There are ongoing efforts to ban the party (through constitutional instruments created specifically after 1945 to prevent a second NSDAP or other similar anti-constitutional extremists) and there is an argument to be made that this is strategical assistance for evidence-gathering.
There has been another effort [0] collecting _public_ statements that can be used in a potential future Constitutional Court case. Depending on your stance this leak complements the ban effort or undermines its legitimacy. Note, Germany has no fruit-of-the-poison-tree evidence provisions!
All the state bodies authorized to file such a request – the Bundestag, the Bundesrat, and the Federal Government – each require a simple majority to initiate the proceedings and thus rely on the votes of the CDU.
It is also important to note that this is merely a request for an examination; the final decision rests with the Federal Constitutional Court.
There is a recent comment from a very respected lawyer about the situation, citing Göbbels: https://youtu.be/I87E0cV367I?t=11614 (use the auto-translated subtitles)
The full quote translates to something like:
"It will always remain one of the greatest ironies of democracy that it provided its own mortal enemies with the very means by which it was destroyed. As elected representatives, the persecuted leaders of the NSDAP enjoyed parliamentary immunity, a salary, and free travel passes. This shielded them from police intervention, allowed them greater latitude in what they could say compared to ordinary citizens, and—to top it all off—ensured that their activities were financed by their very enemies. This democratic stupidity could be exploited to great advantage."
Make it illegal to hold and express the view that people should not be allowed to wearing the burqa. If someone is express that they are against same-sex marriage or against circumcision for non-medical reasons, let them sit in jail for a few years. Why allow people to legally hold those view and express them but then forbid them from being political about it?
refresher course on reality: you want these views out in public so you can publicly ridicule the people expressing them. You send them to jail they learn from the real criminals how to be really criminal with their views and come out worse than before. That these views are taking hold more and more now tells you there is a legitimate problem not being addressed and either the view is some shade of correct or, more likely, the view is an incorrect solution to the actual problem that won't work. Either way you have to figure it out and fix it. Repressing the view just makes the eventual result more violent without solving the underlying issue causing the view
As far as jailing people because they think or say the wrong thing? omfg no thank you! Saudi Arabia almost just beheader someone for that kind of WrongThink.
The German constitution allow the legal system to limit the fundamental rights of individuals who are found to be undermining the constitutional order. It can punish people as well as preventing people to form political parties. If the political views are so bad that they are seen as undermining the constitutional order, allowing people to hold those views and express them but not to form parties seems odd and counter-intuitive. If the views are that bad they should not be expressed regardless if its done with or without a party hat.
Up until then, certain politicians wouldn't explicitly support, but also wouldn't condemn Basque-independence-related terrorism when asked. Thankfully we're now past this! The terror group was dissolved.
Probably the law was a good thing? The danger being 'who decides what terrorism is', but I suppose the definition in the law is fairly clear (haven't read it nor plan to).
It's classically liberal to allow anyone to follow their religion, it's not classically liberal to restrict freedom of speech for the sake of religion, much less for the sake of a foreign religion.
While this might be true, it's at least half a lie – SPD, Grüne and SED could have initiated proceedings anytime targeting one of AfD's state chapters in Saarland, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower-Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg, or Berlin (2016-2023). They didn't. You should explain why their reasons to not do it have been valid, while not being valid reasons for non-leftist parties. Also, SPD isn't even trying to convince CDU/CSU right now... they benefit from the Brandmauer, because without AfD, there would be a clear majority for non-left parties and no one would need a coalition with the SPD.
> note that this is merely a request for an examination; the final decision rests with the Federal Constitutional Court.
Again, true, but also half a lie. It's not merely a request in the sense that there's no risk associated with it. The backlash of a failure to ban the AfD would be ginormous - the situation would be much worse than it is right now. That - and the fact that SPD and Green benefit from the Brandmauer - is the reason why even center left parties don't really move forward with a ban.
While this might be true, I'd argue it's more than half a lie:
1. The SED couldn't have initiated anything since it doesn't exist anymore, but you know that.
2. Your wording implies that between 2016-2023 your implied parties only had a chance to initiate in the states you mentioned, but you selected both the states and the timeframe around the proceedings that they did initiate.
3. Your chosen timeframe also conveniently ignores the AfD's escalations over the last 2-3 years. There are a lot of people who were convinced of the need to ban the AfD explicitly because they started calling for removing people's citizenships (both of naturalized citizens and German-born ones) for populist non-reasons, which is overstepping our constitution.
This is blatantly wrong. The SED has never dissolved - all they've done was changing the name.
> 2. Your wording implies that between 2016-2023 your implied parties only had a chance to initiate in the states you mentioned, but you selected both the states and the timeframe around the proceedings that they did initiate.
The years refer to Berlin only, hence the Oxford comma. In Berlin, they can initiate proceedings again once they've formed a coalition.
> 2. (...) but you selected both the states and the timeframe around the proceedings that they did initiate
No, I didn't. I chose the states where these three parties form a government without any other party right now, with the exception of Berlin, for which I gave the timeframe. Also, feel free to point to the proceedings "that they did initiate" before 2016, after 2023, and/or in other states. You won't find any.
> 3. Your chosen timeframe also conveniently ignores the AfD's escalations over the last 2-3 years.
Again, the timeframe refers only to Berlin. All other Länder are governed by a coalition of the mentioned parties right now, so they could initiate proceedings right now.
Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony): https://www.landtag-niedersachsen.de/Drucksachen/Drucksachen...
Bremen: https://www.bremische-buergerschaft.de/dokumente/wp21/land/d...
Hamburg: https://www.buergerschaft-hh.de/parldok/dokument/102051/23_0...
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern: https://www.dokumentation.landtag-mv.de/parldok/dokument/648...
