The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has gained ground in three recent state elections, caused an uproar in the Thuringian parliament and triggering another debate on whether to ban the party outright.
Banning the party isn’t going to help.
Like I say of Trump, the AfD isn’t the problem, they’re a symptom. Conservatism and conservatives themselves are the problem – the question is how should we deal with them, and I really don’t know the answer to that.
Edit: just to clarify, I’m not saying the AfD shouldn’t be banned, just that banning the party won’t change the people who vote for it and run it.
The problem is the same all over Europe people are unhappy with immigration from MENA.
None of the centre or left parties will deal with it, except in Denmark and Poland which coincidentally have seen lower votes for far right parties. But that’s probably unrelated right.
So yea. Let’s decide who should be in power and what they think of is right goes and ban anyone that thinks differently.
Banning AfD is the best short term solution, it needs to be followed by a stronger social focus of the government.
One reason for conservative and right-wing sentiment is fear of the future in the populace. Fear causes people to try to isolate themselves from “others” and wanting to horde and protect their stuff instead of supporting others.
If the government is able to alleviate those fears, they will not see a need for fear anymore. But that is a long process, which constantly gets sabotaged by commercial outrage media, foreign intervention, social media, conservative/right-wing politicians, etc.
Like I stated in another comment banning them won’t be a solution but it will harm them and the fascist movement (just cutting their funding will do a lot).
But yes there’s a bigger problem with the growing right-wing tendencies in the society that needs more than this to be addressed
Banning a party has significant affects on far-right organizations and money-streams. Much of their propaganda will become impossible to finance and any successor parties are automatically banned as well. Fascist voters cannot become disillusioned without a ban. Their beliefs are as solid as a flat-earther or anti-vaxer and only destroying their echo chamber has a chance to take them out.
Banning the party isn’t going to help.
Yes it will. It’ll mean it won’t be standing in elections, and that’s only fair because it’s an anti-democratic party… and it will deprive its members of broad protections afforded to parties and remove a unifying banner for them.
Banning anti-democratic institutions in a democracy is not only justified, it is conducive to the democracy’s survival. It lifts the bar for getting rid of democracy to be equivalent to not winning in an election but by establishing a second monopoly on violence, a far greater threshold and attempts at which are more straightforward to deter, prosecute and stamp out than being within every TikTok user’s first few swipes.
There’s nothing that prevents AfD voters from going to other parties, there’s plenty, or to voice their concerns in a new party that can be a legitimate part of the democratic system. Changing parties isn’t like banning a religion or a creed or a race, a party is hardly more than just a banner, the power of which can change between and during elections, at any time, through a simple act of the mind. Banning the party will absolutely help.
It sends a good message. It doesn’t send a message of wanting the silence the concerns of those who voted for the AfD in anything but the short term, it sends the message of ‘we hear you, but try again… a bit less fascist-y please’.
Note that I’m not saying the AfD shouldn’t be banned, just that banning it won’t make the people who vote for it and run it any less, well, fascist.
There’s nothing that prevents AfD voters from going to other parties, there’s plenty, or to voice their concerns in a new party that can be a legitimate part of the democratic system. Changing parties isn’t like banning a religion or a creed or a race, a party is hardly more than just a banner, the power of which can change between and during elections, at any time, through a simple act of the mind. Banning the party will absolutely help.
And that’s the thing; because the people who support AfD won’t change just because their party gets banned, how likely do you think it is that they’ll realize they need to be a legitimate part of a democratic system instead of what they’ve been doing all along?
banning it won’t make the people who vote for it and run it any less, well, fascist.
Correct. But it’s no supposed to do that. Banning a fascist party doesn’t solve every problem of a divided society, but it prevents the worst (a fascist party seizing power) and gives us time (and the chance!) to solve some of the others.
There’s basically no other option. Either a society has effective rules against fascism in place or it will stand idly by while being undermined. And if it has these effective rules, it must abide by them. ‘Fascists should not be allowed to rule the country’ seems to be a reasonable lower limit.
