MARSHMALLOW MINISTER MASHED: Leipzig court overturns Nancy Faeser's ban on the AfD-adjacent magazine Compact

It is a defeat for Faeser and a victory for Compact, but in the worst possible way.

Jürgen Elsässer in court with his wife and lawyer. (Photo credit: dpa).

Last year, our then-Interior Minister Nancy Faeser banned the AfD-adjacent magazine Compact. It was one of the more shocking moves in her campaign to crack down on “the extreme right” by restricting the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents in the Federal Republic. Faeser’s ban included early morning police raids on the homes of Compact editorial staff, a seizure of all Compact assets right down to the office furniture and a blanket prohibition on reproducing any of the logos or images associated with the magazine.

I wrote all about it here:

In a truly deranged press release that is still available on the BMI website, Faeser’s office called the move “a heavy blow against the far-right scene” and ranted about “spiritual arsonists who are fuelling a climate of hatred and violence towards refugees” and who “want to overturn our democratic state.” Legally, their case rested on all manner of things Compact said that Faeser and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution didn’t like. At the core of their argument, however, was the familiar objection that Compact insisted on differentiating naturalised from ethnic Germans – a thesis that (according to current jurisprudence) becomes unconstitutional to the extent it suggests naturalised Germans do not enjoy the full rights of citizenship.

Compact’s founder and editor-in-chief, Jürgen Elsässer, immediately challenged Faeser’s actions before the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig. The judges there lifted the ban temporarily while the case was pending.

Today the judges in Leipzig issued their final and unappealable ruling, declaring Faeser’s ban to be illegal. It is a richly deserved and cathartic slap in the face to our Marshmallow Minister – the most sinister but also the stupidest person ever to pollute the offices of the Interior Ministry. Part of me wishes Faeser were still in office just so we could all watch her face the mounting calls for her resignation, because a defeat of this scale should indeed be a career-ending failure. The rest of me of course knows that she would never resign and that she is too insane ever to experience such a thing as humiliation.

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At this point you might be asking how it is that German Interior Ministers have amassed the authority to ban entire publications in the first place, and whether the Leipzig court has withdrawn that power from their arsenal. You might also be asking if the idiots at the state media programme tagesschau were correct when they wrote back in January that a Compact victory “would open the floodgates to far-right rhetoric in the media.”

The answer, alas, is no. The idiots at tagesschau are almost never right and no floodgates have been opened. The ruling is good for Compact specifically, but for the rest of us, it’s kind of disturbing.

Article 9 of our Basic Law and section 3 of the Vereinsgesetz, or the “Law on Associations,” allow the state to prohibit “associations whose purposes or activities … are directed against the constitutional order,” and the Vereinsgesetz in particular permits the Interior Ministry to decide on such bans and to confiscate the assets of prohibited organisations. This is more of that uniquely German defensive democracy I keep telling you about. Because most press outlets, including Compact, are also legal associations, Interior Ministers now and again become tempted to use the Vereinsgesetz to circumscribe our otherwise constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press. Before Faeser’s move against Compact, this tactic had only been used rarely – against small-time extremist websites and the like. Its legality was pretty much untested.

We were hoping for a ruling clarifying that the Vereinsgesetz could not be used as a backdoor to press censorship, but the presiding judge Ingo Kraft disappointed in this respect. He explicitly confirmed that the Vereinsgesetz may also be used against media organisations, and he also found that some of the material published by Compact is “unconstitutional” – especially their remarks on Islam and “remigration.” The court press release focuses in particular on the close relationship between Compact and the Austrian Identitarian activist Martin Sellner, whose programme of “remigration” Compact has repeatedly endorsed, at length and “without any reservations.” The court is clear that such content could indeed warrant a ban; in this case it doesn’t only because this material does “not yet” meet the threshold of being a “defining characteristic” of Compact as a publication.

I’m happy Elsässer survived this one, even if I find the man’s work often kind of naive and unbearable. But this ruling is not good, and shouldn’t be celebrated as a victory for freedom of speech.