And just for completeness' sake, Berlin 2025: https://pardok.parlament-berlin.de/starweb/adis/citat/VT/19/...
So let me ask you again: why were they willing to create Entschließungsanträge, but why weren't they willing to go to Karlsruhe?
If it progresses like it ALWAYS does (EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.), the center-right party copies the far-right messages in hopes of gaining the votes of the far-right voters, then enters a coalition with them as the "voice of reason to reign them in", to ultimately just achieve normalization of those narratives, a hollowed-out democracy, destroyed political discourse and an empowered far-right party.
But one can hope, that THIS time it will be different...
Now imagine you had only a center-right and a far-right party, and you have the U.S. :/
Ultimately, you can’t ban ideas in a democracy, unfortunately even the idea to abolish it. What you can do it make that process harder and slower, so your opponents lose power before they succeed. Or, you know, convince people to drop the idea altogether.
What you can do though, is destroy the foundation of democracy by being tolerant towards discrimination, for the sake of not "banning ideas"
--> "Why not turn people who are not able to work anymore into a nutricious paste for others? It was just a question! You can't silence me, this is a democracy!!"
You can’t ban ideas, because they will hide behind other ideas, until you ban everything. If the AfD is banned and voters start holding blank pieces of paper and posting *** like in Russia, everyone knows what they mean, but will you start arresting people holding blank pieces of paper and posting *** like in Russia?
But in this case, just listening to them is enough. They're openly calling for violations of our constitution. How much longer do we have to wait before we may take their threats seriously?
However, violence, intimidation and human rights violations during immigration and customs enforcement in order to pump hateful and jingoistic populist support is a rightwing idea. The steelman for it is that it “intimidates” would-be immigrants, but the counterargument is that it’s senseless strongman violence enacted on desperate people[1] running from terrible situations that ironically the US have had a direct hand in manufacturing.
This is quite common to far-right rhetoric:
- You agree that we should [very mild and centrist idea, commonplace across the world]
- Good, now that you agree then you should have no opposition to [human atrocities]
'I don't like who they let in' is an entirely different criticism from 'They let anyone in!'
It's dishonest to pretend that the latter is happening.
The trouble with getting all this is terrible with normal law enforcement is the voters then elect Trumps because they are fed up with it.
Nothing, but you have to be sure when they say "we want to get rid of the illegal immigrants" they don't really mean "we want to make all immigration from shithole countries illegal and get rid of people from those places", because they like to play those word games. This is what happened in the US.
People married to immigrants, who love immigrants, who work with immigrants, and even immigrants themselves heard Trump say "We want to deport criminal immigrants" and voted for that.
Next thing you know they're deporting your wife. Then they start chasing away foreign students, and companies who want to work with and hire foreigners are put on shit lists. Then they start narrowing pathways to legal immigration to create more strain on the system. Then they remove protected status from legal immigrants creating a population overnight who are illegal. Then they start looking at modifying the Constitution to change what makes someone a citizen in the first place, and whether they can retroactively strip people of that right. Then they start looking at naturalized citizens to denaturalize them.
Eventually they start going after political opponents who are immigrants, raiding their homes and threatening to deport them and their families.
These are not hypotheticals, it's where the US went in fewer than 2 years since giving the "just no illegal immigration, what's wrong with that?" crowd free reign to do whatever they want. And we specifically got here by taking the reasonable idea that illegal immigration is undesirable and running with it until the anti-immigration problem is far worse than the illegal immigration problem.
So if you think 200k to house an immigrant is bad, if your country is anything like the US (it is) soon enough you're paying billions upon billions for an unaccountable domestic paramilitary force that deports people to foreign torture prisons and executes citizens in the streets. Then you have a real problem.
I'm a Brit and anti Trump and not too worried about immigration but you've got to have some common sense.
At the end of the day, that administration ended with the most comprehensive immigration reform in decades being tanked by Trump because he wanted to run on immigration being a problem. He told his party to kill the bill, and they did. Nothing common sense about that.
People putting those parties into the same category is a significant part of the problem.
CDU/CSU will try to take the same topics the AfD used to enrage its voter-base and will present itself as the "rational, conservative and experienced" alternative to the "concerns of the voter".
This is the process which will cause CDU/CSU to not publicly condemn the AfD and its narratives, will make the CDU/CSU to "sacrifice" themselves as the coalition partner who will "control" the AfD, secretly hoping to convert their voters into CDU/CSU voters while AfD destroys itself due to its lack of skills to actually deliver in government.
In the end the AfD MAY or MAY NOT actually collapse if they are forced to deliver on their unrealistic promises. But it won't matter, because #1 the party will not die because it will present itself as the victim, and #2 the whole exercise will do such a substantial damage to political discourse and democracy that it will take decades to recover from it.
Again, one can hope that THIS TIME it will be different...
A bunch of AfD members self-reported their anti-constitutional statements to Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, an organization that again and again hilariously exposes AfD and their technological (and not only) illiteracy.
A better way to deal with extremism is to spread the wealth. The Elites just want us fighting amoungst ourselves.
Weird, if the original messages have been published, why do both OP and the EuroNews article linked by the GP say that "Hackers have published 281 GB of AfD emails as AI summaries" and "A website published what it said were summaries of some of the emails but not the original messages"?
I have yet to see any actual data of this leak, even though it's all over the news.
There is little competition for taboo topics in politics, so those who lean into them become a kind of a monopoly for these issues. They don't need to play nice to compete, because they are the sole provider.
In Germany, immigration is the most popular issue and also a taboo. AfD has a complete monopoly on it. They get away with the baggage because for a large share of voters, the alternative just does not exist.
So they frame the anti-immigrant debate as if they are fighting to kick out the Syrian asylum seeker who hasn't worked a day since he arrived in 2015. But in truth, they are basically saying, "we don't want too many foreigners, especially ones that don't look German". This applies to pretty much all the legal immigrants in Germany.
