Germany is debating whether to ban AfD as the party surges to 21% in the polls
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
Well, the EU, and Germany, have been threatening and punishing any member state that voted the "wrong way". Take Italy for instance, the head of the EU comission, publicly announced that the EU has ample ways of punishing Italy should the new prime minister "misbehave" - essentially meddling in the country's internal affairs and attempting to influence elections, in favour of alined politicians.
What you are witnessing in Germany is just regular EU affairs, as Germany is the main country of origin for such practices.
I don't like AfD but bannig them won't help much and such policies are damaging the continent. It will blow up at some point as the pressure is pretty high in all member states.
Works as designed, then.
What's the point of having a system of shared values if one member goes "Hey, let's, umm, kill all the left-handed people!" and your system can't defend itself against such actors?
What if those actors were paid by an entity determined to destroy your system by testing the extreme edge cases of your shared values?
Let's say Russia decides to troll your system by paying for staged Koran burnings in Sweden [1]. Now, a debate ensues about the tradeoff between freedom of speech/expression, and the value of not hurting people's religious feelings.
If your system gets weaker by such attacks, you need to strengthen the system by excluding or restricting malicious actors.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/27/burning-of-qur...
Corrected to better reflect AfD's position. To address your point, the goal should be to serve the people, not the system. A system that persists against its subjects wishes is, by definition, tyranny.
The trick is that they set up a decoy problem that needs fixed, that only they know how to fix (without providing a fix, of course).
"Chemtrail poisonings need to stop" would be a popular AfD demand [1].
The trick here is to use a popular conspiracy theory, so demanding stopping of chemtrail poisonings looks like serving the poeple from the outside, right?
Now, the AfD would never say "stop immigration". They say "stop uncontrolled excess immigration", so it seems like there'd be some "normal" amount of immigration, and the stupid government doesn't see that we're currently surpassing it, and that this is a huge problem that needs fixing.
They want to have a say who's a "valid" asylum seeker, and who's just entering with malicious intent. And this is where shared values are being overstepped.
Populists will tell you that they know how to weed out rapists, by looking at their nose, or skin colour, or if they have mobile phones on them when entering the country.
The problem arises when a critical mass starts believing that yes, indeed, 5G needs to be banned from our vaccines, and the people will be served!
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/afd-in-sachsen-st...
> AfD never, ever, wanted to stop immigration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany#Immigr... says otherwise - they want to reduce it to "small numbers of skilled immigrants". Granted that's not the same as zero immigration, but that's splitting hairs.
And how do we strenghten the system?
By supressing people that demand change? Isn't it obvious by now that poverty and daily struggles are pushing folks towards extremes EU wide? Surely the EU and member states should listen to people's problems.
Supressing legitimate cries of help will only lead to more frustration.
Every year europeans are poorer, more taxed, more regulated, their quality of life dropping, european capitals are unsafe, innovation lags, and so on, and the only parties that at least aknowledge their grievances are these extremes that we want to ban.
We ban them, then what? Do we offer a viable alternative, one that goes beyond lecturing? No, we want to ban them without actually listening to folks.
I don't Russia is capable of more than letting us dig our own grave.
Also what did Germany do to restrict "malicious actors" prior to the war?
It imposed its will on member states that knew _exactly_ what Russia is planning.
> Let's say Russia decides to troll your system by paying for staged Koran burnings in Sweden [1].
Have you actually looked into the underlying issues that cause what's happening in Sweden? Have you spoken to immigrants and how they are treated in that country, and have you been to the ghettos where they have to live? If you did you'd have a better understanding why Russia finds it so easy to stir trouble in there. The all welcoming, all loving, country of Sweden has some deep deep issues it needs to solve before it passes blame on Russia.
But this is just another example of how we try to solve the sympton instead of the cause.
According to the founder of the migrant sea rescue NGO Mission Lifeline [1], by importing more immigrants and giving them voting rights, to overwhelm the native population's vote:
If there had been enough immigration from abroad (e.g., by abolishing the visa requirement for Afghans and other persecuted people), and if these people had been given the right to vote immediately, (the German district of) Sonneberg would not be an issue today. Therefore: Open the borders! - https://twitter.com/Axel_Steier/status/1673019802523254785
That Chang Frick has ties to the Kremlin is ludicrous.
