Germany’s right-wing sovereigntist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has launched a lawsuit against the nation’s political police, even as some push for the government to ban the political opposition altogether.
The deadline for Germany’s political police force — established after the Second World War to protect the “liberal democratic basic order” and to prevent any deviation — to retract a decision to classify the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as “confirmed right-wing extremist” or else face legal action passed on Monday morning. The AfD, which is the second largest political party in Germany and the official parliamentary opposition, said the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) declined to respond to their legal letter and so they were launching a lawsuit to challenge the decision in court.
The AfD had called the BfV classification “manifestly unlawful” and said they’d filed for proceedings and for an urgent motion at the Cologne administrative court, the city where the BfV is based, reports Handelsblatt.
Crucially, the BfV classification means it can spy on the party, its politicians, and its members without restriction. Further, with this step, the discussion has progressed to banning Germany’s second most popular elected party altogether, all in the name of protecting democracy. Views are split on this, however, and even within the centre-right Christian Democrats, there are voices calling for a rush to a ban, and others pointing out that such a narrative only vindicates the Afd’s campaigning points that democracy is under threat.
The legal filing against the national political police force comes on the same day as the handover between the outgoing left-wing coalition government, roundly rejected by voters back in February, and the incoming centre-right-led coalition government. This timing, it is alleged, is not a matter of coincidence, with a claim aired by Germany’s Bild newspaper today that the old left-wing government rushed through the order to classify the AfD as extremist as one of their final acts before losing power.
The new Interior Minister, Alexander Dobrindt, who is being sworn in on Tuesday, believed, per that report, the BfV decision wasn’t even properly reviewed before being promulgated, and that once he is in office this week, he intends to have it reviewed. Dobrindt said: “This report will not disappear into a filing cabinet; it will be expertly evaluated by the Federal Ministry of the Interior… [I want] the top brass of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution to present this report to me, to discuss it, and to explain it to me in detail”.
The newspaper itself cited its government sources and claimed that this rush to classify the AfD as extremist was a final act of the outgoing left-wing government—something of an inversion of last-day Presidential pardons in the United States—and that the old Interior Minister Nancy Faeser “pushed hard to publish the expert opinion before the change of power” on her penultimate day in office.
While the AfD may not hope for much from Dobrindt’s review of the document by Interior Ministry experts, he at least is not a politician who wishes to see the ballot-box threat banned from the country altogether. He has already said the bar for banning a party in Germany is high, and the AfD does not meet the standard because “[an] aggressive and militant nature” is not present as a defining characteristic of the party, reports Die Welt.
He said using lawfare to persecute the party would likely be counterproductive, remarking: “There’s a political challenge that needs to be resolved. I would prioritise that, not a debate about a ban… In truth, this plays into the hands of the AfD and its narrative of history, that people no longer want to engage with it politically, but only legally, and I would actually be reluctant to grant that to the AfD.”
Refuting this view, among others, is German politician Michel Friedman, who took to Die Welt on Monday to accuse anyone who still votes for AfD of making themselves an “accomplice” who “must be held accountable” for supporting “an anti-democratic party”. He continued: “The AfD may have been democratically elected, but that doesn’t make it a democratic party”, reminding that “We are a resilient democracy that can initiate ban proceedings if necessary. Perhaps not yet. But perhaps soon”.
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