Banning Alternative für Deutschland: A Nightmare Scenario

What will happen if Germany's largest opposition party is prohibited and why it is in everybody's interest for the centre-right CDU to bring down the firewall and normalise the populist right

As all of my readers know, the Social Democrats (SPD) are fighting hard to force two hard-left justices onto the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Although the vote failed last week because Friedrich Merz messed it up, the SPD remain determined to give Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf and Ann-Katrin Kaufhold the red robes. They might still succeed.

This matters because Brosius-Gersdorf and Kaufhold have both argued in favour of ban proceedings against Alternative für Deutschland. What is more, both candidates would be appointed to the second senate of the Constitutional Court, which is the division responsible for banning political parties. And as if that were not enough, the SPD nominated both candidates in the wake of their party congress, where SPD chairman Lars Klingbeil said that banning the AfD was his party’s “historical duty.” Many have therefore concluded that the SPD are trying to stack the court in advance of an application to prohibit Germany's second-strongest political party, banish all of its elected politicians and seize all of its assets.

I’m far from a sensationalist, and I’ve repeatedly discounted the likelihood of an AfD ban – not least because the German establishment and the left in particular have good reasons to keep the AfD around. Lately, however, I’ve begun to appreciate that there are deeper, systemic forces working against the AfD in this case. These forces are beyond anybody’s control and if nobody does anything, they may well end in political catastrophe that is much bigger than any single party.

Since the end of the Merkel era, the German left has become thematically scattered, and so they have retreated to the only coordinating issue the German left has ever had, which is hating the right. As climatism started to fade, the social welfare state exceeded its limits and mass migration went sour, AfD bashing became the sole unifying principle for much of the SPD, Die Linke and the Greens. Hating the right is particularly important because it keeps leftist politicians and their activist class on the same page. Without a crusade against the right, a great chasm opens between the antifa thugs who want to smash the state and destroy capitalism on the one hand and the schoolmarm leftoid establishment functionaries in the Bundestag who want to mandate gender-neutral language for the civil service on the other hand. What is more, the firewall against the AfD splits the right and keeps the shrinking left in government. It is a win-win for leftoids everywhere.

Recent events, however, show why things cannot continue as they are now indefinitely. Over time, our Constitutional Court will begin to fill with leftist justices supported by the left parties, who like the rest of the left will also want to ban the AfD. Brosius-Gersdorf and Kaufhold are omens here. Right now the system is held in perfect balance; the left talks a big game about wanting to stamp out the AfD, but they can always justify their hesitation by saying the outcome of ban proceedings is too uncertain. When the necessary judicial majority for an AfD ban is finally secured in Karlsruhe, everything changes. At that point, there will be no excuse for not proceeding with a ban. The activists and the NGOs will take to the streets if their political masters in Berlin don’t begin the process. The CDU will be brought around by media smear campaigns and antifa intimidation.

Keep in mind that this is not about the AfD, but about imperatives within the left itself. No amount of moderation, polite messaging or triangulation on the part of the AfD can get the left to stop or pursue other goals. Unless some exogenous force introduces a new unifying obsession for the left parties and their activists, they will never stop gnawing on this particular chew toy.

Practically, this probably means that the AfD has an expiration date. If they can’t get into government at the federal level and if nothing else changes, they will find themselves facing ban proceedings before a court stacked with leftists who hate them in the next 10 or 15 years. The federal elections in 2029 seem like the last opportunity to normalise the AfD before this final escalation.

People in the CDU need to realise how serious this is, because their fate hangs in the balance as much as the fate of the populist opposition to the right of them. It is absolutely necessary that they break the firewall and enter some kind of arrangement with the AfD before it is too late. It doesn’t matter how much the press freaks out. It doesn’t matter how many violent antifa thugs take to the streets. It doesn’t matter how many party headquarters the leftists invade and vandalise. The firewall will fail in one direction or the other, and if it fails with an AfD ban, we are all in very deep shit.

Once the AfD is gone – once all their assets are confiscated, all their representatives are driven out of the federal and state parliaments and the authorities have hunted down all plausible successor organisations – the left would turn on the CDU and the CSU. They have to, because as I said above the left in its present form is an anti-right machine.¹ Everything that is happening to the AfD right now would begin to happen to the centre-right Union parties. Left parties would suddenly have a majority almost everywhere; all the tools of defensive democracy would be at their exclusive disposal. Leftist forces in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution would begin infiltrating CDU party ranks, what remains of the right flank of the CDU would be hunted down and criminalised, CDU civil service members would be subject to official harassment and intimidation and a great part of the CDU party programme would be declared beyond the pale. There is very little the CDU could do to stop any of this.

The DDR was not a single-party state; rather, the governing Socialist Unity Party (SED) tolerated the existence of several “bloc parties” alongside itself. Only the SED was really in charge, but the bloc parties allowed the SED to claim a broader basis of social support and to integrate different groups who could not identify directly with the reigning communists. The forces unleashed by an AfD ban would very likely reduce the CDU to a bloc party of the German left, while also encouraging the closer integration of the left parties themselves. A clear leader might emerge, and if history is to repeat a second time as farce, that might even be Die Linke – none other than the rebranded SED. Whatever happens, the left would have an iron monopoly on all major political issues. A lot of these would be decided internally, at party congresses and in back rooms, without the public ever having to hear much about it.

This is an extreme nightmare scenario, but I think it’s more likely than not what happens in the event of an AfD ban.² The problem is that the Federal Republic is in many ways a provisional country, which was set up to counteract the distant political threats of yesteryear, like lingering National Socialist elements and eastern Communism. Built into the constitutional fabric of the Federal Republic are a series of tools that permit parliamentary majorities to appropriate the entire political system for themselves, and when they use these tools there’s not much anybody can do about it. If the CDU want to have any kind of future, they need to normalise relations with the AfD and come to some kind of compromise that gets the left out of the federal government. Otherwise we may all face a totally legal coup followed by a leftist political revolution that will land us in a kritocratic equivalent of the DDR.

1. It is not just eugyppius who is thinking this. The AfD-adjacent jurist Ulrich Vosgerau sees things pretty much as I do, and he’s pointed out that the same view even prevails on the other side of the political spectrum. Ann-Katrin Kaufhold, the crazy leftoid constitutional court nominee, has said that the one danger of banning the AfD is that “society would no longer take action against the right wing.”

2. Only if AfD supporters return immediately and en masse to the CDU after an AfD ban, would the CDU be strong enough to defend itself against subjugation and ward off a legal coup by the left parties. I’m not sure it is reasonable to hope for such a thing.