Too big to ban? Germany wrestles with outlawing its most popular party

In Germany’s political landscape, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is one superlative after another. Founded in 2013, the AfD is Germany’s newest political party and, with 27 per cent in national polls, by far its most popular.

Its critics, meanwhile, trade in negative superlatives: the AfD is Germany’s most dangerous party; such a danger to democracy, they say, that it must be banned.

After years of emotional but inconclusive debate on the matter, the AfD’s future may face its greatest threat yet owing to a huge leak of emails from its uniquely strong-willed and cantankerous members.

Among the 280GB of material hackers claim to have stolen is a 2015 email attributed to AfD co-leader Alice Weidel.

Back then, as an ambitious young party member, she protested in a series of strident emails about the leaders’ dramatic political pivot. In the middle of the refugee crisis, Weidel warned they were losing conservative voters with deliberately “racist” populism towards migrants.

“Some in the party seem to be in a hurry to send the AfD into oblivion,” she wrote, noting a “deliberate and intentional blurring” of the limits of its politics towards a now defunct neo-Nazi party, the NPD.

In the decade since rising to head the party, however, Weidel has cemented her power base by allying herself with the very people – and political views – she denounced a decade ago.

Its emails such as hers – and 400,000 more – that have jump-started the debate over which poses a greater danger to German democracy: the AfD – or the efforts to proscribe it.

Proponents of a ban present four key pillars, primarily viewing the AfD as worthy of proscription for pursuing unconstitutional aims.

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Echoing Weidel in 2015, they say the party deliberately targets Muslims, migrants, asylum seekers and LGBTQ+ people, in a way that is incompatible with the opening article of Germany’s postwar Basic Law or constitution: human dignity is inviolable.

Should the AfD take office in December in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, for instance, it has promised to introduce a policy of “remigration” of “culturally alien” people that, according to some in the party, should include the deportation of naturalised German citizens.

Among other leading arguments in favour of a ban is how AfD politicians and their supporters label opponents as “traitors” and regularly call for their imprisonment – a demand with uncomfortable historical precedent from the Nazi era.

The lesson of Germany’s fascist history, ban proponents argue, is baked into the article 21.2 of the Basic Law: “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.”

These and more arguments fill the 3,060 pages of a report by the Society for Civil Rights (GFF), a Green-allied non-governmental organisation. It analysed all AfD statements, speeches, social media posts and more to present a party that, it says, “opposes the principle of democracy by seeking to suppress its political opponents”.

“What is decisive, however, is not that the AfD is shaped by such concepts but that it intends to put them into practice,” said Bijan Moini, the GFF project leader.

However, even the lengthy GFF report acknowledges there is a fine but crucial line between problematic and unconstitutional politics. The AfD “acts more cleverly” than previous far-right parties, it acknowledges, by delivering “many messages between the lines”.

While the AfD, predictably, dismissed the GFF report as “outlandish”, even the conservative Welt daily hit back. “Wanting to ban ‘between-the-lines’ messaging,” it argued in a front-page lead article, “is a classic characteristic of authoritarian systems”.

Alongside the GFF report are half a dozen intelligence reports, classifying five regional AfD parties as “confirmed right-wing extremist” and calling out the AfD’s “ethnic definition of the [German] people”.

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Chancellor Friedrich Merz is sceptical of attempts to ban the AfD, as is interior minister Alexander Dobrindt, whose ministry would have to enact any court-ordered procedures.

“We need the ambition to govern the AfD out of existence,” said Dobrindt who, in office, has adopted a robust law-and-order approach to borders and migration.

While critics say a failed ban would only boost the party’s popularity, proponents of a ban insist that what is lacking is not evidence, but political will.

An application can only be triggered by the federal government or one of the houses of parliament, with no majority in either.

The only successful party ban in postwar German history was in 1952, when the constitutional court in Karlsruhe banned the (West) German Communist Party.

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An attempt to ban the neo-Nazi NPD failed a decade ago. Not because it wasn’t extremist enough but because the Karlsruhe judges ruled that, thanks in part to the AfD’s extreme-right pivot, the NPD had become too unimportant to realise its goals.

As AfD opponents scan leaked emails for further evidence, historian Norbert Frei warns that the moment to ban the party may have already passed.

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily, Frei suggested the Karlsruhe court might well argue now that “the AfD, though an anti-constitutional force, is too important to be banned”.

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