Nations are a race to the bottom in 2026. We find more divisions, on purpose, than things to bring us together.
Politicians and capitalism figured out that division is engaging for the loudest people, which is profitable.
Using nationalism, the flag, etc are very very useful tools for politicians, capitalism and bad actors. Nobody wants to be say they aren't a patriot.
Israel, right now, is claiming to be acting in the best interests of its people. Would Palestinians agree? Race to the bottom logic, we will destroy ourselves before we give up our flags, it seems.
As developed nations destroy the environment, where are the people who had no say in that supposed to go? Who bears that responsibility? It certainly won't be the developed nations, which will act in the best interest of their people and deny entry to the climate refuges their citizens created with the latest plastic garbage that became cool on TikTok.
Do you think that the leadership in Gaza acted in the best interests of its people?
If they had, Gaza would’ve looked very differently today.
The irony. All those parties really have no beliefs or principles, they only desire power and to use it for themselves. One may wonder what got so many people to decide those entities would deserve their vote more than the other establishment.
Why not publish the actual emails? Why do they need to be summarised, perhaps incorrectly?
Quote from the website:
"This is an index. The original messages — full headers, bodies, attachments, byte for byte — are in the torrent, inside standard .mbox files. Download the archive, open those files in any mail client, and you have exactly what the party's servers held.
Nothing on this site replaces that, and nothing on this site should be cited as a primary source."
Propaganda works like this; they know most people won't dig any further than the headline and summaries.
Would it be a good thing or bad thing if this was scaled up so email servers and instance messages services was all public if the message involved a member of a political party, without allowing any back channel or ways to avoid the public record?
The reality is that backchannels have always existed. People used to meet discreetly or through emissaries; or had phone calls from secure lines; etc. There is so much that we will never know, even about times that are well-documented.
To be honest, I am not a big fan of "thoughtcrime" being pursued. Let them be racist if they want to; we should make sure the population is smart enough to reject racism on its own. Maintaining a working democracy requires some violence, sure, but if we over-use it it will stop being a democracy.
These types of shenanigans were even named after him, “Rutte doctrine”.
This would make surveillance laws socially much more acceptable. The politicians will claim:
- "We are surveilled anyway, so we can pass surveillance laws against citizens, too.", or
- "The citizens really ask for surveillance laws against specific groups (in this case: politicians). So, we will, of course, give the citizens what they want and pass surveillance laws against potential terrorists/child abusers/[whatever is currently fashionable]".
If you consider privacy or the right not to be surveilled to be important, this better should hold for the enemy (politicians).
?? The root of the idea is not bi-directional. Politicians have a particular type of job: public service. It’s this “job” that requires the transparency.
And not transparency into their public life. Though, as a public figure if your private life becomes embarrassing, or salacious you’re guaranteed to have news hounds on your trail. Not least because your public service rivals will use whatever they can to discredit you in the court of public opinion.
It’s the same for the work product. All of the material of governance should be the “property” of the people governed.
Can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
This is like: if you engage in anti-social behaviour or plan some crime, you deserve to have hounds (law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies) on your trail because of surveillance data that was gathered about you.
> Can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
This is like the political argument: "If you have nothing to hide, why are you opposed to the new surveillance law?"
And in the latter my statement is true by definition. A tautology.
Really, I don’t know what you were hoping to accomplish with those similes, but they’re simply not equivalent logically.
But I understand you disagree.
It is definitely an interesting discussion to have in where the lines should be drawn in transparency and public insight into political landscape and behavior inside it. In Sweden, every person, regardless of position, has their income as public information. How much a person pay it taxes is also public information, so in some sense you can guess how much assets a person own and how much they have in the bank based on what they declared.
Conservatives are vibe haters. They feel something is wrong and will figure out how to justify their feelings. The email server was just one of many excuses to dislike Hillary. But it was never the "main" one. It was just one that gained a lil traction.
Hillary also caught crap for Benghazi, her husband, her aides, her outfits, etc. It never ends with conservatives because how they feel is as important as reality. They'll find anything to justify their vibes.
They did this in the Netherlands and the result is that politicians started sending voice notes...
You also sometimes need to be able to just discuss stuff, privately. Not all phrases uttered in the context of government do well when interpreted by the general public.
Sure, you can make it the law, but technically there are infinite ways to get around it, including ones that are impossible to get rid off, like using the shared folders on systems that are non-publik for safety reasons.
Popularity isn't a limit here, at least not in this direction. If the party were irrelevant, it would prevent the ban since the party would not be able to achieve those anti-constitutional goals anyway.
Does AfD actually do that, though?
>A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic.
Then it was
>fearmongering, calling the current government a "cartel",
And now you're saying
>abolish core concepts of the democracy or constitutionally guaranteed rights
In other words, it went from "afd wants to get rid of democracy" to "afd's policies breaks the constitution". Of course you guys are different people and are entitled to your own opinions, but it's tiring arguing on a slippery topic that keeps on getting redefined.
If you wish to quote me, then do it accordingly: the AfD is blaming the established democratic processes for the current "cartel" situation. As if that's the only thing to blame, and not that the AfD is not willing to collaborate with other democratic parties or even respect the democratic process.
The other option has been tried 100 years ago and didn't go so well.
> If you want people to vote for other parties then those parties should chagne to serve the people again instead of trying to make the people serve them.
This doesn't work when the party doesn't serve the people in the first place.
It doesnt even help most of their voters.
It's hard to work against pretense, because pretending is lying, and shortcutting reality is hard to compete with, if people start to believe in the lie.
For example: I can promise to gift everyone a unicorn for upvoting this comment (thanks in advance!). Instead of working on a concept of how to make that happen, I can instead just pretend to work on making that happen and mostly work on selling that to you.
