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Comment by vladvasiliu | Hacker News Reader

> There would be no reason to ban a party if they could be ignored (see the NPD)

But this is the problem. It means that a party being illegal isn't such a big deal in and of itself. It's only a problem if it challenges the mainstream parties. You can see why people would think it's just a political maneuver if they're trying to ban X party only when many people vote for them. Bonus points for this party portending to "represent the voiceless" or whatever.

If some party is illegal for whatever reason, it should be banned right away. Just because you can ignore it doesn't mean it should be ignored. It would also be much easier to prevent having a sizeable chunk of the population vote for an "illegal" party and the headaches coming from that once it becomes big enough.

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> But this is the problem. It means that a party being illegal isn't such a big deal in and of itself.

Yes, this is what the constitutional court decided.

> If some party is illegal for whatever reason, it should be banned right away.

It should be hard (and is very hard) to ban a party. Thus if every party illegal should be banned right away, a large amount of effort would need to go into banning by the highest legislative and judicial bodies in the nation. It's furthermore quite hard to definitively establish a party as such, which further makes such things much slower (calls to ban the AfD have been happening for more than a decade now).

Only two parties have been banned in Germany's post-war history. Banning a party is a rightfully a huge hurdle, because it goes both ways: While it can be a part of a self-defence mechanism of democracy it is also a way in which Hitler & Co consolidated their power. Hence it can be only used after a ruling of the Constitutional Court – it is in a way a constitutional question.

> ... right away

Apart from the constitutional hurdles there is also the question of "right away": The AfD of the early 2010s is not the same party as today. Back then they were ... well cranky but not extreme. Banning it in 2013 would have been unjust. Over the decade it moved further and further to the right. Pretty much all the founders and bigwigs of the early generation left the party and distanced themselves from it. But radicalisation is a process not a binary switch from one day to the next.

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