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.
FINALLY. And to everyone who is like “tHiS wiLl MaKe ThInGs WorSe!!11” or “bAnNiNg ThE pArTy WoN’t hElP”. SHUT THE FUCK UP.
These are LITERALLY Nazis. Even more than the US Trump-Rep’s.
And since Russia is not willing to throw 25 Million People on them again and is much more keen to join them, since they are heavily involved with the AFD:
-https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/putin-afd-zusammenarbeit-100.html
-https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/petr-bystron-afd-russland-100.html
-https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2024/kw15-de-aktuelle-stunde-russland-afd-997398
-https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2024-04/afd-russische-regierung-strategiepapier
I’m not willing to take any chance on that. We have Laws for EXACTLY this scenario, time for our government to grow a spine and starts protecting democracy!
We did it once, we can do it again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Reich_Party
If discourse and argument fail to quell the intolerant, a tolerant society must be willing to use censorship and even violence to defend itself. If we let them trample all over our values, tolerating them for the sake of being the “better person”, we’ll be the better corpse sooner rather than later and history will remember us “Look how nobly they did nothing!”
If our history is ever written, that is.
They banned NPD and AFD happened.
All you’ll get is a new party filling up the political vacuum and their audience being even more die-hard radicals.
In a democracy where some 30% vote nazi, banning them won’t solve anything. Anything.
No, I won’t shut up, because you and people like you are part of the problem. If you think the solution is to jail and ban your political opponents, I got bad news for you.
Nearly everything you said is just plain wrong:
- The NPD never got banned (supposedly because the party was “insignificant”).
- They renamed themselves “Die Heimat”.
- If banned, a follow up party from the AfD would be automatically banned too.
- You make it sound like 30% of Germans vote AfD, while they get that many votes mainly in the eastern states.
- You talk about democracy and call Nazis “political opponents”. I got news for you: Those fascist scums’ only goal is to get rid of democracy, sell Europe to Russia and maybe start a third world war.
So keep on talking as much as you like, everyone with half a brain can see right through you.
ah, ok, tell me please, what exactly do you see right through? I wanna know. For research purposes. (And to report it to the headquarters, so we could improve our sabotage operation).
Most of your points were already correctly dismantled. But I’d just like to ad to
In a democracy where some 30% vote nazi, banning them won’t solve anything. Anything.
Is a sentiment I often feel too. I believe that we have to do so much more to fight against Fascists than just Vote and “use the democratic system correctly”. (I.e. fight fascism in the streets, offer actual political solutions to peoples problems…). But to say this won’t do anything is a huge understatement.
Banning the AfD will:
- Disband the party leaving them in shambles to reorganize
- Stop the money flow which is going to the AfD (and in turn to other right wing groups
- Finally delegitimize the AfD and their main actors in a Democratic setting
A ban would be an amazing feat but it would just be a little breather in the fight against fascism.
You can only ban them if they seriously threaten the democratic order. Which some of their members might claim to want to do, but so far the whole party hasn’t shown much of action in the direction.
If you do ban your political opponents because “now they need to reorganize and won’t get money”. You will only strengthen their point that the current democratic order cannot be trusted and that their voters are ignored by the system. You will turn 10% of hardcore voters and 20% of rebel voters into 30% hardcore voters.
And then good luck to you with having any democracy whatsoever. Or do you plan to maybe institute a special democratic police and jail everyone with antidemocratic views? What about jailing some 30% of a certain region of your country? How do you imagine this will go down?
If simply banning nazis from holding political power is enough for some of you to question, then you’re really not going to be ready for what you need to do to them once they get political power. Ban them now because y’all are far too soft to do what needs to be done if you don’t.
Don’t know what’s there to be so smug about. “Oh you would rather ban them in a constitutional process than to wait for them to seize power and fight a bloody civil war, or worse?” Yes please! I hope we all much prefer the first option.
I hope we all much prefer the first option.
Some of us are convinced this measure does nothing, and are unwilling to fight. It seems they only seem to oppose fascism when it can be done by magic.
Some of us are convinced this measure does nothing
Nothing? How can it do nothing? You could argue that it doesn’t do enough or not the right things, but if nothing else banning the party would obviously keep them out of the government at least for the next few years.
Those of us are wrong, then. Fascism isn’t some inherently abstract force of nature, it’s people and organizations of people. Those social structures can be disrupted, and the major question whose answer determines the means of disruption is whether the earlier responses were appropriately timed and powered.
I prefer the situation where fascist-attitude people are individuals who need treatment rather than one where fascism is not just an attitude of individuals but a structural problem requiring e.g. law enforcement involvement or even a full-societal issue requiring outside military involvement.
Ban them now
They won’t, in no small part because the AfD has enough seats to block the attempt. Also, doesn’t help that lots of the enforcement wing of the German government (particularly in the national security services) are AfD or AfD sympathetic.
We’re well past the point at which Germans can do to the fascists what they did to the communists back in the 1990s - ban the party outright and seize their assets. Now they’ve actually got to make this a political fight, rather than a legalistic one, because they turned their backs on the AfD for far too long.
They won’t, in no small part because the AfD has enough seats to block the attempt.
They cannot block a decision of the federal constitutional court, don’t be ridiculous. Germany has measures in place exactly for this scenario, and they are about to be enforced. They cannot be vetoed away, it’s a legal matter.
They cannot block a decision of the federal constitutional court
Given the concentration of AfD in the Eastern Block, you’d be inviting the region to pull a Catalonia and threaten to break away.
Germany has measures in place exactly for this scenario
Riot police, sure.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Far-right parties’ main goal is excluding people from society so they should be fully okay when they’re the ones being excluded.
Please. People say they’re too big now, but there has to be a right size. In Canada, at least, hate groups are always too popular and established to challenge, or too small to bother with.