It's similar to the paradox of tolerance.
When you want to live by some rules, you have to defend these rules. Otherwise, malicious actors will use up all available resources, game the system by every available loophole, and then rewrite the rules of law.
As the article explains, implementing such a ban would put the existing German political establishment in a group comprised of many unsavory folks:
> Germany has a troubled history of parties being banned, with Otto von Bismarck, the country’s first chancellor, banning the Social Democrats for disloyalty to the Kaiser.
> When the Nazis came to power, they banned all other parties.
> The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) also banned other parties not affiliated with the ruling Socialist Unity Party.
Maybe actually try and address the concerns AfD supporters have, instead of simply trying to ban the party. The 20% of AfD supporters are still going to vote and will probably become even more radicalized as this ban would substantiate the claims that Germany does not want to fairly address their concerns.
I suppose you're German and you're familiar with the failed attempt of Friedrich Merz trying exactly that with his CDU?
The trick populists use is that you make something seem to be something everybody would want, of course, and demand for it to be implemented, without having actual solutions.
How do you address a party demanding that the government should stop poisoning citizens with chemtrails? [1]
Would you agree that Germany needs to restrict "uncontrolled immigration"? I would. Who wouldn't?!
But wait. What's "uncontrolled"? Who gets to decide on the definition? If we had a definition, do we actually have uncontrolled immigration, and if we do have it, what exactly is the problem with it, and why would we want to solve it?
But see, they're not in the problem-solving business. They don't care. They're in the "stir up fear and promise we have a solution" business, which is a very successful business model.
If 20% of your population believe that there's 5G in your vaccine and the government wants to kill half of your friends, you need to fix other things, like lack of education.
A ban on a malicious actor trying to game the system might be a temporary hack to win time.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/afd-in-sachsen-st...
Just so we're on the same page, could you give me a definition of what a fake refugee is, how many fake ones Germany currently has, a statistic of the development of fake refugees vs. genuine refugees over the last 5 years, and the mechanism by which the fake ones (not the real ones, of course) cause harm to Germany that needs fixing?
If you could provide that, and truly no main party in Germany is currently engage on that data, I'm voting AfD next time.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/afd-in-sachsen-st...
The more common term is "fraudulent asylum seeker". It's defined as anyone that fabricates something about their background in order to qualify for refugee status. This could be any number of things, but the most common are:
* lying about persecution. For instance saying the government wants to kill you, when in reality there is no such threat.
* lying about country of origin. Like saying one is fleeing Syria when in reality they are economic migrants from peaceful countries. https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/07/the-men-who-pretend-to-...
* lying about age. Some countries have more permissive rules for minors, so adults lie and say they are children. Poland studied this, and found about 40% had lied about their age: https://www.polsatnews.pl/wiadomosc/2019-09-18/niemieccy-eks...
The fact that some governments aren't bothering to try and detect asylum fraud means there's no available data. But that doesn't mean it's not happening. It's like a company that has no sexual harassment reporting mechanism claiming no harassment happens because it has never had any reports of harassment.
So let's see:
> Poland studied this, and found about 40% had lied about their age in the refugee wave 2007-2018.
You might not be able to read Polish, so I'll help you understand this article.
It refers to a German investigation (your link is just a Polish news outlet citing the German investigation) done by the University Hospital of Münster.
They found that 234 cases [1] (that's the 40%) in 12 years, of all cases that were reevaluated had lied about their age in order to get better chances at asylum approval. However, they only included cases for re-evaluation that were already looking suspicious.
It's not "40% of migrants lie about their age". The "study" was not published or at least isn't online.
So let's see what happened.
The Merkel administration had to deal with a surge of asylum seekers.
Some of them claimed false ages to get a better chance in the approval process.
Some courts and Jugendämter in Germany noticed that. People at UKM in Münster re-analysed some suspicious looking cases, and talked about methods for improvement of age determination.
