Tuesday, October 1, 2024, 2:22 p.m.
The intention of a group of deputies from different parties in the Bundestag to present a lawsuit before the Constitutional Court to request the ban of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has reopened the debate in this country on the convenience and possibilities of success of that initiative . For the German lower house to debate and vote on a petition of illegality against a party, a minimum of 37 parliamentarians are required to sign the demand.
German media highlight that those who support the proposal to go to the highest German court are, however, many more than necessary and belong to the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens, both in the Government, but also to the conservative opposition of the Union of Bavarian Christian Democrats and Social Christians (CDU/CSU), as well as The Left. A simple majority in the German Parliament would be enough to go to the Constitutional Court.
The protagonists of the initiative aspire for the AfD to be declared unconstitutional by the court based in Karlsruhe, which would lead to the prohibition of all activities and the intervention by the State of all its assets. In the parliamentary motion, the deputies accuse the AfD of wanting to abolish the free and democratic basic order and of adopting an “actively militant and aggressive stance” against that basic order. The group’s motion identifies numerous violations of human dignity by the AfD, such as the call for what Alternative for Germany calls the “remigration of millions” of immigrants or the mass and forced deportation of foreign citizens. The motion also assesses numerous statements by AfD regional and national presidents as violations of the human dignity of migrants, Muslims and sexual minorities.
The defenders of the demand consider that this is the only way to stop a formation that in the last regional elections held in September in three East German federal states achieved resounding victories with campaigns focused on demanding the expulsion of undesirable foreigners and ending with the reception of refugees, but also with criticism of the European Union and sympathies towards the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. While in Thuringia it was crowned the first political force, in Saxony and Brandenburg it placed second and was on the verge of unseating the ruling parties, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, respectively. At the national level, polls for the general elections in Germany in September 2025 give the AfD up to 19% of the vote, only behind the conservatives, but with a wide lead over the SPD or the Greens.
The difficulties of the process
Kevin Kühnert, secretary general of the ruling SPD of the federal chancellor, Olaf Scholz, expressed this Tuesday his reservations towards the initiative supported by at least a dozen of his coreligionists in the Bundestag. In his opinion, filing a lawsuit to outlaw AfD before the Constitutional Court is currently too risky due to the lack of sufficient evidence to prove its unconstitutionality. «Banning a party does not have to do with Mr. Kühnert rejecting it or thinking that it is fascist, but rather with ultimately being able to present evidence to the courts saying that it is clearly contrary to the Constitution and that, therefore, it must be banned,” declared the general secretary of the SPD. «At the moment I do not have any proof of that type. So I would say: be very careful,” he commented.
Conservative parliamentary leaders also reject for now trying to outlaw the far-right party. “I don’t know anyone in the CSU parliamentary group who supports this motion,” declared the top representative of the Bavarian Christian Socialists, Alexander Dobrindt, to the newspaper ‘Augsburger Allgemeine’. For Dobrindt, the planned motion “is erroneous and counterproductive.” Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz himself stated at the end of last May that banning the AfD party is not a matter that worries him at the moment. This is “a very difficult issue in democracy”, for which there are very high obstacles, commented the head of the German Government, after recalling that previous lawsuits against other much smaller and radical far-right formations have not yet been successful at the time.
In 2017, a banning procedure against the neo-Nazi German National Democratic Party (NPD) failed for the second time. The Karlsruhe judges then established that this formation, without institutional representation at the national, regional or municipal level, was so insignificant that it did not pose a serious threat to the German Constitution. However, earlier this year, the Constitutional Court ordered the suspension of state funding for the party, which has since renamed itself Die Heimat, La Patria. In the history of the Federal Republic, only one political party has been declared unconstitutional by the highest German court. In 1956 and in the middle of the Cold War, the judges banned all activities of the German Communist Party (KPD).
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