Calls grow in Germany to ban far-right AfD
Calls grow in Germany to ban far-right AfD – DW – 10/01/2024
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has gained ground in three recent state elections, caused an uproar in the Thuringian parliament and triggering another debate on whether to ban the party outright.
FINALLY. And to everyone who is like "tHiS wiLl MaKe ThInGs WorSe!!11" or "bAnNiNg ThE pArTy WoN't hElP". SHUT THE FUCK UP.
These are LITERALLY Nazis. Even more than the US Trump-Rep's.
And since Russia is not willing to throw 25 Million People on them again and is much more keen to join them, since they are heavily involved with the AFD:
-https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/putin-afd-zusammenarbeit-100.html
-https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/petr-bystron-afd-russland-100.html
-https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2024/kw15-de-aktuelle-stunde-russland-afd-997398
-https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2024-04/afd-russische-regierung-strategiepapier
I'm not willing to take any chance on that. We have Laws for EXACTLY this scenario, time for our government to grow a spine and starts protecting democracy!
We did it once, we can do it again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Reich_Party
If discourse and argument fail to quell the intolerant, a tolerant society must be willing to use censorship and even violence to defend itself. If we let them trample all over our values, tolerating them for the sake of being the "better person", we'll be the better corpse sooner rather than later and history will remember us "Look how nobly they did nothing!"
If our history is ever written, that is.
I think their party should be banned and all funds currently donated and accounts related should be redirected to counter facism efforts and education.
They banned NPD and AFD happened.
All you'll get is a new party filling up the political vacuum and their audience being even more die-hard radicals.
In a democracy where some 30% vote nazi, banning them won't solve anything. Anything.
No, I won't shut up, because you and people like you are part of the problem. If you think the solution is to jail and ban your political opponents, I got bad news for you.
Nearly everything you said is just plain wrong:
So keep on talking as much as you like, everyone with half a brain can see right through you.
Most of your points were already correctly dismantled. But I'd just like to ad to
In a democracy where some 30% vote nazi, banning them won't solve anything. Anything.
Is a sentiment I often feel too. I believe that we have to do so much more to fight against Fascists than just Vote and "use the democratic system correctly". (I.e. fight fascism in the streets, offer actual political solutions to peoples problems...). But to say this won't do anything is a huge understatement.
Banning the AfD will:
A ban would be an amazing feat but it would just be a little breather in the fight against fascism.
If simply banning nazis from holding political power is enough for some of you to question, then you're really not going to be ready for what you need to do to them once they get political power. Ban them now because y'all are far too soft to do what needs to be done if you don't.
Don't know what's there to be so smug about. "Oh you would rather ban them in a constitutional process than to wait for them to seize power and fight a bloody civil war, or worse?" Yes please! I hope we all much prefer the first option.
Ban them now
They won't, in no small part because the AfD has enough seats to block the attempt. Also, doesn't help that lots of the enforcement wing of the German government (particularly in the national security services) are AfD or AfD sympathetic.
We're well past the point at which Germans can do to the fascists what they did to the communists back in the 1990s - ban the party outright and seize their assets. Now they've actually got to make this a political fight, rather than a legalistic one, because they turned their backs on the AfD for far too long.
They won't, in no small part because the AfD has enough seats to block the attempt.
They cannot block a decision of the federal constitutional court, don't be ridiculous. Germany has measures in place exactly for this scenario, and they are about to be enforced. They cannot be vetoed away, it's a legal matter.
Yeah if they got power they might try to ban their political opponents!
I think killing Nazis is the general agreed upon approach
Banning the party isn't going to help.
Like I say of Trump, the AfD isn't the problem, they're a symptom. Conservatism and conservatives themselves are the problem – the question is how should we deal with them, and I really don't know the answer to that.
Edit: just to clarify, I'm not saying the AfD shouldn't be banned, just that banning the party won't change the people who vote for it and run it.
There won't be democracy in Germany if the AfD gets into power. You need to stop the wound from gushing before you can worry about setting the broken bone.
There is a difference between conservatism and being a threat to the democratic order. Germany has conservative parties that are perfectly valid, it's just that the AfD is not one of them.
Killing the head of a terrorist organization won't help if you don't fix the underlying issues.He will be replaced in short order, usually by someone worse. Likewise this kind of political movement.
What the left in Europe (well in my country at least) still doesn't understand is that they're not going to fix this by lecturing the populist voters about how all their thoughts and ideas are wrong.
There is a difference between conservatism and being a threat to the democratic order.