It's not necessarily easy, but much easier.
You declared it, so it must be true.
Debatable. One of the core ideas of democracy is to protect minorities. Democracy has been built around the concept that a majority cannot restrict basic rights of minorities. Arguably no one should be allowed to create a system which allows the violation of basic human rights of minorities.
The idea that democracy is synonymous with the current neoliberal order is nonsense.
Is that still a minority? I invite you to introspect more. It's not complicated either.
A voting minority cannot by itself gain power in a democratic election.
A population minority may vote with, against, or mixed versus the eventual majority. It is not the same as active participation in voting.
It's actually quite the opposite, they are running on things like a direct democracy[0], with phrases such as "Wir sind überzeugte Demokraten"[1] (eng: We are confident democrats). And they do that for good reason, as running a party that openly wants to abandon the democratic process would be against the constitution.
[0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_f%C3%BCr_Deutschla...
[1]: https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Programm_AfD_D...
However, it is in our democratic right to fight parties that are anti constitutional. It's in the constitution.
Edit: There is a loophole, though. Article 146 allows the German people to replace the constitution in its entirety.
And that AfD is against the best interest of the people, i guess, you can not be serious. It is a populist party that picks up all the things that people are not happy about and are popular, but ignored. It is actually in the very interest of the people who vote for them. But of course scary for the people, who get voted out. Majority wins.
The laws don't work like that, otherwise we arguably would not have any parties left.
he posted & advertised heavily nationalistic videos on tiktok and gained huge following.
court said the election had been affected by irregularities, alleged foreign interference, and problems with campaign financing and online campaigning.
I.e. people asking at the polling places who was going to pay them the money they'd been promised
[Edit: nope, that was neighboring Moldova in 2024]
It does beg a question of how to run an election as a smaller state when faced with overwhelming propaganda from a much larger one (the US or Russia).
That's never not been true, I suppose, but with large unregulated, privately-controlled social media platforms it feels more pressing.
How does one run a "fair" election if the voters are being irradiated with one-sided messaging sufficient to turn an election? Is the result really the will of the people? And yet, what's the alternative?
Democracy's definition contains no such safeguards, just as pure capitalism doesn't prevent monopolies.
Pretty much everyone agrees that "50.01% of us agreed to slaughter the rest" is not a good decision, but it is technically a democratic one.
Just ask yourself if you would be ok with the majority of the population voting to abolish private property. Or Islamists voting to end votes. Or men voting to remove the voting rights of women.
"Democracy" is not synonymous with "good".
Let's turn to an actual dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/democracy-and-republ...
Why not?
Damn right it isn't, because for most of them it is against their own interests. They vote out of emotion.
In other parts of this thread we have people saying that the AfD must be banned because they are a threat to democracy and that the German constitution has provisions which prevent amending it to weaken the guarantee of democracy...
But how do you then reconcile the idea that people must be prevented from voting for the party they wish? Is that not undermining democracy when you only let them vote when they vote "correctly"?
You don't understand how they may have a historical election or two that led to some kind of event proving that sometimes the people need to be protected from themselves short-term in order to preserve their constitution and democracy long-term?
In Germany we have laws to ban parties that work against our constitution, exactly because of what happened in Weimar. The AfD is classified as confirmed right-wing extremist in five states. Starting a ban process is more than justified. The process is not arbitrary. Only the Bundestag, Bundesrat or government can apply, and the Constitutional Court decides after checking if the conditions are met. Also, just because a majority votes for something doesn’t make it right.
Two important facts:
> Under Article 21, Paragraph 2 of Germany’s Basic Law (Constitution), a party can only be banned if it actively seeks to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or threaten the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany.
> Proving the Whole Party is Extremist: Courts require proof that the entire party—not just individual members or radical factions—is systematically anti-constitutional.
> In the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court has banned only two political parties:
> Socialist Reich Party (SRP) (Sozialistische Reichspartei): A neo-Nazi and far-right party considered a successor to the Nazi Party, banned in 1952.
> Communist Party of Germany (KPD) (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands): A Stalinist party, banned in 1956.
It is hard to understand how countries work. Whether France, US, Germany or China, these are very different animals. It is also tricky to be well informed regarding the struggle for power in politics, since this is not material that is properly explained in every day press publications.
The constitution protects people from voting their rights away forever just because they look for a quick solution. This has happened in the past, and to prevent it from happening again, the constitution has been strengthened to the point of banning anticonstitutional parties.
What the AfD struggles with is that the constitution enforces democracy. And while this is obviously an instance of the tolerance paradox, prohibiting people from removing democracy is the only way to ensure their rights and freedoms, and most importantly their power to control the government (by voting).
Constitutions exist to provide friction to fast-moving populist votes. They prevent the two wolves from eating mutton after the vote. They are not immutable; they are hard to change, and can limit simple-majority votes.
I read into your question, that they should be allowed to do that. The question is, why should they?
Never let your far-right parties grow. It should be banned, it should have been banned years ago.
By the way, defund billionaires. The Epstein class is behind the funding of these extremist dangerous parties.
https://netzpolitik.org/2026/angriffe-auf-yandex-aus-brennen...
https://rohtext.de/news/afd-bots-offline-yandex-angriffen-wa...
https://www.br.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/faktenfuchs-irrefuehr...
Whether it's Australia : Pauline Hanson, an anti-immigration nationalist widely lampooned as a walking faux-pas for the past two decades, now virtually leads the polls with her One Nation party, which has gone from about 5% support (when the current center-left government was elected mid-2025) to over 25%! today. In the space of 17 months.
New Zealand : From the globally-lauded center-left Jacinda Ardern, at home she was soon all-but-bullied out of politics by a significant and very vocal portion of NZ males angry at her shortcomings - she lives in Australia now - and NZ has since been led by a coalition of three increasingly-right-wing businessmen doing their best to "crack down" on the poorer classes to "balance the books".
