Alexander Dobrindt told ARD that he doubted if the AfD operations mentioned in the intelligence agency\u2019s assessment satisfied the standards for an absolute prohibitionread more<\/p>\n
Alexander Dobrindt, the incoming German interior minister, said on Sunday that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was unlikely to be outlawed after being designated as \u201cextremist\u201d by the intelligence agency last week.<\/p>\n
German politicians have been contemplating banning the party as well as other measures such as firing AfD members from government service and reducing or terminating public funding.<\/p>\n
However, Dobrindt told ARD that he doubted if the AfD operations mentioned in the intelligence agency\u2019s assessment satisfied the standards for an absolute prohibition.<\/p>\n
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The constitutional court\u2019s guidelines provide that a party must demonstrate that it is acting \u201ccombatively and aggressively\u201d to achieve its aims in order to be outlawed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sceptical, because the aggressive, combative nature of the party against our democracy must be a defining characteristic. The Constitutional Court was right to set high hurdles for banning a party,\u201d Dobrindt said.<\/p>\n
He added that he was \u201cconvinced that the\u00a0AfD\u00a0does not need to be banned, it needs to be governed away, and we need to talk about the issues that have made the\u00a0AfD\u00a0so big\u201d.<\/p>\n
Dobrindt, a high-profile member of the CSU, the Bavarian sister party of incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz\u2019s CDU, said his ministry would examine the designation in depth and he would discuss its findings with the spy agency\u2019s top brass in person.<\/p>\n
SPD leader Lars Klingbeil told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that the future government would work to shrink the\u00a0AfD.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I don\u2019t believe is that a potential ban procedure, which could take years, is the sole instrument to bring the\u00a0AfD\u00a0down,\u201d Klingbeil, Germany\u2019s next vice chancellor, said.<\/p>\n
AfD\u00a0co-leader Alice Weidel accused outgoing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser of using the spy agency as a \u201csecret justice system\u201d to discriminate against the party.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe are a future governing party; even the machinations of the secret justice system will not be able to prevent that in the long run,\u201d Weidel told the Welt newspaper on Sunday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alexander Dobrindt told ARD that he doubted if the AfD operations mentioned in the intelligence agency\u2019s assessment satisfied…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[10592,14160,37262,37264,2000,299,37260,37259,1824,37261,37263],"class_list":{"0":"post-75580","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-alexander-dobrindt","9":"tag-alternative-for-germany-afd","10":"tag-constitutional-court","11":"tag-csu","12":"tag-eu","13":"tag-europe","14":"tag-extremist-designation","15":"tag-german-interior-minister","16":"tag-germany","17":"tag-intelligence-agency","18":"tag-party-ban"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114453393170791272","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}