Just start the process to ban this party already. There is enough evidence that they are enemies of our constitution.
Why not?
Damn right it isn't, because for most of them it is against their own interests. They vote out of emotion.
In other parts of this thread we have people saying that the AfD must be banned because they are a threat to democracy and that the German constitution has provisions which prevent amending it to weaken the guarantee of democracy...
But how do you then reconcile the idea that people must be prevented from voting for the party they wish? Is that not undermining democracy when you only let them vote when they vote "correctly"?
You don't understand how they may have a historical election or two that led to some kind of event proving that sometimes the people need to be protected from themselves short-term in order to preserve their constitution and democracy long-term?
In Germany we have laws to ban parties that work against our constitution, exactly because of what happened in Weimar. The AfD is classified as confirmed right-wing extremist in five states. Starting a ban process is more than justified. The process is not arbitrary. Only the Bundestag, Bundesrat or government can apply, and the Constitutional Court decides after checking if the conditions are met. Also, just because a majority votes for something doesn’t make it right.
This appears to be an old german law right after nazis were defeated, so its not like someone invented a law specifically to target afd.
Popularity isn't a limit here, at least not in this direction. If the party were irrelevant, it would prevent the ban since the party would not be able to achieve those anti-constitutional goals anyway.
Debatable. One of the core ideas of democracy is to protect minorities. Democracy has been built around the concept that a majority cannot restrict basic rights of minorities. Arguably no one should be allowed to create a system which allows the violation of basic human rights of minorities.
Is that still a minority? I invite you to introspect more. It's not complicated either.
A voting minority cannot by itself gain power in a democratic election.
A population minority may vote with, against, or mixed versus the eventual majority. It is not the same as active participation in voting.
This is the essence of gerrymandering and why only ~10% of US house races are competitive. It's related to why there are only seven swing states in the US for our only national election, which should be changed to a national popular vote.
The idea that democracy is synonymous with the current neoliberal order is nonsense.
The other option has been tried 100 years ago and didn't go so well.
> If you want people to vote for other parties then those parties should chagne to serve the people again instead of trying to make the people serve them.
This doesn't work when the party doesn't serve the people in the first place.
It doesnt even help most of their voters.
Does AfD actually do that, though?
>A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic.
Then it was
>fearmongering, calling the current government a "cartel",
And now you're saying
>abolish core concepts of the democracy or constitutionally guaranteed rights
In other words, it went from "afd wants to get rid of democracy" to "afd's policies breaks the constitution". Of course you guys are different people and are entitled to your own opinions, but it's tiring arguing on a slippery topic that keeps on getting redefined.
If you wish to quote me, then do it accordingly: the AfD is blaming the established democratic processes for the current "cartel" situation. As if that's the only thing to blame, and not that the AfD is not willing to collaborate with other democratic parties or even respect the democratic process.
It's hard to work against pretense, because pretending is lying, and shortcutting reality is hard to compete with, if people start to believe in the lie.
For example: I can promise to gift everyone a unicorn for upvoting this comment (thanks in advance!). Instead of working on a concept of how to make that happen, I can instead just pretend to work on making that happen and mostly work on selling that to you.
It's not necessarily easy, but much easier.
However, it is in our democratic right to fight parties that are anti constitutional. It's in the constitution.
Edit: There is a loophole, though. Article 146 allows the German people to replace the constitution in its entirety.
It's actually quite the opposite, they are running on things like a direct democracy[0], with phrases such as "Wir sind überzeugte Demokraten"[1] (eng: We are confident democrats). And they do that for good reason, as running a party that openly wants to abandon the democratic process would be against the constitution.
[0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_f%C3%BCr_Deutschla...
[1]: https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Programm_AfD_D...
You declared it, so it must be true.
And that AfD is against the best interest of the people, i guess, you can not be serious. It is a populist party that picks up all the things that people are not happy about and are popular, but ignored. It is actually in the very interest of the people who vote for them. But of course scary for the people, who get voted out. Majority wins.
The laws don't work like that, otherwise we arguably would not have any parties left.
he posted & advertised heavily nationalistic videos on tiktok and gained huge following.
court said the election had been affected by irregularities, alleged foreign interference, and problems with campaign financing and online campaigning.
I.e. people asking at the polling places who was going to pay them the money they'd been promised
[Edit: nope, that was neighboring Moldova in 2024]
It does beg a question of how to run an election as a smaller state when faced with overwhelming propaganda from a much larger one (the US or Russia).