Brazil : The big swing from Bolsonaro on the right to Lula on the left.
Japan : Increasingly fragmented, moving rightward and nationalist, centrist rule threatened for the first time since 1955.
Argentina : The populist president Milei, whose strategy-of-least-thought - rip off the whole bandage, right now - proudly sacrifices the hopes of a generation-or-three to gain a form of Economic Satisfaction post-haste.
I am increasingly aligned to the position that every billionaire is a policy failure.
Wealth inequality of the degree we have today is not sustainable.
EU and Germany's woes won't go away with banning a party. You can't have a single currency without a joint fiscal policy (aka federal state).
Letting bigots and racists continue to express these views is extremely problematic.
And it also, kind of worked, from then on Hitler preferred the legal way instead of doing it like Mussolini (i.e. a putsch). It's one part taking the fall for the Ludendorff, one part Bavaria already being sympathetic to him.
Hypothetically, should a party running on a platform of ending democracy be allowed to participate in democracy? Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilung...
There are several ex high ranking afd official who left the party because of nepotism, internal authoritarianism, etc.
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/afd-niedersachs...
https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/inside-afd-...
You're leaving this out?
On 26 February 2026, the Administrative Court of Cologne (Verwaltungsgericht Köln) ordered Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), in interim proceedings, to refrain from classifying and treating the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation” pending the conclusion of the main proceedings at first instance.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/afd-einstufung...
Other parties are so indoctrinated and zealous in their beliefs that they fail to see this simple truth and would rather resort to some authoritarian actions than think of changing their ways and try to win the electorate back.
I think any party not encouraging others to commit violence should be allowed to run, if majority of all voters don't want democracy, it should be their right to vote for such party, which wants to end democracy. Democracy is here for the people/voters, not vice versa, it should have no self-preservation mechanisms, if it has it's not really an democracy anymore, if opinion of majority of the people is not respected to preserve it.
> Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
Well, look at the Brexit referendum, it's kinda same thing.
A sitting US member of the house had their house and offices raided just the other day.
He is also very directly going after journalists.
Freedom is speech is very much not guaranteed in the US.
It is. Use a dictionary.
The fault is in equating "democracy" with "fair and stable governance through mostly democratic means". A LOT of people in this thread are making that incorrect gloss of the terms.
AfD leaders want to bring back the German nationalism of the 30s/40s, fullstop.
Can we please stop pretending this isn't the case? It's so tiring.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/23/afd-na...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/11/afd-mps-scruti...
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.thetime...
And about a million others if you search them up. They are the neo-Nazi party. The leaked emails this article is about speak volumes.
> The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945),[1] where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance. Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.
There is nothing wrong with being intolerant to something. But claiming you are still tolerant is wrong.
Oh dear.
Whatever happend to Voltares "I disprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it"?
EDIT: The irony of this post being downvoted in an attempt to hide it, rather than discuss an opinion you disagree with!
EDIT2: Please understand I have no love for AfD, rather a love of open politics (let everybody hear how crazy they are!).
O tempora, o mores. Back in Voltaire's (sic) days, this would have been an issue between debating gentlemen, not one of massive spreading of hate. It's the fault of media and internet, I know, but that's not so easy to stop.
Anything but address the actual issues that helped catapult them to the top.
The goal posts for those issues will always move.
Look at Japan for instance. For decades, its government's stances on immigration were far to the right of anything in Europe, and guess what, that still didn't stop a far-right faction and its sentiments from taking over.
You can always manufacture anxiety over literally anything, see for instance how the US republican party has made a fight over, like, 10 trans athletes a core pillar of their national culture war.
We have to see this through the lens of modern German history, and the corpus of rules (and lessons from history) that allowed the German Federal Republic to become an independent state again. I think this is not about saying things, but about saying things that foreshadow an attack on the constitution, and then perhaps very likely damaging the institutions of a country in the future.
A democratic state is a suboptimal construct. Once the politcal damaged, it is not easily repaired (See: Some countries East of Germany).
And regardless, banning a political party (the process for which is set in Germany's constitution) is not the same as banning its former members from speaking.
Even if the quote was correct, it is about free speech. Being elected and holding political office is beyond that.
There is nothing intrinsic to democracy that means you need to have a constitution. This should be obvious since many democratic states and organizations have no constitution! The UK has no formal constitution, neither does Israel. Canada also has no single constitution document. There are probably lots of non-democracies out there that have constitutions. It's completely orthogonal to whether or not a place is a democracy.
But Germany has a constitution and it allows to ban parties, that act against it. Would you say, that makes Germany not democratic?
The world is angry, we live in the age of the predators. European youth are also disappointed, just as in north America, that higer education is no longer a highway to a better life than our parents. But ruined? No.
I think journalists have to realize that crying wolf always stops working when you need it the most.
It's funny how people avoid this term. The far left party in the German parliament ("Die Linke") would never deny they're far left. (Their name literally translates to "The Left".)
My comment was more about how the US media/english-speaking media describes non-left parties. All the populists on the left side of the spectrum are “left wing”, but their political counterparts are always “far” right.
But sure, let’s continue this whole “he did it, so I’m doing it too”
So, irrelevant to the topic under discussion?
"Look at the conditions X is in" is a common dog whistle for anti-immigrants and racists. It's a flare sent up to say, "Hey, who else thinks all these X are ruining our country?"
Oh well, Querfront doing Querfront things. At least they can agree on hating Jews.
The LLM-generated summaries seem a bit overly dramatic at times, making it hard to judge how serious some of the content actually is. Looking forward for a website with the original emails.