Wouldn't you agree that the system worked? A problem was diagnosed, and measures were introduced to solve the problem.
Now, the AfD's trick is to not tell their voters what's happened since then: The numbers for people seeking asylum went downhill after 2016, so the problem didn't exist anymore, at all [2].
What we're dealing with now are mostly war refugees from Ukraine.
Now, AfD's trick is now to convince people that the amount of fake refugees in itself is problematic, without giving specific numbers, and without telling how it's problematic, and why. They make it seem as if it's a real problem that exists, and as if it's being ignored (it's not, as we see by the scientists trying to solve it)
[1] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2019-09/studie-minderjaehri...
[2] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/76095/umfrage...
Like I said, evidence is limited because governments aren't bothering to study the validity of asylum claims. You vaguely allude to action:"some courts" tried to look for fraud, and ministers "talked about methods for improvement". Of course people are dissatisfied with this response. Scrutiny shouldn't be limited to just some courts, and better verification shouldn't merely be talked about it should actually be done.
> Now, AfD's trick is now to convince people that the amount of fake refugees in itself is problematic, without giving specific numbers
Of course, there's no way to give a specific number unless there's more rigorous attempts at fraud detection. Again, this is like a company has no mechanism to report harassment, and the points to the absence of harassment reports to insist there's no harassment. This is a trick, too: claim a phenomenon does not exist, when there's been little effort to study it.
So what are we talking about here?
What's your evidence that aspartame doesn't cause cancer? What's your evidence that God doesn't exist? What's your evidence that X doesn't cause Y?
See, the problem isn't that there are asylum seekers who abuse the system.
Nobody disagrees with you.
It's the extraordinary claim that it's a current and massive phenomenon (A) that is causeing big trouble (B) and that it's not being worked on (C), and that AfD has a solution for it (D) that no other party has (E).
Remember, extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Here, we have claims A, B, C, D, and E that each need extraordinary evidence.
We have zero data, and the problem is long gone. Should we spend resources, time and money into investigating a phantom problem that probably doesn't exist?
20% say yes.
I think it's phenomenal that a party can divert attention from actual, real problems into decoy problems and blow them out of proportion to gain power.
That's the actual danger to democracy we're talking about.
An extensive body of people taking aspartame compared with oncology patients and a mountain of evidence finding no correlation between the two. Not merely an absence of evidence.
> We have zero data, and the problem is long gone.
Then stop saying fraud is rare. If you have zero data it's entirely dishonest to make any claims about the rates of fraud. And the problem is gone? Did Germany expell the asylum seekers? If so that's news to me.
> Should we spend resources, time and money into investigating a phantom problem that probably doesn't exist? 20% say yes.
And that's an entirely valid position for a political party to hold. Remember, there was a time when most people thought climate change was a phantom problem that didn't exist. Not so long ago, the possibility that COVID leaked from a lab was a phantom conspiracy theory.
Here's an alternate theory as to why mainstream parties are so resistant to auditing and investigating asylum claims: they don't want to face repercussions for shoddy policy that did little to verify asylum claims. You seem so confident that fraud is very rare, yet so defensive about validating asylum claims.
> I think it's phenomenal that a party can divert attention from actual, real problems into decoy problems and blow them out of proportion to gain power.
> That's the actual danger to democracy we're talking about.
What's phenomenal and dangerous is how people can convince themselves that banning a political party because they don't share the same concerns is defending democracy. By this logic, Republicans would be defending democracy by banning Democrats. Democrats are diverting attention from real problems into - according to Republicans - phantom problems like climate change.
You don't have any more right to say what is or isn't a relationship problem than an AfD member. Plenty of people probably believe, with the same conviction, that some of your concerns are phantom problems diverting attention from real issues. Understanding that is what preserves democracy.