That's never not been true, I suppose, but with large unregulated, privately-controlled social media platforms it feels more pressing.
How does one run a "fair" election if the voters are being irradiated with one-sided messaging sufficient to turn an election? Is the result really the will of the people? And yet, what's the alternative?
Democracy's definition contains no such safeguards, just as pure capitalism doesn't prevent monopolies.
Pretty much everyone agrees that "50.01% of us agreed to slaughter the rest" is not a good decision, but it is technically a democratic one.
Just ask yourself if you would be ok with the majority of the population voting to abolish private property. Or Islamists voting to end votes. Or men voting to remove the voting rights of women.
"Democracy" is not synonymous with "good".
Let's turn to an actual dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/democracy-and-republ...
Two important facts:
> Under Article 21, Paragraph 2 of Germany’s Basic Law (Constitution), a party can only be banned if it actively seeks to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or threaten the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany.
> Proving the Whole Party is Extremist: Courts require proof that the entire party—not just individual members or radical factions—is systematically anti-constitutional.
> In the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court has banned only two political parties:
> Socialist Reich Party (SRP) (Sozialistische Reichspartei): A neo-Nazi and far-right party considered a successor to the Nazi Party, banned in 1952.
> Communist Party of Germany (KPD) (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands): A Stalinist party, banned in 1956.
It is hard to understand how countries work. Whether France, US, Germany or China, these are very different animals. It is also tricky to be well informed regarding the struggle for power in politics, since this is not material that is properly explained in every day press publications.
The constitution protects people from voting their rights away forever just because they look for a quick solution. This has happened in the past, and to prevent it from happening again, the constitution has been strengthened to the point of banning anticonstitutional parties.
What the AfD struggles with is that the constitution enforces democracy. And while this is obviously an instance of the tolerance paradox, prohibiting people from removing democracy is the only way to ensure their rights and freedoms, and most importantly their power to control the government (by voting).
Constitutions exist to provide friction to fast-moving populist votes. They prevent the two wolves from eating mutton after the vote. They are not immutable; they are hard to change, and can limit simple-majority votes.
I read into your question, that they should be allowed to do that. The question is, why should they?
EU and Germany's woes won't go away with banning a party. You can't have a single currency without a joint fiscal policy (aka federal state).
And it also, kind of worked, from then on Hitler preferred the legal way instead of doing it like Mussolini (i.e. a putsch). It's one part taking the fall for the Ludendorff, one part Bavaria already being sympathetic to him.
Letting bigots and racists continue to express these views is extremely problematic.
Never let your far-right parties grow. It should be banned, it should have been banned years ago.
By the way, defund billionaires. The Epstein class is behind the funding of these extremist dangerous parties.
https://netzpolitik.org/2026/angriffe-auf-yandex-aus-brennen...
https://rohtext.de/news/afd-bots-offline-yandex-angriffen-wa...
https://www.br.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/faktenfuchs-irrefuehr...
Whether it's Australia : Pauline Hanson, an anti-immigration nationalist widely lampooned as a walking faux-pas for the past two decades, now virtually leads the polls with her One Nation party, which has gone from about 5% support (when the current center-left government was elected mid-2025) to over 25%! today. In the space of 17 months.
New Zealand : From the globally-lauded center-left Jacinda Ardern, at home she was soon all-but-bullied out of politics by a significant and very vocal portion of NZ males angry at her shortcomings - she lives in Australia now - and NZ has since been led by a coalition of three increasingly-right-wing businessmen doing their best to "crack down" on the poorer classes to "balance the books".
Brazil : The big swing from Bolsonaro on the right to Lula on the left.
Japan : Increasingly fragmented, moving rightward and nationalist, centrist rule threatened for the first time since 1955.
Argentina : The populist president Milei, whose strategy-of-least-thought - rip off the whole bandage, right now - proudly sacrifices the hopes of a generation-or-three to gain a form of Economic Satisfaction post-haste.
I am increasingly aligned to the position that every billionaire is a policy failure.
Wealth inequality of the degree we have today is not sustainable.
A sitting US member of the house had their house and offices raided just the other day.
He is also very directly going after journalists.
Freedom is speech is very much not guaranteed in the US.
He literally encouraged a coup and then pardoned people who took part. That's not hyperbole. He instructed Pence to coup, who refused, then he instructed his followers to march down there. A literal coup.