[0] https://www.hexane.cc/detail/?uid=9DF63C5C-F244-4763-BF2A-90...
But I think this kind of moral approach is precisely why right wing parties have been winning globally, in the US and elsewhere. For many voters, the overwhelmingly important thing is individual economic security and personal/familial safety. Full stop.
And so if you force them to choose between a morally off putting party that at least claims to care about their problems, and one that is ostensibly morally less bankrupt, but hand waves away those problems – they’re going to hold their nose and vote for the former. Shame and outrage doesn’t work in a society that is uncertain and scared about its future.
It seems like a handful of candidates are beginning to understand this, in the US at least, but for some reason this level of realpolitik is just beyond many center and center-left parties.
Harris lost to Trump in 2024 for what I see as exactly the same reasons.
"Careless People" talks about it and how it was the inception of Meta's powerplay into politics by becoming indispensable for politicians to use their platforms to reach voters. The only thing they cared about is engagement and avoiding regulations, both are easily achievable if polarisation becomes the norm, the obliteration of proper political discourse into the form it exists now is a consequence of that.
I don't believe those far-right parties would have this much support if public discourse wasn't mostly focused on online platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, etc., they wouldn't have the reach nor the tools for creating information bubbles as existing right now. Those platforms allow for the formation of entire separate realities that are self-reinforcing.
Hence why I started with "fanning the flames". It means the issues are there, they need to be worked on but with social media we are stuck, solving complex issues require compromises, long-term thinking and planning, nothing that is enabled by social media's knee-jerk reactions, ephemeral messaging, etc.
Sadly, some of the parties that are involved (tech bros, Russia, etc.) are not going to do any good when it comes to these issues. They'll only make the housing issues worse (by accumulating even more wealth and invading your country, respectively). But blaming everything on immigrants and elites has always worked extremely well, in-group vs. out-group is something that our brain needed for survival in the past, so it is very easy to trigger.
The saddest part is that those that push the anti-elite narrative (Trump, Musk, etc.) are often the elites themselves.
That doesn’t imply that the candidate must have morally dubious character, just that morally dubious characters are taking advantage of it.
> 1. a political philosophy or movement that represents or is claimed to represent the interests of ordinary people especially against the Establishment
> 2. general concern for ordinary people
In US politics, both Bernie Sanders and Trump were put in the same bucket and derided as populists by the media, even though their policies could not be more different.
One thing I would add is that we have the most concentrated control of media/influence since pre-Gutenberg times. This is a huge issue, as a very small number of people have control of our politics and emotions, and use that to further their own increasingly weirdo interests.
and then proceeds with extreme opinions on that parties.
Far-right parties have increased their presence thanks to inequality created by conservative parties and well funded campaigns by billionaries.
Let's not pretend that this is the will of the people when so much money is put into moving the blame of the current state of the economy from billionaires and monopolies towards working class people of foreign origin. (Like if it was working class people the ones hoarding money and power)
A lot of 'extreme views' being bandied around are not really any different to what was spoken about in the 90s, tbh. Even Tony Blair was making comments on topics like immigration which would make today's audience blush.
We've had decades of centrist governments all throughout Europe. Do they not shoulder any blame for the rise of the far-right? Or is it only the "billionaires" who have agency?
I agree somewhat. However, the fault of mainstream politics is one of failure. The fault of extraterritorial actors is one of action.
I think that mainstream governments in the rounds haven't done enough for hoi polloi in the past few decades, but also that perceptions of what they could have fine may often be unrealistic. There are many prophets - some shallow thinkers might say "just read [ Das Kapital | Friedman ] and do that", but i don't agree that ideology delivers the benefits it promises.
It was a tall order to expect the past few decades of governing parties to satisfy the people enough that they don't turn to AfD shit.
Mainstream politicians' capital comes from votes, an expensive and limited resource. Extraterritorial actors do not have this constraint.
Where i end up is: yes, we should blame tired neoliberal parties for failing the people and driving then to charlatans. But that blame should be tempered by an understanding that government is a game that never leaves everybody satisfied. But extraterritorial actors? They are somewhere between philosophically vacant and hostile, and they are fucking with us just because they can. The blame is categorically greater.
Fast one - the one that used journalism (so called 4th branch of government) that enjoyed public trust and more or less was factual which in turn kept public opinion more or less in one shared and factual reality. This in turn put pressure on actual government in between elections.
And there is second one - slower - public could change government in elections based on the lived experience of last N years.
The monopolies broke 1st loop completely. And the 2nd was hindered. Now ppl cannot choose directionally in slow loop (elections) what is good for their self interest bcs they do not have factual picture of reality. So they can choose based on vibes which in turn is as good as "random move away form current status quo".
IMHO still way better then autocracy.
Case in point - ppl voted for Trump among other things bcs of gasoline prices. How it turned out...
And why right wing - bcs said monopolies put thumb on the scale - as their are capital after all. And they do have more self awareness what is best for their interest. If democracy survives next will move will be ditching current right wing for whatever else and then even monopolies thumb on scale probably will not help current regimes.
This argument has been repeated for decades, but I just don't see it.
I'd seriously wager maybe 20% of the US population even understands the basics of how their state government functions. Less than 10% probably understand their local government or could name more than 1 local politician.
This isn't hyperbole. A shocking number of Americans are PROUD to not be engaged in politics in any way. Especially for young folks, politics and understanding the government are just not cool.
Correct, everyone is paying more except the top 1% under Trump.
It explicitly cares about people who identify as traditional Germans, who in their own eyes are "the normal people".
On the economic side, Gemini tells me that they favour deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy for small and medium-sized enterprises (Mittelstand). They also want to increase family support payments to incentivise having children. These are all economic policies that make sense to conservative-minded "normal people".
They're fiscally conservative values, as you likely already know. Social and fiscal conservatism are correlated, as you likely also already know.
