Debate: If the state were to ban the AfD, it would have to mutate into a DDR 2.0
What consequences would an AfD ban have? Our author explores the scenarios. A guest article.
No one has succeeded in attracting voters away from the AfD on a significant scale in the last 10 years. Nothing remains of Friedrich Merz's promise to halve the AfD's size – its parliamentary group in the Bundestag is larger than ever, and it is already the strongest faction in two state parliaments. So what can we do?
Let's look at the whole thing with the cold logic of economics: There is demand for the AfD product, and there is supply. There's little you can do about that demand, as I tried to show here last week. But you can reduce supply – by banning the AfD. Then the demand won't disappear, but nothing will be able to be bought or voted for either. There are plenty of counterarguments to that, all of which have already been presented in recent weeks: Then the AfD will simply re-establish itself, then it will go underground, or its voters will flock to the BSW, strengthen the NPD, or form a "Brown Army Faction." There's something to that, but what it is, you can only see when you analyze it together – all of this will happen in parallel, and not only that. Let's look at it step by step.
Let's assume that an AfD ban is like the ban on the Socialist Reich Party or the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in the 1950s. Then, on Monday afternoon, the Federal Constitutional Court issues its ruling, and that same night, special police units move across Germany, confiscating AfD assets, sealing offices, and freezing bank accounts. By Tuesday, the AfD will no longer have any Bundestag or state parliament mandates; these will expire without replacement, as happened with the SRP, and the other parties can happily form coalitions with each other or leave them alone – regardless of firewalls. Anyone who is no longer a member of parliament also no longer has immunity. This means that AfD MPs' offices can be searched, and their associated cloud access, telephones, computers, and fax machines can be seized and analyzed. Given the previous behavior of some prominent AfD politicians, it is to be expected that the suddenly available evidence will lead to one or two high treason trials. This was also the case with the KPD at the time due to its close ties to the GDR. Thousands of KPD members were arrested, charged, and convicted across Germany. However, the KPD was a mass party at the time, even compared to the AfD. A re-establishment, which opponents of the ban like to cite, is also unlikely. The Constitutional Court prevented this with its ban on re-establishments. This meant that anyone who founded even an association that relied on the rhetoric, argumentation, material remnants, or former members of the SRP could immediately be charged by the authorities for violating the re-establishment ban. Enforcing this was even easier back then; there was neither the internet nor social media; anyone who wanted to reach the public or even just their scattered comrades had to use the media or establish their own – and thereby immediately became liable to prosecution. The result: Both the later-founded German Reich Party and the DKP were mere shadows of their predecessors, even though the DKP continued to enjoy the support of the GDR.
A ban would severely weaken the AfD: Subsidies and MPs' salaries would immediately disappear, cutting off almost half of its income. State funds account for 44 percent of its revenue . Civil servants and public sector employees would immediately duck their heads and dutifully remain silent to keep their jobs. The same applies to working parents. The problem is that AfD supporters won't lose their right to vote through a ban, and they can still engage in politics, just not for the AfD. Or rather, not in the way they could before. We no longer live in the 1950s, when citizens voted every four or five years, perhaps signing a petition or attending a demonstration in between, but otherwise letting the government govern. These days, almost everyone participates in the political decision-making process – on X, Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, TikTok, in a citizens' initiative, or otherwise. And there you can support the AfD anonymously – even during the election campaign.
You just can't call them by name, and they can't do that themselves either. Now comes the part that the proponents of the ban won't like – and which didn't even exist back then when the KPD and SRP were banned, and couldn't have existed.
Operation “Silverlock” – the AfD can do that tooSince the process of banning and dissolving a party has been known for decades, the AfD will also be preparing for this. At least part of its assets and leadership will therefore already be abroad when the verdict is announced – purely by chance, of course – for example, in Hungary, the USA, or Slovakia. There are examples of this, too: Some leading figures in the PiS party (which was not banned) fled to Belarus and Hungary after losing the 2023 elections to avoid charges of corruption and high treason. Extradition requests and European arrest warrants will achieve little: They usually come to nothing when it comes to political crimes and the respective government is sympathetic to the wanted party. Spain can tell you how difficult extradition proceedings against Basque separatists have been in Belgium and France. The Spanish government recently had a similar problem with its Catalan separatists. The Polish PiS politician, who fled to Hungary to escape his arrest warrant, was quickly granted asylum there. Maintaining the AfD's extensive and professional online presence from exile should therefore not be a problem even after a ban. And that's not all: After more than ten years of presence in election campaigns, parliaments, and the media, the AfD also has its political stars and many candidates who can continue to run in elections despite the ban, just not under the blue banner. So, soon after a ban, we will see candidates on seemingly non-party lists everywhere in Germany—and especially frequently in the east—photographing themselves on their posters and websites alongside Alice Weidel, Tino Chrupalla, Björn Höcke, or Alexander Gauland. They can borrow this trick from the Polish Solidarity Party, which in 1989 photographed its candidates with Lech Walesa's likeness to ensure that its logo was not misused.
