The Social Democrats are plotting a judicial putsch to seize control of the German government. This is totally real. This is actually happening.

The Willy Brandt Haus: SPD federal headquarters in Berlin.

I hereby retract my last assessment.

The Social Democrats are entirely serious about banning Alternative für Deutschland, the only viable populist opposition party in Germany. The German left seem to believe that our highest court will enact a ban if their hard-left nominees to that court are approved. The SPD have put forward these nominees precisely to stack the court and prepare the way for prohibiting the second-largest political party in the Federal Republic.

Getting rid of the AfD is only a secondary goal. That’s what I failed to realise before, and why I got this wrong. The real aim is to use the pretense of an AfD ban to seize control of the government. As soon as the AfD are prohibited, their MPs will disappear from the Bundestag, giving the three left parties – the SPD, the Greens and Die Linke – an outright majority. These parties will oust Friedrich Merz via a constructive vote of no confidence and make SPD chairman Lars Klingbeil Chancellor in his place. Klingbeil will then form a red-red-green government and appoint a hard-left Minister of the Interior, who will use all the political enforcement mechanisms of the German state to go after the CDU in turn.

A legal coup of this nature would be irreversible by conventional means, and it would have consequences extending well beyond the next federal elections in 2029. Superficially, Germany would retain the same constitutional framework, yet the left would secure for itself an effectively permanent and unshakeable parliamentary majority. We would all wake up in a soft socialist dictatorship, with the rebranded DDR-era Socialist Unity Party among the three permanent sharers in power.

I understand that this sounds crazy, but it is not wild eugyppius speculation. The press have confirmed the outlines of this plot. I am just filling in a few blanks. Below the fold, I will explain how we know that this is the plan, how likely the left are to succeed and what is necessary to stop them.