In order for you to make this statement, you had to take a word ("conservative") that can be interpreted in one of two well-known ways ("social conservative", "fiscal conservative"), and pretend that when I used that word, I must have meant the way that doesn't make sense, instead of the way that obviously does.
No, right wing parties have been winning globally because they are vastly more resourced both financially and media-space-ly than the opposition. If you can constantly flood the zone with bullshit, it becomes impossible for the opposition to correct the disinformation before the next flood arrives.
Apparently, everyone forgot already.
Their views, are the views of 1/5 people you'll meet in Germany, on average. If we mirrored this logic, the SPD should be "far-left", Grüne should be "far-left pro" and Links should be "ultra far-left pro max".
This use of language waters out the meaning. Just like calling everyone commies and nazis... also I think it'll have the opposite effect you hope.
A popularity in election results doesn't define a parties position on the political spectrum. A lot of people are voting for change to occur, but that doesn't mean that that change already happened just by counting the votes.
What? Slavery wasn't tolerated. It was celebrated(still is) in a large amount of the country. It was considered a right by many white people in the US. Something they were entitled to(entitlement is a big theme with American conservatives) and still are.
Let's not forget, or maybe let's try to learn, that racism was the united states original social/cultural export. Back in the day Americans were seen as the most racist people on the planet and they were proud of it. Americans minstrel shows were big business and a very early one in the countries history.
Let's not forget that well after slavery was outlawed, Americans were still firebombing black/indigenous neighborhoods, towns, and lynching people. Americans still kill native Americans to this day, lookup native American women going missing.
Let's not forget that Kanye, just a few years ago, said that slaves had it good and should have been thankful. While that was absolutely the ramblings of a mentally unwell person, he was simply restating what is prevalent in many circles in America today. Kanye was just repeating what was said around him and is repeated in "private" across much of the country.
Lol wtf ya think ICE actually is? It's just a government force meant to remove the blacks/browns/foreigners who take all the good jerbs from the hard working whites.
If you literally just meant to say that the Nazi label shouldn't be applied indiscriminately, without commenting on whether you think it should be applied to AfD, then of course I can't argue against that statement.
The experiment has failed so we're moving back to things that are known to work. No need to blame Russia.
the summary is: "AfD member Matthias Funk writes and forwards racist dehumanizing incitement: Neger, Muselmanen, Hinterwäldler, dreckige Monster Merkel, Pest, calls patriots to rise against Verbrecher."
I'm not sure about the actual email, but am certain that there are a lot of "left coded" agents that would find any discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants "dehumanizing". Also considering the WWE style of modern politics calling one of the leaders of your opposition "dreckige Monster Merkel" is not something strange.
You think the term "muselmanen" could reasonably be used in a civilized "discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants"? You do know "muselmanen" has a very specific link to WWII concentration camps, right?
So, er, I think your argument comes down to "sure, they're bigots, but most of the people I know are bigots too so stop complaining". I don't find this a very convincing argument.
(And "the filthy foreigners are coming for our women" is, like, the oldest accusation in the book. Don't forget to add that they also kill children to use their blood in their blasphemous religious rituals.)
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/new-years-eve-in-cologne-5-years-after... [2] https://pardok.parlament-berlin.de/starweb/adis/citat/VT/19/...
So, 61.5% of all suspected rapists/sexual assaulters were German.
And you reply with sensationalism.
You fell for it. Congrats. You played yourself.
When we engage with such tactics we harm ourselves and the people around us. We become stooges for politicians. We repeat their nonsense. Cmon.
no thanks
They're right-wing extremists. We know that for a fact and have known that without commiting cybercrimes. So what is there to learn?
Maybe embezzlement or similar, but.
We have to keep in mind that they have in fact become the victim of a crime, which they (best case) will spin to their advantage.
Worst case they will use it as a justification to commit such and other crimes themselves.
Just claim that the anonymous entity wasn't anonymous. Claim it was your enemy. "Look, the Antifa hacked us. We need to ban them just like the US did"
Or blow it up bigger. "Look, the system itself is corrupt and 'the left/the altparteien/whoever' stopped using democratic measures to compete against us. That is because they cannot win on their own merit. Meaning that the system and its safeguards are meaningless."
Something like that. Given more time, one could flesh out this back-of-the-napkin thing into a likely working strategy.
___
Fascism fundamentally isn't data-driven but narrative-driven. So data alone is not going to work against it (though it is a valuable pillar).
If you look at the numbers of votes they're getting, you see a group of people that is so large, it will be self-sustaining, instead of fizzling out. Or so is my prediction.
Idk. I just don't see this ending up in the way we want things to end up. It's not going to affect me personally all that much, because I can be "passing" so to speak, but that's not exactly what one should strive for tbh. Keeping your head down and not caring as long as you're fine, I mean.
And I agree, now that we've waited so long (gee, I wonder if the far-right Verfassungsschutz leader had anything to do with that?), banning them will be ugly and lead to civil unrest. I think realistically, we will need some major state repression of these Neonazis and good luck with that given the political leanings of police.
But I don't think there's a way around that at this point, we still have to try.
"Wehret den Anfängen" and "Never Again" and all that.
"You gotta do something" is correct, but not every something is suited.
But I think at this point we're entering the circular stage, so. Idk. I don't want to live in this world we see developing, but what I want seems to be not all that relevant to said world.
Sometimes you gotta, if you want to keep a free society free
There's no awards to be won for coddling fascists. The protections of a free society cannot be extended by those trying to extinguish it.
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935
It is for their benefit I have translated a few quotes from leading AfD members so they can paint their own picture what those "ideas I don't like" are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536747
This however speaks nothing of anti-Zionism.
They hate Jews
They really hate muslims
It's hilarious watching old European neonazis allying themselves with Israel today.
