Labeling the AfD ‘extremist’ will backfire terribly

Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (literally, the Federal Office for Protecting the Constitution), has released a bombshell: Based on a report of over a thousand pages, the Verfassungsschutz has classified the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party as “confirmedly right-extremist.” Or, to translate from bureaucratese, “extreme-right.” That means that the AfD is now officially tagged as hostile to the constitutional order of Germany.

Regional branches of the party as well as its former youth organization have been given the same label before. The party as a whole has been formally labeled a “suspect case” (Verdachtsfall) for years, which already allowed the Verfassungsschutz to spy on it. This new classification now is not yet a prohibition. It is more akin to an extreme form of official blacklisting: In practical terms, the AfD can still contest elections, citizens can still vote for it, and its candidates can still represent them.

It is also not a crime to be a member of the AfD; there are currently about 51,000. At the same time, members who are also public servants, for instance in the police, may well face individual assessments of their loyalty to the state.

Conveniently, the Verfassungsschutz has not published the report underlying its finding. But its key allegations against the AfD have been advertised widely: Due to its – very real and often brutal – xenophobic rhetoric, the AfD stands accused of systematically offending against human dignity, an ideal explicitly protected as “inviolable” by the very first article and first paragraph of the German constitution (formally known as the Basic Law).

More broadly, the AfD, the Verfassungsschutz argues, advances an ethno-chauvinistic – to translate the almost untranslatable German adjective “völkisch” – concept of the German population that discriminates against those who are not or not entirely of ethnic German descent. That is – full disclosure – Germans such as me, for instance. That as well, the domestic intelligence experts charge, is not compatible with Germany’s constitutional order.

That Germans can, for now, still vote AfD does not mean that the Verfassungsschutz’s new move is a formality. On the contrary, it is a grievous and misguided escalation, in three ways: It allows the government to boost spying on the AfD by surveillance and informers to the maximum. In principle at least, it greatly stigmatizes the party in the public sphere. Finally, if a formal procedure to achieve a full prohibition were to be initiated, then its chances of success have now increased.

Little wonder then that the AfD has already announced that it will fight the new classification in the courts. It is hard to predict its chances of overturning it. For one thing, last year the AfD lost a similar case – if with lower stakes – when it contested its prior Verfassungsschutz categorization as “suspect.”

It’s little wonder also that some political opponents of the AfD are already loudly clamoring for fresh attempts to fully ban the AfD and remove it from German politics by brute suppression. “If you can’t beat them, snuff them” might as well be the motto of those AfD rivals.

For, despite silly claims to the contrary, the escalating attack on the party is inevitably political and does reflect the AfD’s massive recent success: with 25 percent and more, the AfD is now often the strongest single party in German polls; it did very well at the last federal elections, taking second place with almost 21 percent after the mainstream conservatives; it has a large parliamentary presence of 152 seats, doubling its previous weight. It is, by far, the largest and most important opposition party. Many Germans will, rightly, see the current moves against the AfD as a political abuse of legal norms – in short, lawfare – to hamstring or destroy a political rival that has become too threatening.

Some German mainstream politicians, including the always extremely cautious Olaf Scholz, are more reticent. Scholz, notoriously, is the man who smiled sheepishly when Washington let the world know it would take out Germany’s Nord Stream pipelines; he also denies the Gaza genocide, while Germany is supplying Israel with arms and political support. Scholz, in other words, is the opposite of a courageous hero. And yet, his hesitence about going for a full ban on the AfD makes sense.

Because, in simple practical terms, notwithstanding the Verfassungsschutz classification, that, too, would be an undertaking with an unpredictable outcome. Fortunately, German law makes it difficult to completely prohibit a party: Only three institutions can start the legal process – parliament, the federal council (the upper chamber, representing Germany’s states), and the federal government in Berlin – and only the country’s constitutional court can decide such a case. Similar hurdles would have to be overcome to deprive the AfD of public funding, another demand currently made with fresh force by its opponents.

If there were an attempt to prohibit the AfD and it failed, the only party profiting from it would be, obviously, the AfD: it would then be able to claim both the mantle of martyrdom and victory over the deep state and its lawfare. Like Donald Trump recently in the US, the AfD has an in-built capacity to politically profit from persecution that its enemies underestimate at their peril.

Even if a prohibition attempt were to succeed, simply abolishing a party that a quarter (and counting) of German voters are supporting would, of course, trigger enormous, justified frustrations and a massive popular backlash. But there are even more – and more fundamental – reasons why both the current ostracizing of the AfD and a potential full ban are very bad ideas.