Of course people in desperate situations in third world countries lie to get into a country like Germany or the UK where they have been told they will get jobs and benefits, no questions asked. To suggest people wouldn't lie in that situation is ridiculous. Even the "genuine" asylum seekers travelling illegally to Germany through safe haven countries are queue jumpers over their much more numerous brethren that have been waiting for years in refugee camps for a chance to get lucky enough to go to a western country. To suggest that people will cross the Med to get to Europe but that they won't lie is ridiculous.
People can see the problem with their very eyes as well. It materially affects them. They witness crime. Are they imagining that too?
It is also not an "extraordinary" claim that it is not being worked on. How could it be? You deny it even exists. How can something both not be a problem and also be being worked on. You can't say "it is extraordinary to claim the problem exists and that it isnt being worked on". That is complete sophistry.
Someone who travels across one or more safe countries before claiming asylum.
This is the kind of disrespectful and insulting response that actually pushes people towards the extremes.
20% of German's population is now made of first gen immigrants. Immigration, excessive immigration is a real issue and people feel strongly about it that they seek parties that at least acknowledge their concerns instead of insulting them when they raise them.
Children have priority, but men routinely lie about their age. Some 40% of purported children refugees turned out to be adults. Similarly, many claimed to be from Syria fleeing warzones, but turned out to be economic migrants from countries at peace looking for a better job.
I'm not German and I am pretty much on the opposite of the political spectrum as AfD. My parents went to the US after the communist insurrection in Cuba, and I'd much rather have more permissive legal avenues to immigration in America. But what I'm not a fan of, is undemocratic measures like banning political parties because of a more conservative approach to refugees. Banning political parties is the destruction of democracy, not it's preservation. If members of AfD are actually trying to undermine democracy, charge them with insurrection or whatever the appropriate crimes may be. Remember, the Reichstag Fire Decree was ostensibly passed to protect German democracy, too.
That could be construed as disingenuous.
Freedom of movement means that migration within the EU is not controlled.
In 2015 Germany effectively let in everyone from the Middle East on the grounds of welcoming "Syrian refugees". Since then we're seeing throughout the EU an effectively uncontrolled flow of immigrants who are not prevented from entering and who have understood that the first thing to do on arrival is to claim asylum. So this is pretty much uncontrolled.
Controlled immigration (legal non-EU immigrants) is also high.
Today, I believe that 20% of the population in Germany is first generation immigrant.
A problem is that we've seen (like everywhere in Europe and on other issues as well) that the debate is being poisoned by reducing it between a correct, civilised, acceptable opinion ("Immigration is great and chance") and a fascist, Nazi, extremist, bigotted, uneducated opinion (pretty anyone who says there is too much immigration and that it is not controlled enough). I think this explains both the AfD's rise and the proposed approach against them.
I don't know if there is such evidence, so no judgement on AfD.
However, it seems very often media in west write "protecting democracy" when they actually mean "protecting political power of centrists/liberal democratic parties". Some people even genuinely think that it's democracy only when that part of political spectrum rules.
Germany supports lots of antidemocratic measures. They oppose binding referenda of the population before the adoption of international treaties, for example.
This isn't about democracy. It is about protecting leftist policies from democratic backlash.
It depends on the law (constitution). If the law says it's forbidden, then it is anti-that-kind-of-democracy. If there is no such law, then it's consistent with democracy.
Real presidential democracy should allow for change of law and constitution, so the democratic process here would be to first change the law/constitution to allow for advocating, then advocate for switching to Parliamentary system, then get this change passed through the lawmaking process. Lots of steps, very hard to do, but in principle there should be a legal and democratic way. If there isn't legal democratic way, the system is highly suspicious, and probably isn't even formally a democracy.
> If we didn't, should the NZ government be able to ban a party advocating for one?
If the government (in extreme, the president) is democratically elected, and if the ban is done constitutionally and lawfully, then that would be still democratic.
> Germany supports lots of antidemocratic measures. They oppose binding referenda of the population before the adoption of international treaties
Interesting, is this an official government position with some rationale? Or the government just does whatever they can legally and ignores the calls for referendum?
One rationale I've came across is that international treaties (in parliamentary systems) have to go through the parliament, which is representative, so referendum is not needed, and if someone wants to invoke one, they have to do the necessary work required by the law.