I'm not sure I agree. More and more it's started seeming like they're generally just waiting for a moment to drop their masks; eg. here in Finland now that we have a fully right wing government, our "fiscally conservative" party started their term off by limiting the right to strike, and is now echoing extremist right wing talking points about eg. immigration, LGBT+ people, and the environment. They were OK with an extremist right wing minister leaving us out of Ukraine's "Alliance for Gender-Responsive and Inclusive Recovery" because the plan mentioned LGBT+ people, and they stood in the way of banning abusive LGBT+ "conversion therapy" even though they claimed to be against it back when they still had to be in a government with leftist parties (sorry, couldn't find an English source for this but here is one in Finnish. For translation I'd suggest DeepL, it's vastly superior to eg. Google). They are also blaming the opposition for "besmirching" Finland's reputation abroad, meaning they don't want anyone pointing out that we have literal neo-Nazis in the government and parliament.
Valid for democracy, but not valid for the problems we're facing (i.e. most importantly climate-change)
Banning the party isn’t going to help.
Yes it will. It'll mean it won't be standing in elections, and that's only fair because it's an anti-democratic party... and it will deprive its members of broad protections afforded to parties and remove a unifying banner for them.
Banning anti-democratic institutions in a democracy is not only justified, it is conducive to the democracy's survival. It lifts the bar for getting rid of democracy to be equivalent to not winning in an election but by establishing a second monopoly on violence, a far greater threshold and attempts at which are more straightforward to deter, prosecute and stamp out than being within every TikTok user's first few swipes.
There's nothing that prevents AfD voters from going to other parties, there's plenty, or to voice their concerns in a new party that can be a legitimate part of the democratic system. Changing parties isn't like banning a religion or a creed or a race, a party is hardly more than just a banner, the power of which can change between and during elections, at any time, through a simple act of the mind. Banning the party will absolutely help.
It sends a good message. It doesn't send a message of wanting the silence the concerns of those who voted for the AfD in anything but the short term, it sends the message of 'we hear you, but try again... a bit less fascist-y please'.
Note that I'm not saying the AfD shouldn't be banned, just that banning it won't make the people who vote for it and run it any less, well, fascist.
There’s nothing that prevents AfD voters from going to other parties, there’s plenty, or to voice their concerns in a new party that can be a legitimate part of the democratic system. Changing parties isn’t like banning a religion or a creed or a race, a party is hardly more than just a banner, the power of which can change between and during elections, at any time, through a simple act of the mind. Banning the party will absolutely help.
And that's the thing; because the people who support AfD won't change just because their party gets banned, how likely do you think it is that they'll realize they need to be a legitimate part of a democratic system instead of what they've been doing all along?
Banning AfD is the best short term solution, it needs to be followed by a stronger social focus of the government.
One reason for conservative and right-wing sentiment is fear of the future in the populace. Fear causes people to try to isolate themselves from "others" and wanting to horde and protect their stuff instead of supporting others.
If the government is able to alleviate those fears, they will not see a need for fear anymore. But that is a long process, which constantly gets sabotaged by commercial outrage media, foreign intervention, social media, conservative/right-wing politicians, etc.
There will always be a subsection og the population that adheres to fascist ideas. For a liberal democracy to function, these ideas have to be ostracized to make sure that no fascist party can establish itself in a major way. Some far-right voters will vote for minor far-right parties, some will vote for more moderate conservative parties and some won't vote at all. The key is to keep them from uniting while appearing moderate enough to win over some more moderate voters.
Banning a party has significant affects on far-right organizations and money-streams. Much of their propaganda will become impossible to finance and any successor parties are automatically banned as well. Fascist voters cannot become disillusioned without a ban. Their beliefs are as solid as a flat-earther or anti-vaxer and only destroying their echo chamber has a chance to take them out.
And that’s a symptom of media and social media echo chambers.
Like I stated in another comment banning them won't be a solution but it will harm them and the fascist movement (just cutting their funding will do a lot).
But yes there's a bigger problem with the growing right-wing tendencies in the society that needs more than this to be addressed
Far-right parties' main goal is excluding people from society so they should be fully okay when they're the ones being excluded.
Please. People say they're too big now, but there has to be a right size. In Canada, at least, hate groups are always too popular and established to challenge, or too small to bother with.
Zero? Yep, that seems like the right size.
Lol, that's not the best wording on my part. Right size to shut them down.
As an aside, I can't be the only one annoyed by the choice to expand "AfD" to "Alternative for Germany" instead of "Alternative for Deutschland" right? I really think the best solution to this is that we all agree that AfD should fuck off into oblivion. Sound good? Great!
Never again
Isn't there a lot of dirt on them? Starting with pushing for more strict laws against foreign influence and funding, covert fascism, and then dragging them (and anybody else akin to them) through courts until they are non-existent is how it should have been done a long time ago imho. Just a cold, inorganic machine of beaurocracy grinding them into a ground meat without any possible objection due to biases.
It's being done, but the party itself never crosses a hard line into fascism. Individual party members do, even up to ministerial level in the few states where they got sufficient votes to have some official functions, but then the party distances itself from those individuals and kicks them out. That way they have taken official responsibility and are immune to prosecution themselves.
Good.