Anyone could invoke solidarity, but only those pictured on the poster next to Wałęsa could be considered genuine opposition candidates. Even if their top brass were deprived of their right to stand for election, that doesn't stop the AfD from resorting to such tricks. This was particularly evident in Romania, where the nationalist candidate, Calin Georgescu, who was legally barred from running, simply put forward a follower, George Simion, who then received even more votes in the rerun. An economist would probably see this as proof that a supply shortage while demand remains the same leads to higher prices, thus a better election result.
Digital strategies do not need party membersBut the way the German electoral system works, the AfD doesn't necessarily have to resort to shadow candidates à la Simion to get back into the Bundestag. It's enough to establish a harmless independent list and focus the campaign on three direct constituencies to benefit from the basic mandate rule. The candidates will then run with Weidel's likeness on their posters so that former AfD voters choose the right candidates – and there we have another pseudo-AfD faction, which just isn't allowed to call itself that. If it's feeling mean, it calls its list "Silverlocks." The other parties can theoretically put a stop to this trick by revising the basic mandate clause in accordance with the 2024 Federal Constitutional Court ruling . But any regulation to the detriment of the AfD (which can no longer appeal against it after a ban) would also harm the Left – and who knows when the governing majority in the Bundestag might need it again.
Now comes another argument for the proponents of the ban: Of course, the AfD would be weakened by a ban. Running an election campaign under such conditions is complicated, and the likelihood of mistakes and conflicts within the party is high. This could easily lead to several AfD successor lists or candidates competing against each other in some states or constituencies, resulting in them missing out on a seat in parliament or the mayoral election. Last year in Thuringia, there was a cockfight between two AfD candidates in the same constituency , and the party was excluded from the 2023 Bremen state election because it had submitted two lists. In addition, the AfD is a cadre party: It has many voters but few members. It currently has around 39,000 members, which, as a percentage of the election results, is significantly lower than the other parties and also significantly fewer than the KPD had before its ban. In the SPD, there are just under 24 SPD voters for each member; in the CDU, there are just under 33 CDU voters for each party member; and in the AfD, the figure is almost eight times as high as the CDU. It has 254 voters per member! Keeping them on board isn't easy already, but it will be even more difficult in illegality. The counterargument in this case comes from Romania: staff shortages can be more than compensated for by an online advantage over the other parties – and the AfD has been better than most of them in this regard. This, incidentally, is also the most powerful argument against the postulate, repeatedly put forward by opponents of the ban, that "the AfD must be fought politically" (rather than legally). Where are the other parties' ultra-modern, AI-driven IT centers that can counter the AfD's TikTok presence?
Almost 660 million euros go annually from the federal budget to the political parties' political foundations , none of which goes to the AfD Foundation. The money flows primarily to the foundation apparatus, to scholarships, and to a kind of subsidiary party foreign policy, within the framework of which these foundations maintain foreign missions all over the world. This money is used to organize (mostly traditional) conferences and debates with party bigwigs, and every now and then even to produce clunky, academic-sounding reports and analyses, which are then - who would have thought it - available online. From the outside, it looks a bit like the hare versus the hedgehog: where one wants to go, the other has already arrived. The only difference is that in the parable, the hare was not supported with 660 million euros annually. Some have over half a billion and remain analog, others have nothing but are excellently positioned digitally.
The AfD like the RAF back then?Some opponents of the ban say that part of the AfD will go underground after a ban. We'll then have a right-wing extremist underground, presumably one that is also prepared to use violence or is violent. There's certainly some truth to that, but not much. Since its inception, the AfD has largely drained the right-wing extremist swamp to its right. The fact that the Federal Constitutional Court found the NPD not to be a threat to the political order of the Federal Republic is also due to the fact that its sympathizers and voters have been absorbed by the AfD. Therefore, small right-wing extremist parties, Reich Citizens, and other free radicals will benefit from a ban.