The states had good reasons to remove him from their ballots.
Now he's harassing state workers to remove Americans from voting rolls. Classic coup/anti-democratic stuff. Textbook.
AfD leaders want to bring back the German nationalism of the 30s/40s, fullstop.
Can we please stop pretending this isn't the case? It's so tiring.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/23/afd-na...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/11/afd-mps-scruti...
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.thetime...
And about a million others if you search them up. They are the neo-Nazi party. The leaked emails this article is about speak volumes.
> The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945),[1] where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance. Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.
Hypothetically, should a party running on a platform of ending democracy be allowed to participate in democracy? Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilung...
There are several ex high ranking afd official who left the party because of nepotism, internal authoritarianism, etc.
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/afd-niedersachs...
https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/inside-afd-...
You're leaving this out?
On 26 February 2026, the Administrative Court of Cologne (Verwaltungsgericht Köln) ordered Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), in interim proceedings, to refrain from classifying and treating the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation” pending the conclusion of the main proceedings at first instance.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/afd-einstufung...
I think any party not encouraging others to commit violence should be allowed to run, if majority of all voters don't want democracy, it should be their right to vote for such party, which wants to end democracy. Democracy is here for the people/voters, not vice versa, it should have no self-preservation mechanisms, if it has it's not really an democracy anymore, if opinion of majority of the people is not respected to preserve it.
> Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
Well, look at the Brexit referendum, it's kinda same thing.
Other parties are so indoctrinated and zealous in their beliefs that they fail to see this simple truth and would rather resort to some authoritarian actions than think of changing their ways and try to win the electorate back.
It is. Use a dictionary.
The fault is in equating "democracy" with "fair and stable governance through mostly democratic means". A LOT of people in this thread are making that incorrect gloss of the terms.
Oh dear.
Whatever happend to Voltares "I disprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it"?
EDIT: The irony of this post being downvoted in an attempt to hide it, rather than discuss an opinion you disagree with!
EDIT2: Please understand I have no love for AfD, rather a love of open politics (let everybody hear how crazy they are!).
And regardless, banning a political party (the process for which is set in Germany's constitution) is not the same as banning its former members from speaking.
Anything but address the actual issues that helped catapult them to the top.
The goal posts for those issues will always move.
Look at Japan for instance. For decades, its government's stances on immigration were far to the right of anything in Europe, and guess what, that still didn't stop a far-right faction and its sentiments from taking over.
You can always manufacture anxiety over literally anything, see for instance how the US republican party has made a fight over, like, 10 trans athletes a core pillar of their national culture war.
Even if the quote was correct, it is about free speech. Being elected and holding political office is beyond that.
O tempora, o mores. Back in Voltaire's (sic) days, this would have been an issue between debating gentlemen, not one of massive spreading of hate. It's the fault of media and internet, I know, but that's not so easy to stop.
We have to see this through the lens of modern German history, and the corpus of rules (and lessons from history) that allowed the German Federal Republic to become an independent state again. I think this is not about saying things, but about saying things that foreshadow an attack on the constitution, and then perhaps very likely damaging the institutions of a country in the future.
A democratic state is a suboptimal construct. Once the politcal damaged, it is not easily repaired (See: Some countries East of Germany).
There is nothing intrinsic to democracy that means you need to have a constitution. This should be obvious since many democratic states and organizations have no constitution! The UK has no formal constitution, neither does Israel. Canada also has no single constitution document. There are probably lots of non-democracies out there that have constitutions. It's completely orthogonal to whether or not a place is a democracy.
But Germany has a constitution and it allows to ban parties, that act against it. Would you say, that makes Germany not democratic?
I think journalists have to realize that crying wolf always stops working when you need it the most.
It's funny how people avoid this term. The far left party in the German parliament ("Die Linke") would never deny they're far left. (Their name literally translates to "The Left".)
My comment was more about how the US media/english-speaking media describes non-left parties. All the populists on the left side of the spectrum are “left wing”, but their political counterparts are always “far” right.
But sure, let’s continue this whole “he did it, so I’m doing it too”
So, irrelevant to the topic under discussion?
The world is angry, we live in the age of the predators. European youth are also disappointed, just as in north America, that higer education is no longer a highway to a better life than our parents. But ruined? No.
"Look at the conditions X is in" is a common dog whistle for anti-immigrants and racists. It's a flare sent up to say, "Hey, who else thinks all these X are ruining our country?"