“Our democracy” in Germany
In Germany, there are efforts to ban the AfD (or at least its more extreme elements) as it becomes even more popular with the volk:
With Alternative for Germany (AfD) surging in polls ahead of next month’s regional elections, establishment parties are calling for a ban on the right-wing party. “High-ranking German politicians have advocated for proceedings to ban the most radical regional branches of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party,” German public broadcaster DW News reported Sunday.
For years, the German left has called for a ban on the AfD, but these demands are now reaching a fever pitch as Berlin’s political class dreads a looming right-wing victory.
Over a year ago I wrote this post on efforts to weaken the AfD’s legislative power by denying the party the committee leadership to which it was entitled by its victories in elections. In that post, I quoted the following rationale that’s been given:
The rationale given for this anti-democratic coup is a recent designation of the AfD as a right-wing extremist party. On May 2, 2025, four days before parliamentary power was to change hands, outgoing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser from the Social Democratic Party announced that Germany’s domestic spy agency (the BfV) had slapped that label on the AfD, based on a 1,000-page secret dossier. According to press leaks, the dossier appeared to consist of public statements by AfD leaders, many already chewed over endlessly by the party’s opponents, relating to Germany’s mass migration problem.
AfD representatives have asserted, for example, that Germans have a cultural history tied to their ethnic and national identity; that this history and identity deserve protection; and that unchecked illegal migration threatens national cohesion.
The dossier also contained statements “implying,” as a scandalized Reuters put it, that “immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals.” Actually, those AfD statements didn’t “imply” that immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals; they asserted that fact outright, because that is what government crime statistics overwhelmingly show.
Germany’s past causes it to be understandably wary of parties that speak of the special German identity and the need to preserve it. But what is the AfD actually advocating? From what I’ve read, it sounds somewhat similar to MAGA regarding immigration – but of course, the favorite tactic of MAGA’s leftist opponents here is to call MAGA “Nazis.”
In Germany, those who want to ban this wing of the AfD refer to it this way:
… that the party’s more radical, ethnically based wing rejects the constitutional principle. In their view, this wing should be subject to legal scrutiny.
They refer to this faction of the AfD as “völkisch” — a German adjective derived from das Volk, meaning “the people.” The völkisch movement was an ethno-nationalist movement and precursor to Nazism. Today, the AfD is often accused of holding völkisch views because its officials repeatedly distinguish between Germans with and without a history of migration.
Banning a very popular opposition party is highly unlikely to cause its members to just quietly take it.
If you can’t vote your way out you have to shoot your way out.
Here in the United States, the Democrat party needs to be banned. Over the history of our country, they started a Civil War, engaged in wholesale deprivation of rights of black citizens through Jim Crow laws, and are now actively campaigning to overthrow our system of government.
The partner of AfD co-chair Alice Weidel is a woman from Sri Lanka. And the AfD is more pro-Israel than the “mainstream” German parties.
So there’s your “Nazis” in Germany 2026 – multicultural lesbian Zionists.
You have elite incompetence, elite mendacity, and the use of state institutions to suppress dissent. The media refers to AfD as ‘far right’ because they won’t go along with those things.
German Pols should know better than to call the Nazis “Right Wing”.
The Democrat Party is caught between the proverbial, “Rock and a Hard Place”.
They’ve created this monster and have no way out. Sure they can disavow and kick every DSA supporter out of the party. Yet they can’t stop the indoctrination of the young and their radical ‘children’ have grown to see them as an obstacle. So, it’s bend the knee to those children or be swept into extinction.
Yet every member of Congress has to swear an oath to defend the US Constitution but given the DSA’s expressed desire to eviscerate that Constitution… by what metric can their oath be seen as legitimate?
Western Europe is a perfect example of having to shoot your way out.
My wife is German and every year we visit her parents in Munich. The German media is much more biased than in the US and it’s hard to get any objective coverage of the AfD.
The CDU, which is the main “conservative” party in Germany wants nothing to do with the AfD and would rather make a coalition with the SPD, which normally would be the opposition party. It’s a mess and Chancellor Merz is almost uniformly looked upon as a joke.
Meanwhile, basic services in the country are declining. Trains and buses no longer run on time and sometimes there are cancellations without warning. On my last trip a few weeks ago, I was on a bus and a child got off the bus without his mother. The mother alerted the driver but he didn’t speak German and refused to stop the bus to let the mother off until the next stop. Incidents like this are no longer unusual.
I still enjoy our trips to Munich. It’s a beautiful city with lots of things to see and do. But the decline is obvious and seems to be accelerating.
@Geoffrey Britain: Western Europe is a perfect example of having to shoot your way out.
See. This is why I don’t worry so much about civil war in the US. It will come to Europe first.
The anti-AfD morons are much like our anti-Trump morons. Invent a symbol, select it, and all’s fair in attempts to abolish it.
What is the status of the right to bear arms in modern day Germany?
