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
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”.
If you say that banning a party because it plans to destroy democracy itself destroys democracy then you are talking of democracy as am absolute. So after banning the party democracy vanishes and we live in a not democratic state anymore. That’s not the case though. It would still be a democracy. Banning a party is a dilemma, either you let the people have their say which is more democratic and then after you have let them then you don’t have a democracy anymore or you don’t and then you have less of a democracy in the sense that one position of planning to completely destroy democracy is not allowed but it still is a democracy on all the other issues at least.
As for whether the party will use loopholes to destroy democracy: that’s a complex issue and difficult to determine. We may not agree on that. That’s why we leave it to a court to settle.