Is the AfD Too Extreme for Democracy?

13 comments

1. You can’t ban a party that big. If they got to it when it was smaller, then yeah, you could shut it down, but now 25% of the country is openly connected to it, and the polls show them rising even higher. at this point they need to be defeated at the ballot box not in the legal system.

   Repressing political parties is inherently undemocratic. If a democratic government is scared of its voters, that says more about the government than it does about the people. If they actually were good at their jobs and made people want to vote for them, they wouldn’t have this problem.

2. I’m not a fan of banning political parties. Or politicians for that matter.

3. >A quirk in the interpretation of German law about banning political parties states that a party can’t be banned unless it is actually strong enough to threaten German democracy. 

   That is an interesting way of looking at it. I wonder if the established parties refusing to fix problems could be banned as well then, as the doing nothing is pushing people to AfD and therefore those parties are contributing to the threat to democracy.

   /not entirely serious.

4. They are literally an anti-democratic party in a democratic system. Vote for them, and they will lose no time to strip your right to vote and your rights as a citizen in general. The same phenomenon happens across almost all western/democratic societies.
   Might not be coincidental but deliberate.

5. I feel like when we say Democracy we don’t just mean Democracy we mean something more. If for example 51% of the population voted to kill the other 49%, would it be democracy? On the other had AfD isn’t saying g anything the Trump administration isn’t doing.

6. > But the BfV’s actions would remove that judgment from the
   > ballot

   This is factually untrue. The “extremist” label only extends the BfV ‘s authority to monitor the party. It voids certain protections against surveillance that normal political parties enjoy.

   A ban can only be issued by the German supreme court and only after a lengthy and complicated legal procedure where extensive evidence has to be presented for the claim that the party actively works against the democratic order.

   > Germans remember their authoritarian past, and they
   > remember, too, that authoritarianism arrived by democratic
   > means.

   Which is precisely the reason the supreme court has been given the authority to ban parties. The high share of votes is actually an argument in favour of banning the party rather than against it. The events of 1933 have shown that if a large share of the population supports a party that seeks to replace the democratic system with an authoritarian one, the state needs a means to protect itself.

7. Yes it is. Banning it is the only way to deal with it.

8. I laugh when people keep referring to AfD as far right. Guys, they are central compared to today’s Republican Party in USA.

9. “We would prefer to vote away democracy for people who disagree with us” isn’t an acceptable position in a democratic society. If your ideology fundamentally disrespects the rules of the game to the point you make doing away with them a political goal, your party deserves to be banned.

10. A good analogy I see is if you need to sink a boat to prevent it from being stolen then either way the boat is gone.

    Truth is I highly doubt 25% of Germans actually agree to the extreme measures laid out by AfD. I suspect many are forced to choose between the lesser evil. And yes to some, extreme deportation is the lesser evil to what they perceive as open border. Stricter immigration laws may curb this trend.

    Now I am not here to argue about immigration. The choice is stricter immigration under left leaning parties or ignore the problem until a far right gets elected.

11. I’m baffled on the lack of self awareness. Is banning a political party your version of democracy??

12. What makes a good democracy, except that it executes the will of the people? If the people don’t like democracy, let them have it. An autocracy isn’t inherently bad.

13. The Germans have a pretty solid history with an extremist party rising in the ranks until it eventually consumed and devoured all of Europe. If the Nazi party had been outlawed, it would never have given Hitler the power to ravage an entire continent.

    Maybe Germans are looking at their own history and don’t want a repeat of events that devastated them 80 years ago. And the AfD is, quite frankly, far more terrifying than other European right wing parties. I’d say it’s about as far right as MAGA Republicans, and it is certainly more extreme than Front National, Brothers of Italy, the Sweden Democrats or Geert Wilders’ party.

    The AfD has antidemocratic tendencies. If it gets into power, it will do to Germany what Trump is doing to the United States. It will shred German democracy and then spread its tendrils into the rest of Europe. It is a Russian trojan horse filled with eugenicists and authoritarians who hate the EU and German liberal democracy. AfD will make Germany an ally of Putin’s Russia, it will abandon Ukraine and, since Germany is easily the most important country in Europe, it will slowly dismantle the European Union. Losing Germany to far right authoritarians would be a death blow to the Western-led liberal order. It would put a Russia-friendly power at the heart of Europe.

    Trump’s biggest blessing is that he is an absolute moron. I think the AfD is far more crafty and nefarious, and is capable of doing much more damage.

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