The campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is not going well

Womp womp.

The anti-AfD protest in Essen on Sunday, photographed carefully lest the viewer see how small it was.

On 2 May, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) yielded to intense pressure from their boss, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, and declared Alternative für Deutschland to be a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation.” The media filled with hit pieces and leftoids began a new round of shouting and morally hyperventilating about the evil fascist Nazi Hitler party. I thought we might be seeing the beginning of an earnest campaign to prohibit the AfD and that over the coming weeks the momentum would just build and build.

Instead it’s kind of fizzled out.

One thing that went wrong, was the roll-out. The AfD immediately filed suit with the Cologne Administrative Court to have their extremist status lifted, and the BfV ended up temporarily suspending their assessment for tactical reasons – above all, to avoid a temporary court injunction that the AfD could portray as a victory. I’ve said many times that a lot of the media pressure against the AfD seems to be coordinated by the constitutional protectors themselves. Now that they’re no longer agitating behind the scenes, the steady drumbeat of pearl-clutching news stories has ceased.

The second thing that has gone wrong, is the publicity campaign. You may remember that the constitutional protectors have produced a 1,100-page assessment documenting the right-wing extremism of the AfD. This dossier, however, remains entirely secret, and so journalists have been leaking choice passages from its pages instead. Their leaks strongly suggest that this document is little more than a vast assemblage of public statements by AfD politicians and functionaries that people in the BfV find untoward.

First we had the three leaks in Welt, which I covered in my first post on this topic. These featured people saying such benign things as “There is more to being German than simply holding citizenship papers” and “Failed migration policy and asylum abuse have led to the importation of 100,000 people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures.”

That did not impress anybody, so Der Spiegel rushed out a new round of leaks.¹ This piece tells us, breathlessly, that “politicians from the party have been ‘continuously’ agitating against refugees and migrants,” that “they have made xenophobic and Islamophobic statements” and that they have an “ethnic-ancestral understanding” of human descent groups that “is not compatible with the free democratic basic order.” They particularly deplore the use of terms like “knife migrants” (“Messermigranten”) which “attribute an ‘ethnocultural propensity for violence to entire groups.’” They say that the party does not consider Germans “with a migrant background from Muslim-influenced countries” to be equal citizens and that the AfD thus “devalues entire population groups in Germany,” violating their human dignity.

The Spiegel piece goes on and on like this – a strange rehearsal of legally irrelevant trivialities:

In a Facebook post in August 2023, the AfD complained that the country was being “flooded with criminals and economic refugees.” “Half of Africa” was allowed to “walk across the German border without resistance and take our country as booty.” In the same year, the AfD presented a “map of horror” on the internet, which was intended to show how “overrun” Germany already was.

According to SPIEGEL information, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution cites another example: a video that was shown at the end of the AfD's election campaign before the state elections in Thuringia in 2024. In the comic, a schoolgirl is threatened by black figures. Security circles say the clip is likely to “stir up fear and rejection of non-white people.”

According to security circles, the domestic intelligence service also states in its report that politicians from the party spread the far-right conspiracy narrative of a politically motivated “great replacement” of the population by migrants. For example, Hannes Gnauck, a member of the AfD's federal executive committee, said at a demonstration against a planned refugee shelter in April 2023: “The old party governments at the federal and state levels are carrying out a population exchange here, and they will not rest until every corner of our country and every peaceful village is crammed full of illegal migrants.”

Maybe you find some of that offensive; maybe the rhetoric is too rough for you. That’s fine. I would simply point out that I could easily assemble a long list of troubling statements from the members of any party, if I were allowed to direct the resources of an entire spy agency against them. Whether we find these statements offensive, however, is not the question, because none of this is remotely enough to justify prohibiting the AfD. For that, you need to show that the party is committed to overthrowing the liberal democratic order of Germany. Nothing in these leaks comes remotely close to that standard.

The mysterious 1,100-page assessment thus begins to look like an assemblage of material thrown together for the benefit of journalists, rather than a dossier likely to convince those who matter that ban proceedings have any chance of success. The great risk, remember, is that the Bundestag or the government will ask the Federal Constitutional Court to consider banning the AfD, and the judges will decline – in backhanded fashion confirming the fully constitutional and democratic nature of the evil fascist Nazi Hitler party. That would be a disaster for the cartel parties, and I suspect the smarter strategists among them have seen the weak tea poured out by Welt and Der Spiegel and gotten a little spooked.

The final and latest thing to go wrong, is the street campaign. Since the BfV upgraded their assessment, all the most odious NGOs have been planning massive street demonstrations across Germany to demand the AfD be banned. These protests were scheduled for yesterday, and they were supposed to repeat the massive nationwide freakouts “against the right” that we saw last year, generating more headlines and still more momentum against the AfD.

That did not happen, because only a handful of losers showed up:

… Demonstrations were held in around 60 cities under the slogan “Ban the AfD now.” The largest rallies took place in Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg. The central rally took place in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate, with up to 7,500 participants – or, according to police estimates, around 4,000 …

The protests were also large in Munich. According to police, 2,500 people took to the streets there, making it the second-largest demonstration of the day of action. In Bochum, police counted around 1,500 participants, and in Göttingen and Hanover, around 600 each. In Nuremberg, 400 people gathered, and in Essen … there were only a few hundred – significantly fewer than the 5,000 announced.

A spokesperson for the North Rhine-Westphalia state control center told BILD: “It was a fairly manageable situation in North Rhine-Westphalia. In Essen, 5,000 participants were registered, but only 500 showed up. In Witten, 1,000 participants were registered, but only 220 showed up. In Dortmund, 300 participants were registered, but 400 people showed up.”

These numbers are so absolutely dismal, we can only conclude that somebody has very deliberately refused to turn on the German NGO protest machine. Perhaps the new government has pulled some levers here, or perhaps as I suggested above the BfV assessment is so bad they’ve decided to shelve the idea for now, or perhaps there’s something else going on.

Either way, I think the AfD can relax a little, and I hereby reduce my estimate of the chances we see an effort to ban the party in the coming year from 60% to 40%. If the AfD see even a partial victory in court – which they well might, because the new assessment was rushed and appears to suffer from various problems – chances will drop lower still. Former Marshmallow Minister Faeser is an incompetent fool and she has messed this up.

1. For some reason, Spiegel journalists are allowed access to this deeply secret document, even though nobody else may see it.