There won’t be democracy in Germany if the AfD gets into power. You need to stop the wound from gushing before you can worry about setting the broken bone.
I don’t disagree with that sentiment at all, I’m just not sure how to set this particular broken bone. How do you make ~20% of the population less fascist?
You can’t, but Germany has always had at least 20% nazis and fascists all throughout its post war history.
Up till recently, they didn’t vote, or voted conservative, because there was no other option. So they didn’t actually threaten democracy all that much.
Banning the AfD won’t reduce the number of fascists, but it will close one avenue they have for destroying the state.
There will always be a subsection og the population that adheres to fascist ideas. For a liberal democracy to function, these ideas have to be ostracized to make sure that no fascist party can establish itself in a major way. Some far-right voters will vote for minor far-right parties, some will vote for more moderate conservative parties and some won’t vote at all. The key is to keep them from uniting while appearing moderate enough to win over some more moderate voters.
In Thailand they ban the major progressive party after nearly every election. Usually they’ve already formed another party even before the ban comes down. Often the party leaders are excluded but it doesn’t achieve much and creates the perception that they’re persecuted.
In Germany, political parties have been banned successfully, both the far-right Socialist Reich Party and the far-left Communist Party. While successor parties were formed, these were less extreme, at least in public, and less successful.
While the AfD is bigger than either of these parties, it still doesn’t poll any higher than 20%. Furthermore, polls indicate that the vast majority of those who don’t support the AfD, believe it shouldn’t be anywhere near power. No other party in Germany receives that level of rejection from those who don’t support it.
If you tried to ban a party with wider appeal, it would probably fail, but with the AfD it may succeed.
There is a difference between conservatism and being a threat to the democratic order. Germany has conservative parties that are perfectly valid, it’s just that the AfD is not one of them.
There is a difference between conservatism and being a threat to the democratic order.
I’m not sure I agree. More and more it’s started seeming like they’re generally just waiting for a moment to drop their masks; eg. here in Finland now that we have a fully right wing government, our “fiscally conservative” party started their term off by limiting the right to strike, and is now echoing extremist right wing talking points about eg. immigration, LGBT+ people, and the environment. They were OK with an extremist right wing minister leaving us out of Ukraine’s “Alliance for Gender-Responsive and Inclusive Recovery” because the plan mentioned LGBT+ people, and they stood in the way of banning abusive LGBT+ “conversion therapy” even though they claimed to be against it back when they still had to be in a government with leftist parties (sorry, couldn’t find an English source for this but here is one in Finnish. For translation I’d suggest DeepL, it’s vastly superior to eg. Google). They are also blaming the opposition for “besmirching” Finland’s reputation abroad, meaning they don’t want anyone pointing out that we have literal neo-Nazis in the government and parliament.
Killing the head of a terrorist organization won’t help if you don’t fix the underlying issues.He will be replaced in short order, usually by someone worse. Likewise this kind of political movement.
What the left in Europe (well in my country at least) still doesn’t understand is that they’re not going to fix this by lecturing the populist voters about how all their thoughts and ideas are wrong.
As long as it is a political party it is entitled to double digit millions every year in state party financing.
If it is forbidden, it cannot be refounded with the same people and ideology and their wealth is seized.
It ia not comparable to “terrorist” organizations, that dont need to abide by some rules of the dominant order in order to be active.
The democratic system should not actively finance and aid those who want to destroy it.
Finally the ideology is legitimised every time it can be voted for legally, as it shows the ideology to be considered part of the acceptable political plurality
I agree, that this move is mostly about getting some time and deeper issues still need to be addressed. However, by law, if the party is banned so are followup parties.
What the left in Europe (well in my country at least) still doesn’t understand is that they’re not going to fix this by lecturing the populist voters about how all their thoughts and ideas are wrong.
I do not agree with this sentiment though. Because for a big part their thoughts and ideas are just wrong (e.g. scientific denial (like climate or vaccinations) or hate against certain groups). We cannot say ‘well they have a point’ when they simply don’t have shit.