We know the UK used to promote that strongly but then let it lapse [around 1833 or later maybe?].
Shooting your way out still requires being armed or having access to armament.
Sort of related to the post on utopia vs. distopia? One never needs guns and the other is made more miserable because there are no guns to reverse course.
Gregory Harper,
I married a German as well and I’m probably older. I could see Germany declining 45 years ago when I had discussions in Munich with students there. They were almost all Hard Left and sympathetic with the USSR. They did not like America much. They were also frightfully ignorant but quite sure of their positions.
Germany elected former Communist Youth League member, Angela Merkel. They called her Mutti Merkel – Mother Merkel, but she was childless. She started the immigration nonsense because she detests nationalism of any type especially German nationalism.
She succeeded in destroying Germany and now Germany is in rapid decline with 7 million Muslims who contribute virtually nothing but crime and grift. Her party along with the Left destroyed the electrical generation system with endless windmills and solar panels as well as dismantling their nuclear plants. You don’t put these “renewables” in a cold, windless countries, but the Germans did. The Germans, bless their flexible langauge came up with the word Dunkelflaute – meaning dark calm, to describe 100% cloudy, sunless days with simultaneous zero wind. Germany gets a lot of those and their climatologists knew that. What a series of stupid moves that are now hurting their export led Industrial base with high electricity costs.
Germany is doing everything wrong extremely well.
John Galt III, @11:28 pm.
Such an important, fact-ful reply
May I quote parts of it in other forums?
Gregory Harper, 7:36 pm:
“… The mother alerted the driver but he didn’t speak German and refused to stop the bus to let the mother off until the next stop. Incidents like this are no longer unusual.”
That’s appalling! And so distressing.
More people in America need to know about these European immigration consequences.
I so wish America had a mandate that made English the official language!!
Meaning that politicians plus civil servants plus public service employees must be fluent in English!
It’s really very simple. All over the West, a transnational political/social/economic Establishment is under siege from various groups and movements all lumped together under the ‘populist’ label, though in fact they are very heterogeneous (and some of them in fact detest each other). They all, however, are against the Establishment in one way or another.
That power establishment is fighting for its own survival and power and status. It’s all excuses and pretexts. There are attempts to ban AfD in Germany for the precise same reason that they weaponized the legal system against Trump before 2024. It’s the same reason they tried to debank Farage in Britain. It’s why they’re waging lawfare against Marine le Pen in France. It’s happening all over the West.
The details vary, the pretexts vary, the various ‘populist’ groups are sometimes themselves very sketchy and some of them are implacably opposed to each other as well. But it’s still the same overall struggle everywhere.
R2L wrote “What is the status of the right to bear arms in modern day Germany?”
I have read in an online forum that civilian gun ownership is tightly restricted, e.g. Concealed Carry is generally verboten.
Marlene,
Of course you can quote me.
As far as Merkel is concerned – my favorite is this short video:
https://en.yenisafak.com/turkiye/funny-video-of-merkel-chucking-german-flag-to-the-side-resurfaces-3647038
Selfly and RL2,
I had friends take the Jagdkurs to obtain a Jagdschein.
6 months of training to get your hunting license and that allows a German to have a rifle. To have a handgun there are more persmissions required and the same sometimes for ammo. Very convoluted.
The disarming of Germans did not happen under Hitler but in the Weimar period preceding.
I live in Montana so I go here:
https://machinegunsmontana.com/
I lived and worked in Munich in the 1980s. It was spotless. Public transportation was clean, safe, and reliable. No graffiti anywhere. No slums. Small parks and green spaces throughout the city (I lived in Cosimapark, next to a garden allotment area with a beer garden). Everything worked.
I had a couple of British and American colleagues who were applying for German residency/citizenship. They had to demonstrate near-native fluency in German, both spoken and written.
I was last in Munich in 1998, when I took a fast train down from Göttingen for the day. It was mostly unchanged but there were some signs of strain from reunification. The streets were less clean and I noticed graffiti on the walls at the Ostbahnhof–something that wouldn’t have been tolerated ten years before.
A friend’s daughter visited Bavaria last month. The airport staff she encountered on arrival couldn’t speak German apart from repeating “Geradeaus”–“straight ahead”. Fortunately, she was taken in tow by a Lufthansa pilot and guided through passport and customs control.
I’d like to see Munich again but now I’m wondering whether it would be best to remember it as it was.
Merkel was a disaster. God knows why Germans voted for her. Or what they thought they were getting.
Banning the Afd would hand them the country.
Visited Munich 1 day in 1980 while in USAF, won’t be going again if I wanted to.
Doesn’t surprise me the Socialists would try to ban/ stop opponents because that’s what they do. Wait until they get enough power here and you will see.
One of the surveys done in Germany in the last year concluded that 40% of the respondents wanted the AfD banned. Recent surveys put the level of support of the four consequential leftoid parties at 40% in sum.
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The most recent call for banning AfD came from the Defense minister, one Boris Pistorious.