However, that's not necessarily an argument against a ban, because the goal of a ban is to keep the AfD out of parliaments and political power, without blocking parliaments with firewalls and perpetual anti-AfD coalitions. If the AfD electorate splits among several parties (and some defect to BSW, the Left, or the CDU) and all of them then remain below the five percent threshold, the goal of a ban will be achieved. The price for this might be a larger, radical underground, a new version of the NSU, or (which amounts to the same thing) a kind of Brown Army Faction that carries out assassinations against strangers, politicians, and political opponents. That could be the case, but there are also several arguments against it or that indicate it won't be that dramatic: On average, AfD members are quite old and have a lot to lose. The fifty-year-old civil servant father won't go underground and learn to shoot if the AfD is banned. Only young, adventurous people with nothing to lose will do that. That's the difference with the RAF, which was able to swim like a fish in a pond with many, many peers from the baby boom generation of the time. In comparison, the young AfD fish are desperately gasping for air in a demographically dried-up shallow pool.
Either way, this is a problem for the police. At least these AfD successors will no longer have to be fought politically, but only legally. But the matter isn't that simple.
The authoritarian state strikes backBanning a party is an authoritarian measure. For people with authoritarian attitudes, bans are the best way to solve problems; for less authoritarian people, prevention and rehabilitation are more important. AfD voters are generally authoritarian; they want the state to take action, but of course not against them, because they see themselves as decent citizens. When the state bans the AfD, expels or arrests its leadership, confiscates party assets, and revokes its mandates, it is applying AfD logic against the AfD itself. Politicians, commentators, and ordinary citizens who see themselves as tolerant and non-authoritarian may initially approve. What they fail to realize is that by fighting the AfD, they themselves have become authoritarian. The Federal Republic, which banned the KPD and the SRP, was a formal democracy with free elections, but it was also quite authoritarian. This became apparent whenever someone provoked them: The police would beat students, even when it was unnecessary, impose professional bans, restrict civil rights (as in the Stammheim trial), send water cannons against protesting farmers, and declare their opponents enemies of the state. Hardly anyone wants to go back to that today, except perhaps AfD voters, but then only if it wasn't directed against them. But that's exactly the direction things are heading in.
In the race that will ensue between the police, secret services, and the judiciary on the one hand, and the AfD heirs on the other after a party ban, the state will have no choice but to become more authoritarian and repressive. With the resources currently available, it will be difficult to prevent AfD propaganda and voter mobilization from abroad, and even to enforce a rigid Federal Constitutional Court ruling. The secret services will then be able to (completely legally and without having to consider immunities) observe AfD successor organizations and their meetings, deploy informants, and monitor telephones, but it will be difficult to obtain judicial authorization for the latter every time.
This will either become a formality (if the judges cooperate) or abolished by law (if they don't). Approximately 20 percent of adults in Germany will then be under a kind of general suspicion of supporting a banned organization. I know what I'm talking about, because we had a similar situation in Poland until the end of 2023: The Polish secret services wiretapped whomever they wanted (even opposition politicians with parliamentary mandates during election campaigns), either with formal approval from the courts (which were often misled) or bypassing the courts. Professional bans from the 1950s will also return when civil servants violate the ban on neutrality and are caught donating to an AfD-like organization or supporting their children, who are advertising online for a list that also includes former AfD politicians. The relatively precise constitutional criteria that now protect us from the arbitrary actions of the state will then become very vague and elastic. Not because the state does it that way, but because after a ban the AfD becomes a pudding that cannot be pinned down.
In other words: The Federal Republic will then become increasingly similar to the authoritarian state that most AfD voters mourn. The next hybrid democracy will emerge, a mixture of the liberal post-Stalinist GDR and the German Empire, which also held elections and was organized under the rule of law, but was nevertheless quite authoritarian. And all this without the AfD itself participating in power anywhere or being represented in parliaments.
There are compelling arguments for and against a ban on the AfD, and by no means are they all purely legal. General, almost meaningless phrases like "You can't ban voters" or "You have to fight the AfD politically" are not among them. The issue is too important to be left to the lawyers, and anyone who wants to fight the AfD politically has been able to do so over the past ten years. The result is well known. This brings us to the conclusion: Regardless of whether one tries to lure voters away from the AfD or bans and persecutes it, the state that does so becomes more like the authoritarian state that AfD voters dream of. Only it destroys the AfD and not the other parties. In the end, we have an AfD state without the AfD. That is the fatal thing about right-wing populist parties and movements: Whether they come to power or not, they make the state more authoritarian and repressive.
Do you have feedback? Write to us! [email protected]
Berliner-zeitung
