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.