I mean I do think banning them is a good idea, and in general I think nazis should be taken on helicopter rides, most especially the enablers of nazis, their financial leash handlers which basically bootstrap them into these positions in order to push the dialogue further rightward in service of corporate interests, and probably also in this case in service of "geopolitical security" since we're going to be seeing oncoming climate refugees in the coming years, and combatting that in any way but increasing the security apparatus is off the table.
More than that, though, I worry that realistically just banning them, though a great temporary measure, won't do much, say, five years or a decade down the road, because it's not gonna solve the core hypocrisies and discrepancies that neoliberalism is not so keen to solve. If you want to actually solve this problem long term then you need to combat those core problems. Instead, though, I think that probably the party being banned will just see them either form a new party, or else tone down their rhetoric to an acceptable degree, or just join the next furthest right party and then decide to push them further right, and so on and so on, until we've all collectively just shifted rightward to an incredible degree.
Ad nauseam, et cetera, regardless of the political apparatuses at work, until collectively the western world plummets towards fascism.
or sell thüringen and bayern to the lowest bidder...would work for me.
LOL! The damn Austrians would snap up Bayern. As far as Thüringen goes, break it up equally for the neighboring provinces to govern.
So, for the sake of argument, if AfD is banned would they not just became a paramilitary group?
What's to stop them from devolving into something more 'nefarious' if they are stripped of political power?
What stoped the kpd? Or the groups that wanted to rebuild the NSDAP? Would you rather have them pull the strings instead? I mean yea a ban could be dangerous, but letting them take over the justice system, the finances and police of Germany seems like a horrible second option.
The ease with which they can build such structures would go down. Building while hiding is harder than building while not having to hide.
Having central coordination, for example in the form of a party or some other form of organization, means that strategic goals can be planned for and resources acquired and allocated in a more efficient manner. The previous bigger neonazi party, the NPD, fulfilled that role for quite a while.
Organizations and people are not that interchangeable for these purposes. Workflows, institutional memory, leadership all matter. That's why targeted assassinations of leadership even in cell-like structures can meaningfully disrupt e.g. terrorist organizations' effectiveness. Similar things can be accomplished by simply disrupting business-as-usual.
I'm guessing they'd still be under observation after they get banned because of exactly that and I also think there's steep step between political engagement and serious criminal activity.
But that gets decided by a court and as a German I think the judiciary is the most trustworthy of the three powers. I think if it even comes to that they deal with the motion in a sensitive way.
I am not a German, so I appreciate you explaining that to me. As an American I'd love to say the same about our judiciary.
We, Germans, cannot allow 30 Jan 1933 to 08 May 1945 to repeat itself. Also, the communists in "Die Linke" can go straight to hell with the neo-Nazis.
What are you talking about lol
History moron and there are plenty of idiots that would allow it to repeat itself.
Whenever you squash a community of cockroaches, they tend to scatter and infest nearby communities.
It is nearly always a much better strategy for them to have their “safe space” so they can be more easily identified and de-converted. Being able to pick off the lightly/conveniently indoctrinated is extremely helpful, as it prevents them from being radicalized like a wholesale community squashing will do.
I feel like history could teach us something. How many times have banned ideologies thrived? A lot of people assume the party doing the silencing is in the wrong.
Too little, too late. You can't ban a 30% party and expect democracy to hold.
Of course you can.
"Sorry, the Nazis are at 30%, nothing we can do. We'll just die then."
The last time they tried to ban a party in Germany was the NPD (another Nazi party) and at the end the Supreme Court decided the reason not to ban them, even though they were clearly unconstitutional , was because they were to few/insignificant (in the end they banned them from receiving party funding which still has a massive effect).
So you couldnt ban them because they were to small and you can't ban the AfD because they're to big? Just because enough people vote for a party doesn't mean they're not unconstitutional.
Very noble, but we are at an inconsistency here. Democracy is also incompatible with not allowing people to vote. We have to get a better solution or this will explode in our faces.
Banning one of the the biggest democratic parties to save democracy.
I wonder how that would go. It's the paradox that you have to be intolerant to intolerance.
There is no paradox.
Tolerance is a social contract that both guides and protects your actions. If you breach that contract by being a cunt then you are no longer afforded it's protections for the same.
Nazis demand you accept them while demonising others and will continue to take advantage of you being "tolerant" for as long as you allow it.
one the biggest parties
FTFY, there is nothing remotely democratic about those people.
Those laws exist for a reason, we had some experiences in the past.
They are not a democratic party
Google paradox of tolerance.
Anybody can come to the party as long as you bring your own beer.
The AfD brought crack.
The last time they tried to ban a party in Germany was the NPD (another Nazi party) and at the end the Supreme Court decided the reason not to ban them, even though they were clearly unconstitutional , was because they were to few/insignificant (in the end they banned them from receiving party funding which still has a massive effect).
So you couldnt ban them because they were to small and you can't ban the AfD because they're to big? Just because enough people vote for a party doesn't mean they're not unconstitutional.
You getting downvoted shows how hypocrite the internet collective is. Democracy for everyone unless they don't like the result.