How does one gather support for changing the law if it is illegal to advocate for that change?
I'm assuming the hypothetical weird situation where public advocacy outside the lawmaking process is illegal, but the lawmakers in the lawmaking process can discuss and repeal that law. This isn't implausible in democracy, as it is common in democracies that lawmakers have immunity from prosecution based on objectionable speech in a parliament.
Or illegally via advocating (just because an action is illegal, it does not mean it can't happen) or motivating the lawmakers in various ways, eventually a revolution (which still can be democratic in a sense).
If lawmakers can't repeal that kind of law legally, the system is not a sovereign democracy, but, at best, restricted/controlled democracy, by someone else than demos, who is maintaining that superlaw.
From my British perspective, I think the media know exactly what they're doing. They know many readers will connect "protecting democracy" with cheating, and know that divisive, tribal politics is much more profitable than stability and consensus.
Banning a political party is an important instrument in a wider philosophy known in Germany as “wehrhafte Demokratie” (defensive democracy). This philosophy states that democratic states should have legal tools with which they can defend themselves against people, who want to attack the democratic order itself.
Wehrhafte Demokratie is a very well established and accepted concept, here, partially because of a wish to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Weimarer Republik. It’s also justified by the belief that democracy is not just a dictatorship of the majority, but that even a majority of voters is limited in what they can do and that democracy also includes for example the protection of minorities.
> biased actors who should already be constrained by the rule of law
Banning a political party works by the rules of law.
The legal barriers for banning a political party are quite high in Germany. Basically for a ban it must be proven that the party as a whole, not just single member, have the goal to attack key elements of the democratic order itself and that there is a real danger that they could succeed.
The last condition can also be a legal reason to only ban a party once it actually gets popular: As long as it is unpopular, judges don’t see the condition fulfilled, that the party presents a real danger, so they won’t ban the party. This happened with Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), which was ruled to be verfassungsfeindlich (an enemy of the constitution), but not banned because it was so ineffective und unpopular.
It feels to me now that the retaliation was way worse than the initial concern, ie the populist strongmen largely stayed within norms but we've since had authoritarian pushes from their political opponents, like this one, that are completely undemocratic but "justified" because they belive they're on the side of good. It won't end well.
Seems like such a large amount of disaster and misfortune have been caused by people because "We have God on Our Side". :(
A democracy should have institutions that would ensure it's survival even if the biggest idiots take over - because one day they will.
The trick is to figure out the day before it's too late.
Last time, for example, it didn't work.
Democracy in contemporary context also does not mean direct democracy, it means representative democracy. That's why banning a party that has overwhelming popular support can still be democratic, if it is done lawfully by democratically controlled institutions (via regular and free elections). Dissent of the people for a specific decision or policy does not have legal power in standard democracies unless a special mechanism is invoked, such as referendum with the power of law (whose invocation the president or representatives have to agree on, details depend on country).
But scrutiny must work both ways, they should only be banned after due process.
Probably because those "everyone" (in fact, a big portion of population) wants to have that party that the other side wants to ban, and there is chance it could happen. So they try to defend it preemptively by suggesting any banning in general would not be democratic (which is probably not true).
Another reason is that in recent history, most if not all German governments banning parties either were undemocratic, or turned out to dismantle democracy.
To be clear, I do not welcome the resurgence of the far-right. But blaming voters for voting in ways you might not prefer is like a movie director blaming the public for not enjoying their movie or a chef blaming diners for not enjoying their cooking; it is utterly wrongheaded. The question for the left and centrist parties is how they have failed so utterly and pathetically in presenting a compelling case to the public to vote for them.
If you vote badly and that kills democracy, that’s just a risk you have to accept. If you believe in democracy you believe stupid people have a voice.
Checks and balances. To ban someone you must be ready to fully give up your own political care. It seems just fair. This would ensure that bans only happen when people think they are absolutely needed.
This was very confusing, as it looked like that AFD (normally blue) has the lowest voting intention meanwhile blue in the graph is "Left" which I think is the party "Die Linke" which is normally red.
