AfD and the trouble with banning political parties

More than 800,000 people took to the streets of Germany's major cities over the weekend to protest against Alternative for Germany (AfD), following reports that members of the right-wing party have been discussing a radical plan to expel millions of migrants. 

Independent investigative news site Correctiv reported on a meeting of right-wing groups including the AfD and the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). They were planning "for the so-called remigration, or expulsion, of millions of people who have immigrated to Germany", said Deutsche Welle.

The story "jolted the nation awake from its winter slumber", said The Guardian, "triggering sackings and resignations" and "mass rallies across German cities".

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It also prompted "a politically risky debate over an outright ban of the country's second-strongest party", the paper added. 

'Coloured by the country's Nazi past'

Debate about potentially banning the AfD heated up when Saskia Esken, the co-leader of the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD), said earlier this month that she was in favour of discussing a ban, if only, as she said, to "shake voters" out of their complacency.

Since then, politicians from across the political spectrum have "weighed in on whether a legal effort to ban Alternative for Germany (AfD), while possible under German law, would be tactically smart", said Politico, or whether it would only "further fuel the party's rise".

Like "so much of German politics", the debate is "coloured by the country's Nazi past", the site added. Conscious that Adolf Hitler had made gains at the ballot box before ultimately seizing power, many politicians have begun to see the prohibition of the AfD as "an imperative rooted in historical experience".

One senior CDU politician, Daniel Günther, recently declared the AfD to be "dangerous", adding that "large parts of the AfD want to eliminate our democracy". 

In an interview with Cicero, a Berlin-based political and cultural magazine, Günther said that he has "great sympathy for a [AfD] ban procedure to be initiated," which ought to be "carefully prepared by the federal government".

"A defensive democracy must use its instruments," he insisted, and that means "fighting parties that are unconstitutional with all the means of the constitutional state".

The idea of banning a party is "not only politically fraught", but also poses "a moral dilemma for many", said Euronews. 

As Princeton professor Jan-Werner Mueller put it in a 2013 article for Project Syndicate, when it comes to banning extremist parties, democracies are "damned if they do, damned if they don't".

There is also a purely practical issue, said Lorenzo Vidino, director of the programme on extremism at George Washington University. "If you ban a group, it doesn't just disappear," Vidino told Euronews. "AfD has millions of supporters – the problem it poses isn't solved after you ban the party." In fact, by dissolving the party you might simply end up "losing the control you have over it".

Today, Germany's top court "stripped a neo-Nazi party", Die Heimat, meaning the Homeland, of the right to public financing and tax advantages, "a decision that could provide a blueprint" to head off the wider resurgence of the far right, said The New York Times. Die Heimat was too small to receive public funding anyway, but the move was described by Germany’s interior minister Nancy Faeser as a "clear signal" that "our democratic state does not fund enemies of the Constitution".

Some say a similar ban on public financing for AfD "could be an effective middle ground", said the paper. "It would hinder the AfD, without banning it outright."

'Incompatible with a free society'

The calls for a ban are "completely absurd and expose the anti-democratic attitude of those making these demands", said Alice Weidel, co-leader of the party, in a statement to Politico. They also show that "the other parties have long since run out of substantive arguments against our political proposals".

AfD has also insisted that its recent meeting that discussed the idea of sending migrants home has been completely mischaracterised. 

In the parliamentary debate prompted by the joint motion led by the SDP, Bernd Baumann, parliamentary secretary of the AfD, told lawmakers it was no more than a "small, private debate club", not a "secret meeting dangerous to the public".

Nancy Faeser, the federal interior minister from the SPD, said that such a suggestion was nonsense. "We are seeing an active effort to shift borders and to spread contempt for democracy and misanthropy into the heart of society," she said.

A ban itself could represent a challenge to Germany's democracy, according to the Bavarian MP Petr Bystron. He told The European Conservative: "The last German chancellor who banned a democratic party was Adolf Hitler. All of those who are now trying to ban the AfD are following in his footsteps."

Opposition leaders like Sahra Wagenknecht, who recently founded a new left-wing party, the BSW, have sharply criticised calls to ban the AfD. "Banning unpopular parties because they become too strong is incompatible with a free society," she said in an interview with The European Conservative in November. She said she found "fighting a political competitor with unconstitutional ban proposals incompatible with democratic aspirations".