First, various commentators and politicians have already pointed out that the industrial-strength blacklisting now applied to the AfD is likely to buttress the so-called “firewall,” that is, in essence, the abysmal policy of all other parties to rule out the AfD as a coalition partner, that is, to systematically exclude it from government no matter how many Germans vote for it. In practical terms, this means that, in terms of both numbers and real – if denied – ideological affinity, the AfD, not the SPD, should be forming a government with the CDU now: The firewall already has momentous distorting effects on election consequences, and all Germans can see it.

The firewall also means that by now more than a fifth of German voters are, in effect, partly disenfranchised and treated as second-class voters and thus second-class citizens. That’s because their votes clearly are deprived – deliberately and, as it were, by definition – of a power that all other votes have, namely, to potentially influence not only the composition of parliament but that of government as well.

The firewall is, in other words, not something good democrats should be proud of; it is a blatant form of massive discrimination. What makes this particularly harmful is that the AfD is dominant in what used to be East Germany. Hence, discriminating against it and its voters means, inevitably, discriminating not only politically, which is bad enough, but regionally as well, along the worst possible fault line in all of Germany.

Consider, for instance, how not only but especially AfD voters or members in the former East Germany must feel, when they hear CDU politician Marco Wanderwitz claim that the AfD “must be eliminated“ because as long as it is around “to fill up” voters (all Wanderwitz’s own bizarre terms) with its ideology, those same voters cannot be reclaimed by “democracy.” It’s hard to imagine a more patronizing and demeaning statement. Good luck, Germany, with riding out the polarizing effects of such approaches, combining the obviously unfair with the obnoxiously offensive.

Second, it is true that significant parts of the AfD – not merely a fringe – are far or extreme right. But, even if that may be counterintuitive too many, to fight the party with lawfare is still principally – not only pragmatically – wrong, because all German mainstream parties – as well as much of the AfD, by the way – support come-what-may a very far-right Israeli regime that has been stomping on that famous human dignity for decades and has been committing a live-streamed genocide since late 2023. It is ludicrous, peak hypocrisy to stand by apartheid-genocidal Israel in foreign policy but try to blacklist or even forbid the AfD domestically.

Third, all too few Germans seem to be aware that the whole idea of protecting democracy by aggressively identifying those accused of not supporting it and then marginalizing and suppressing them has a very dark history. Instead, the simplistic tale Germans are told again and again by their leaders and mainstream media is that this ideal of so-called “militant democracy” is the correct post-World War Two response to the manner in which the Nazis came to power in 1933. As if that so-called ‘seizure of power’ had not been most of all the outcome of a conspiracy – in practice, not ‘theory’ – of small traditional elites.

‘Militant democracy,’ on the other hand, was actually tried out already during World War II; not, obviously, in Nazi Germany but in the US, under the direct influence of the recognized and usually venerated intellectual father of the concept, the German émigré Karl Loewenstein.

Regarding those who think that ‘militant democracy’ can do ‘merely’ political and not very concrete, brutal harm, they should urgently read up on this first experiment in Loewensteinian democracy ‘defense.’ For Loewenstein did not just theorize, argue, and lobby. As American historian Udi Greenberg has long shown in his book “The Weimar Century” and a shorter online article, Loewenstein inspired and played an important role in a long international US campaign to identify and suppress alleged “subversives” in the Western hemisphere.

Carried out under Washington’s leadership in several countries of Latin America as well, this campaign ended up surveiling, incarcerating, and deporting thousands, without due process or appeal, simply by administrative fiat. At its peak stood literal, now mostly forgotten – unlike the better-known case of the World War II persecution of Japanese Americans – concentration camps on US soil.

And – surprise, surprise – many of the victims were, of course, innocent. Indeed, Greenberg found that US officials knew they “posed no security threat” and that “only a tiny minority” among them were even politically active in any way. What the preponderant majority was repressed for was not what they had done – nothing – but who they were or, in the eye of over-eager and over-empowered security bureaucrats, seemed to be. The same American officials also knew that many arrests were really “motivated by racism or greed, with internal reports mentioning “policemen’s plans to take over the prisoners’ houses.”

Finally, to reach peak absurdity, US officials were aware from internal reporting that the victims of their campaign included Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, now absurdly targeted as enemy agents. If you have never heard about this extensive practical test of the concept of ‘militant democracy,’ guided by its intellectual godfather himself, and its extremely dark outcomes, then ask yourself why.

Germany may end up prohibiting its biggest, most important opposition party – in the name of “democracy.” This would be a new milestone in the EU’s relentlessly escalating – Romania, France, even Moldova, which is not even a member yet – authoritarian campaign to bend voters to the will of radical-Centrist establishment parties that monopolize the notion of democracy and thereby undermine, even destroy whatever is left of its reality. Whether you like AfD politics or not – I do not, not at all – you should understand that the real if insidious threat to democracy comes from those waging lawfare against it.