This reminds me of Justin Trudeau shutting down the bank account of the Trucker protestors. We need to lock out our opposition from accessing their bank accounts or from being able to pay their cellphone bill because democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire#Political_conse...
(I've slightly lost the thread here, so I'm not 100% certain you're disagreeing.)
"We have to disenfranchise you to protect democracy" is a self defeating idea.
I'm curious what checks there are on Article 21 then. It seems like a no brainer that an unfriendly government count just declare all their opposition enemies of democracy. How is that power limited?
One of the core tenets of democracy is that the people get a choice in their government. If the current government is able to rip that choice away if it's unpalatable, then that's anti-democratic in and of itself.
If we all vote to ban the party some dude started to advocate for killing all left-handed people, we’re not being anti-democratic - we’re being serious people. If you think this party poses no threat, then that’s a real argument. “But it’s not fair that I can’t vote for the cannibals/Nazis/anti-democracy advocates” is unequivocally not (and it’s not more so just because you don’t think they’re actually Nazis or whatever).
Outlawing an action is fine. Outlawing a party who says the action should be okay is anti-democratic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_German_presidential_ele...
>Hindenburg's reelection failed to prevent the NSDAP from assuming power. Two successive federal elections later that year left it as the largest party in the Reichstag and anti-republic parties in the majority. Under this political climate, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Upon Hindenburg's death in 1934 Hitler de facto assumed the presidency, which he combined with the chancellorship to become the Führer und Reichskanzler.
>The NSDAP emerged from the Reichstag elections in July as the largest party ever seen in the Reichstag and having over a third of the vote, while Papen's position was undermined. Papen dissolved the Reichstag again with elections in November, in which the Nazis lost seats but remained the largest party.
> Upon Hindenburg's death in 1934 Hitler de facto assumed the presidency, which he combined with the chancellorship to become the Führer und Reichskanzler.
Hitler was appointed not elected. And assumed the presidency after Hindenburg's death, not by winning an election.
> The NSDAP emerged from the Reichstag elections in July as the largest party ever seen in the Reichstag and having over a third of the vote
"Over a third" is nowhere near the majority. Remember Hindenburg ran as an independent and won over 50% of the vote. "Largest party" in a system with more than two parties and.
And again, after February 1933 the Nazis had severely suppressed opposition parties. Subsequent elections are not fair elections, this is like saying Kim Jeong Un was democratically elected. Technically he was, with the little detail that there was just one party and one candidate to vote far.
Sure, yes, but that does not contradict the fact that in '32, the Nazis did so well in an election that they became (repeating myself) "the largest party ever seen in the Reichstag". Then they won another election in '32, (but by a slimmer margin) where here "won" means that they ended up with more seats than any other party.
>Hitler was appointed not elected.
Yes, but he was appointed mostly because the party he controlled became "the largest party ever seen in the Reichstag and having over a third of the vote".
>"Over a third" is nowhere near the majority. Remember Hindenburg ran as an independent and won over 50% of the vote.
Here you are comparing elections for the Reichstag (a legislative body) with an election for the office of president. In the former, East Prussia votes for a legislator, Pomerania votes for a legislator, North Westphalia votes for one. I.e. they are not national elections, but rather regional ones similar to US elections for senators. That matters because it makes it practical for candidates without national name-recognition to run and to win. In contrast, doing well the election for the president requires strong national name-recognition. So, one possible explanation for Hindenberg's being able to get over 50% of the vote is the fact that there were fewer viable candidates for that office than there were viable parties contesting over seats in the Reichstag.
This table lists 62 parties: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1932_German_federal_ele...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_German_federal_election#:...
If not, what is the difference that makes them different for you?
By comparison the Nazis did not form such a ruling coalition, and seized power by force later - not democratically. My whole point, from beginning of this comment chain, is that the Nazis did not achieve rule democratically. They won parliamentary seats, but failed for form a coalition (at least not until they took power by force and effectively rigged elections).
Why bring the US into the conversation? ;)
There’s also never been a blowback to this. /s