Leading political journalist calls banning the AfD an "authoritarian measure" that is "overdue," insists that political repression is perfectly fine when it is exercised by a "constitutional state"

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.

Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD are accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.

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. All their carefully curated talkshow tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “right wing extremism,” all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would’ve long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.

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.

Let’s read it together.

Eva Ricarda Lautsch has psycho girlfriend eyes.

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.

Perhaps this is why Lautsch backtracks, deciding suddenly that the case for banning the AfD may not be all that obvious after all. She admits that it is “legally risky” because, for a ban to succeed, somebody would have “to prove … that [the AfD] is working to destroy the free democratic order.” This is very hard to do because “it is part of the AfD’s strategy to present itself as the party of true democrats and defenders of the constitution” even though “its representatives have long been working to dismantle the institutions of our Basic Law from within.” Thus, as always, the absence of evidence for anything untoward about the AfD becomes evidence for their malicious, underhanded, democracy-undermining strategies.

Lautsch, desperate to climb out of this circular argument, first seizes upon the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the domestic intelligence agency that has been spying on the AfD for years. She insists that they have “already collected extensive material … which in itself could be used to justify a ban.” Lautsch’s “could” is doing a great deal of work here. The problem is that nobody, least of all Lautsch, has any idea what material the constitutional protectors have compiled. We can, however, try to learn from similar cases where we know more. Back in February, for example, I took a very close look at the information the constitutional protectors had amassed on Hans-Georg Maaßen. It was far from encouraging, and the truth is that if our political goons had anything that could really do in the AfD, we would’ve heard about it long ago.

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.

Literally all politicians claim to represent the popular will and to act in popular interests. Otherwise, none of this is illegal or even remotely wrong. The AfD are an opposition party, excluded by the reigning cartel system from participation in government, and so of course they use parliamentary debate to criticise the lunatics in charge and use social media to distribute their speeches to supporters. What kind of complaints are these? Does Lautsch really want to ban the AfD because they’re good at TikTok?

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.

The “spirit of the law” is a very old idea; it is generally raised in contrast to the “letter of the law”. The AfD did not invent this problem in legal philosophy. All laws require interpretation that accounts for their spirit and their letter, and anyway Jürgen Treutler is a minor AfD politician who does not speak for the whole party and who was not proposing a new legal approach either. He was merely trying to defend the traditional right of the strongest party – in this case, the AfD – to name the president of the Thuringian parliament.

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?

That’s right, it would be positively undemocratic to ignore the “fears of millions of Germans” who don’t like the AfD by not banning the party. That’s just how democracy works: whenever the right people get afraid of the right party, you have to ban it. When the wrong people get afraid of the wrong party, however, bans are absolutely not in order. I and millions of other Germans are absolutely terrified of the Greens but that doesn’t count, because the Greens are a democratic party and we’re undemocratic for being worried about them.

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.

Upon contemplating the likely consequences of banning the AfD, Lautsch becomes positively ecstatic:

And as a weapon of the constitutional state, a party ban is extremely effective. It is not for nothing that the AfD is doing everything it can to escape this fate. A ban by the Federal Constitutional Court would result in the party being dissolved, its infrastructure destroyed and its assets seized. Establishing replacement organisations would also be prohibited. AfD representatives would immediately lose their mandates. Of course, this would not get rid of the AfD members. But the party would be eradicated from the public sphere – and from the political competition. In any case, the two parties that have been banned in the Federal Republic of Germany so far – the KPD [i.e., the Communist Party of Germany] and the Nazi-successor SRP [i.e., Socialist Reich Party] – dissolved into insignificance when they were banned in the 1950s.

The SRP and the KPD were banned in 1952 and 1956, within a decade of the founding of the Federal Republic, as West Germany emerged from wartime occupation and faced down the Communist threat in the East. We were still being folded into the liberal West back then, with all the awkward (and overtly illiberal) political engineering that entailed. I find it pretty shocking that Lautsch thinks these are reasonable precedents, but she runs with them, concluding that “there are democracies that manage without banning parties, but Germany is not one of them.”

Rather, it is part of the core of German self-understanding as a “defensive democracy” to be able to defend itself against the enemies of democracy with the authority of the constitutional state if necessary. You can criticise this tendency to call on extra-parliamentary authorities such as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution or the Federal Constitutional Court, but to turn away from them at the moment of greatest threat to this democracy would be fatal.

Yes, a ban can fail. But those who are not prepared to protect democracy with all the means at the disposal of a constitutional state ultimately surrender it to its enemies. That is the greatest danger.

Germany is the only self-described “defensive democracy” in the entire liberal West. We have our ridiculous constitutional protectors and our other political enforcement mechanisms, because ours is a provisional state thrown together in haste in 1949. We were allowed democracy only within specific boundaries, to prevent the people from voting their way back into Nazism or into the Soviet bloc. That time is past. Fascism is gone and the Berlin wall came down when I was a child, but our rulers just won’t let the postwar era go away. It is always and forever 1933 or 1938 or 1952 or 1956 here in the best Germany of all time, where our rulers govern not to solve present problems, but to beat back the phantom past, and they are going to keep us mired in this dark and hopeless political timewarp until we are all ruined or they are cast out of power, or (more probably) both.