The confusion is palpable.
If there were 0 muslims in Germany today, their politics would be 100% about Jews controlling the world and all that stuff.
"Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine."
The leader of that party was Menachem Begin, later prime minister of Israel and founder of Likud, Netanyahu's party.
Frankly, I think their supposed "antisemitism" is a joke compared to their anti-Arab and anti-muslim attitude. Those are their real enemies now.
Many French would have you believe women wearing Hijab should be banned lest it destroy their "western culture" when even the most Islamophobic Americans don't care
A 5% Muslim population in UK is supposedly threatening to send them back to the dark ages when Singapore is at 15% with codified multicultural guarantees and somehow annihilates them in every measure of modernity and development
That of course has nothing to do with the fact that extreme-right parties look at Israel, with its ethnic suprematism, as an example. The only connection I see is backwards: Israel is undoubtedly doing its best to fuel racism against muslims because it wants us to believe we have a common enemy.
> The AfD party is currently polling at 29% nationally – even while they fight a designation by the Verfassungsschutz as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party in court.
The system is working
I guess the upside is that in countries with a multi-party system (happens more frequently without first-past-the-post), they virtually always have to form a coalition, which typically ends up in infighting within a party or between parties. E.g. in The Netherlands you typically need four parties nowadays to form a coalition.
I leave it to the reader to decide if I'm talking about now or the 1930s.
A vast archive of hacked emails from the AfD was published online on Monday: 281 GB containing 421,179 internal party emails. And, for anyone who might have grown confused about claims of antisemitism while it was plastered over the German news media in the weeks following the Berlin election: here you can see what it really looks like.
In email after email, party supporters use racist slurs and share antisemitic theories of Jewish world domination; there are jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots, discussions of whether refugees should be shot at the border, a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”.
The entire archive is available online – though it may be a criminal offence in Germany to torrent the material or distribute it online. Yet the journalists who’ve been able to examine parts of the hack consider it authentic. The methodology behind the leak is also quite interesting: the vast archive has not been published directly on the site. Instead, it is available via a series of AI summaries, which have been filtered according to severity (CRITICAL, HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW) and type, with categories including “racism_xenophobia”, “corruption_money”, “leadership_feud”, “conspiracy”, “violence_threats” and “antisemitism_extremism”.
The party itself has confirmed the hack to Bild: “In September 2026, a hacker attack targeted one of our party’s hosting service providers, during which portions of a few email accounts – most of which had not been used for years – were apparently illicitly copied.”
Many of the summaries are the party’s own internal disciplinary proceedings, with emails sent to party boards to decide whether to open expulsion proceedings against members. Here, what is shocking (though perhaps not surprising) is the depth and breadth of racist feeling from party members: slurs, fantasies of violence, and antisemitic statements appear commonplace. One email from 2016 appears to show Weidel forwarding a member’s antisemitic material to the federal board as the party weighed his expulsion, while including a warning to her colleagues that the Verfassungsschutz – Germany’s domestic intelligence service – might be reading.
There are some cases which do not appear to have drawn the ire of the party, including one Bavarian official urging party leaders to chant “Merkel croak” every day, or another thread in which staff at the party’s federal office apparently discuss luring a photographer to a party event and removing him by force.
The anonymous hackers claimed their motive behind the leak was to show the “degeneracy and hypocrisy” of the AfD. Among the countless acts of hate speech, there are also allegations of embezzlement and financial misconduct, according to DDoSecrets, a transparency collective which republished the archive: the site’s software flagged 34 documents for misuse of funds, 23 for off-the-books payments, 14 for undisclosed donations and seven for embezzlement.
The AfD party is currently polling at 29% nationally – even while they fight a designation by the Verfassungsschutz as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party in court. That designation has already been made by state intelligence offices for some state branches, such as Sachsen-Anhalt — though it did not seem to hurt their electoral success. The party achieved 43.8% of the vote there in September.
Politics <--------- Left ------ Center ------ Right ---------->
| | Neoliberalism |
Economics | Anti-capitalism | Capitalism |
US | DSA Democrats Republicans |
Germany | SPD CDU/CSU AfD |
UK | Greens Labor Tories Reform |
France | LFI Renaissance RN |
1. The far-right parties are linked and coordinated and generally funded by very wealthy people;
2. The rise of far right parties is a direct result of declining material conditions;
3. Far right parties get to blame immigration and trans people because, in general, there is no counterbalance to that narrative blaming the actual cause: capitalism and ever-increasing income and wealth inequality;
4. The "moderate" (which really means centrist or center-right parties) will predictably and routinely ally with far-right parties to crush any leftist momentum. As an aside, the term "moderate" is intentionally conflated by pollsters, politicians and the media and really means nothing;
5. The topic of economics is typically avoided in most Western countries because the economics are indefensible. Instead you have manufactured wedge issues to divide people such as immigraiton, gay rights and the existence of a handful of trans people. This suits both major parties in most countries because they're both neoliberal, which is to say that they are uniparty on defending capitalism;
6. People will defend capitalism and attack socialism without knowing what either of those things are. Ask someone what capitalism is and you'll usually get a hand-wavy claim about "free markets" or even just "markets", which isn't true at all. No markets are free and markets exist in every economic system. Some of our earliest writings from 4000+ years ago are about market transactions.
So when you see things like protests in France, the rise of Reform in the UK and the rise of AfD (as well as others such as in Italy) know that it's all related and has the same root cause.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis. We saw how that worked out in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. In the US, FDR was forced to make concessions to the working class to stave off the perceived threat of communism. In Germany we got Hitler. And after WW2, the US went on an imperialism frenzy, imperialism being the highest form of capitalism.
All of this is only going to get worse until we address the core issue, which is capitalism.
Ahh, old good mild conservatism.