Leading Political Journalist Calls Banning the AfD an “Authoritarian Measure” That Is “Overdue”

This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.

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A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. {snip}

Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by political editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue.” The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.

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Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky,” “too soon” and “simply undemocratic,” and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising.”

The problem … is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down,” Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD senior president was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.

What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans,” the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.

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As Lautsch continues, she strays ever further from making any kind of rational case. The last concrete complaint she raises is her claim that “the AfD is shifting the boundaries [of discourse] ever further in the direction of an ethnic conception” of Germanness, and that at the notorious “secret Potsdam meeting” the AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund said some untoward things about foreign restaurants. She rushes past these points, sensing their weakness, and spends the rest of this section on bizarre and irrelevant matters:

There is also the AfD’s self-representation as the representative of the true will of the people. That in itself has little to do with parliamentary democracy. Anyone who claims to already know the will of the people is unlikely to engage in parliamentary debate. The AfD therefore uses parliament primarily as a stage for staging the inflammatory speeches of its representatives and then distributing them on YouTube and TikTok. These are addressed directly to the “people” – and thus removed from parliamentary discussion.

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It gets even stranger:

The AfD also has cultivated its own idea of the law itself. The idea is that there is a kind of natural, true law that precedes the actual law. In the words of AfD senior member Treutler in the Thuringian state parliament: “There is not only the law, there is also the spirit of the law.” This is the AfD’s most dangerous idea to date, because it can be used to bend the law, which was once set by democratically elected parliamentarians, in any direction. The true will of the people, the true party of the constitution, the true law. We cannot continue to stand by and watch this party co-opt democracy until there is nothing left of it.

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Lautsch acknowledges that “banning a party with around 50,000 members and millions of voters” presents considerable risks. Among these is that supporting such a ban looks tremendously “undemocratic” and also that “AfD supporters could become more radicalised.”

Interestingly, these fears primarily concern the sensitivities of AfD supporters. But what about the fear of millions of Germans with a history of migration who are afraid of the xenophobia unleashed by the AfD? And what about the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets against it last winter?

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At this point Lautsch comes to the awkward problem of authoritarianism. She assures us that we needn’t worry too much about this. As long as authoritarian actions are decided by democratically elected bodies and approved by courts, they’re totally fine:

It is true that a party ban is an authoritarian measure, but it is an authoritarian measure of a constitutional state. The Federal Constitutional Court only imposes it if the strict legal requirements are met. And the decision to initiate a party ban proceedings is taken democratically – in the Bundestag, in the Federal Council or by the democratically elected federal government.

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