of the democratic process).
There is a mechanism for banning a political party, which will result in it being forced to disband; additionally, no successor party can be founded. The bar for that is, for very obvious reasons, set extremely high: either the government, the Bundestag or the Bundesrat needs to present to the Constitutional Court overwhelming evidence that the party is actively and aggressively pursing policies aimed at weakening the democratic order or which threaten the integrity of the Federal Republic, *and* that it might credibly succeed. Courts have in the past ruled that it’s not enough that a party says undemocratic stuff: it has to be really serious about pursuing policy objectives that risk undermining the rule of law and certain democratic principles.
There is a risk, though, that such an attempt can fail (only two parties have ever successfully been banned in this way, and one was literally the original Nazi party under a new name), so the case needs to be watertight. The AfD will, of course, seek to gain as much political capital as it possibly can, and try to portray itself as the victims of a politically-motivated persecution. If a ban succeeds, the AfD’s supporters will simply infiltrate some other party and start the cycle again; if it fails, it will be a huge propaganda win for them. On the other hand, not taking any action would also leave the AfD claiming victory over the “cowardly” mainstream parties: this is truly a lose-lose situation.
I would say that the risk of failure is not particularly high: the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has helpfully written an 11,000-page document detailing all the evidence it considered and explaining how it arrived at its conclusion. Personally, I think that in the face of this evidence it’s clear we can’t tolerate the AfD and a ban should be considered, but as soon as possible: as support for the AfD increases, so does the risk that starting the process will result in literal rioting in the streets and an increase in violent intimidation from the right. But I also think that we’re kidding ourselves if we think that banning a party is going to solve anything.
Now Germany starts sliding into official fascism, given that the political class tells the population who they can and can’t vote for. Basically German rulers doing their classic, historic thing all over again. A microminority deciding for the vast majority, if we look at the polls.
In the name of stopping extremism and fascism, the government itself has become more extremist, censorious and fascist. Goooood going, Germany.
The Verfassungsschutz is deeply flawed. In the past they financed nazi movements. The political influence is big becouse of apointments by the ministry of interior. I want to see the report but they will not disclose it.
Sadly nothing will happen. If you prove me wrong in the future, I’d be extremely happy
nothing.
The only thing is that now, the Inteligence agency can tap there phones.
The left extremist party “die Linke” is now under oervation for left extremism since 2005 and it did not even lower there poling numbers.
Frankly?
Nothing.
We will slowly fall to fascism again and start WW3 in 2039.
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