Germany’s spy agency BfV has labeled the entirety of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as an extremist entity.
The BfV domestic intelligence agency, which is in charge of safeguarding Germany’s constitutional order, said the announcement comes after an “intense and comprehensive” examination.
“The ethnicity-and ancestry-based conception of the people that predominates within the party is not compatible with the free democratic order,” the BfV said on Friday.
Hopefully this inspires the other parties to to start the process to see the AfD banned. I know the report might not look like much, because of how obvious the findings are. But previous attempts at banning them have failed because such an official report was missing. So maybe our political system starts getting its shit together.
As we say in Germany: Hope dies last
Banning parties isn’t always anti-democratic. The reason why is a bit unituitive so I explained it quite detailed but I believe that’s necessary. Take for example a hypothetical party X. Party X will use legal loopholes to effectively destroy democracy when it gets into power (restrict free speech, manipulate ballots, lock up the opposition, etc.) . Now party X gets the majority. That creates a situation where Party X stays in Power indefinitely. Now at some point the majority of people people change their mind and now they wouldn’t vote for the party anymore so the government isn’t representative of the people anymore. But it doesn’t matter anymore because democracy is dead in the country now. So now the people have to go through the whole establishing democracy process again which costs many lives and many years of living under oppression. That could have been skipped if party X had been banned. Now the problem remains that a majority of people weren’t represented in a election. That’s obviously bad. However keep in mind that the only thing we need to ban to skip all those years of oppression is to ban a single thing that party’s just aren’t allowed to do. And that thing is being antidemocratic. So banning that one single thing allows us to keep all the other nice thing that democracy has to offer.
The massive, gigantic problem with this is you’re making the assumption that party X will use legal loopholes to destroy democracy, and are using that assumption to instead destroy democracy by banning them over things you claim that they will do. You’re saying “we’re going to ban you for being antidemocratic because we think that one day you might be antidemocratic, so we’re gonna go ahead and be antidemocratic first”.