Banning the nation’s second-largest political party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), has become a matter of constant conversation. Yet, a prominent academic has warned that there could be serious consequences for breaking the democratic system.
Germany’s AfD was declared a “right-wing extremist” organisation by the outgoing leftist government earlier this year, triggering a legal challenge. Meanwhile, some German states have moved to ban AfD members from serving as police officers or becoming civil servants.
Left-wing politicians even openly speak of outright banning the AfD altogether as incompatible with the post-war German constitution. This would see the state remove the elected members from parliament. Such discussions are now a weekly topic of headlines in Germany, despite the party having come second in this year’s national elections, with one-fifth of all votes being cast for the AfD, or over ten million ballots. Far from being a niche or fringe party, the faction now serves as the official parliamentary opposition and recently polled in first place nationwide.
While eliminating your political opposition at the stroke of a pen may seem appealing to the German left, a prominent academic has now spoken out to warn against the move, predicting that undermining the basic principles of democracy could be detrimental to the country.
Speaking to Euronews, chair for Modern and Contemporary History at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Professor Andreas Rödder, is reported to have said: “The German Left should think carefully about what it is doing and what consequences it has for liberal democracy.”
The report cites Rödder as one of the “most important intellectuals” of Germany’s centre-right, so he is by no means an instinctive supporter of the AfD, which has eroded the support of the centrist Christian Democrats, just as populists have done to neoliberal “conservative” parties continent-wide.
Nevertheless, using language now increasingly heard in some European states, he told the publication: “A ban that would eliminate all votes for the AfD and thus lead to [a left-wing] parliamentary majority” would be a “sure path to civil war”.
For their part, AfD leaders have recently warned that treating the second-largest party in the country as a criminal organisation endangers democracy. Amid the government using wiretaps and informants to spy on the party’s members, the AfD’s Björn Höcke decried a “massive attack on democracy”.
In May, Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who leads the Christian Democratic Party and rules in a coalition with the left, said he was against banning the AfD, because doing away with the party would do nothing to change the minds of its ten million voters. He said he preferred to try to win back their trust and defeat his right-wing opposition at the ballot box instead.
A soft Eurosceptic party, the AfD was founded in 2013 to offer an alternative to the long-ruling prevailing European economic orthodoxy, and has over time developed relatively robust views on border control and the growing presence of Islam in Germany. While certainly nationalist-conservative or sovereigntist, the party has been branded by legacy media and by opponents as extreme-right and even as Nazis.
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