Yeah, nothing smells like protecting the democracy more than banning opposing parties. /s
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.
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.
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.
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.