How Germany’s Bureaucratic War on AfD Destroys Democracy From Within

Thanks to the attempts to ban the AfD, German democracy is on its last legs. I find it hard to believe that the 'democratic" parties don't see the irony.

From The European Conservative

By Sabine Beppler-Spahl

The establishment’s authoritarian power plays are eroding the already low level of public trust.

Last week, Germany’s Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV)—the country’s internal secret service—officially classified the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party as a “proven right-wing extremist organization.” 

It’s an ill-conceived decision that will not solve the establishment’s problems with fending off the threat of populism. This was dramatically illustrated in yesterday’s spectacle in the Bundestag (German parliament). For the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic, the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz (CDU), suffered the humiliation of needing a second round of voting to be confirmed. Too many members, even within his own coalition, refused to support him in the first round. This coalition, cobbled together explicitly to keep the AfD from power, couldn’t even maintain solidarity on its most basic function: electing a chancellor.

The BfV’s decision marks a further escalation in the establishment’s crackdown on this insurgent party, which now stands as the second largest faction in Germany’s Bundestag, commanding 151 out of 630 seats. The decision was announced by the deeply unpopular Nancy Faeser (SPD), Germany’s former interior minister, who herself no longer holds office as of Monday. Remarkably, however, her party remains in power despite its defeat in February’s election—a direct result of Germany’s anti-AfD ‘firewall’ strategy, which forced Merz into an unpopular coalition with the very party that voters had rejected. 

Fear-driven governance 

Panic and fear have driven the establishment’s reactions since February. Each decision betrays their terror that the AfD might secure an absolute majority in four years.

Though the BfV does not have executive powers, the consequences of the classification are serious. They will, most likely, lead to AfD supporters losing their jobs. Thorsten Frei (CDU), head of Merz’s chancellery, wasted no time announcing plans to “investigate civil servants.” Daniel Günther (CDU), Schleswig-Holstein’s minister president, demanded that the party be “swiftly banned.” 

Some voices, like Oliver Maksan, writing for the Swiss-German NZZ, have rightly called this a “massive intervention in German democracy.” The establishment’s authoritarian approach and political manoeuvring have backfired spectacularly, further eroding the already low level of public trust in the establishment.

Flimsy justification

In a scant press release, the BfV described its decision as based on “an extremely careful expert examination“. It highlighted the AfD’s “anti-migrant and anti-Muslim stance” as well as its “ethnic and descent-based understanding of the people, which devalues entire population groups in Germany and violates their human dignity.”

Proponents of banning the AfD have also pointed to the party’s inflammatory rhetoric. One of its slogans in the February election campaign was  “Alice for Germany” (a play on the SS slogan “Alles für Deutschland,” for which Björn Höcke, Thuringia’s AfD leader, was convicted in 2024 – a fact that  didn’t stop him leading his party to victory in Thuringia in February.) There’s also the obnoxious Maximilian Krah who resigned from the AfD’s federal executive board shortly before the European elections after saying that members of the Nazi SS were not “automatically criminals.” Despite all of this, Krah is now a member of the AfD’s parliamentary faction. 

But the BfV’s bureaucratic classification won’t deter AfD voters, who are used to being labelled and insulted as ‘extremists’. Most AfD supporters aren’t particularly enamoured with the party’s more extreme elements—as evidenced by Höcke’s low popularity ratings (21%), even though his party won almost 40% of the popular vote in Thuringia in February. The AfD’s rise is not due to widespread extremism, but to deep disillusionment with the establishment parties’ failure to address Germany’s economic decline, rising energy costs, and migration crisis.

A self-inflicted crisis

The classification has created a self-inflicted dilemma for the government. Days earlier, prominent politician Jens Spahn (CDU), who now heads the CDU’s parliamentary group, suggested that the AfD should be treated like any other opposition party—a suggestion from which he has since backtracked somewhat after the predictable backlash. Many see Faeser’s move as a direct response, designed to reinforce the increasingly problematic ‘firewall’ strategy against the AfD.

The government now faces a dilemma: either ignore the BfV’s classification—effectively making a mockery of its own intelligence service—or act on it by banning the party, with all the profound risks and societal antagonisms such a radical step would unleash. If they choose the latter, they will be placing this fundamentally political decision in the hands of the courts, forcing constitutional judges—who should remain above partisan squabbles—to serve as the final arbiters in the establishment’s desperate battle against populism. The burden of dealing with electoral challenges would be shifted to institutions designed to interpret the law, not decide which parties citizens can support.

A history of control

The BfV’s classification confirms, if nothing else, the German establishment’s deep distrust of voters. Created after the Second World War under Allied occupation, ostensibly to monitor Nazi resurgence, the BfV quickly became a tool for targeting political dissidents of all stripes—communists during the Cold War, Green Party members in the 1980s, and Left Party politicians, including even Thuringia’s former and long-serving minister president Bodo Ramelow (Left Party). 

The hypocrisy is staggering. There was a time when leftist politicians like Hans Christian Ströbele (Green Party) denounced the BfV as an authoritarian body beyond democratic control and campaigned for its abolition. Now, these same voices are cheering its targeting of the AfD. Both the Green Party and the Left Party have become leading advocates for an AfD ban—apparently, the BfV was evil when targeting them but virtuous when pursuing their opponents.

Secret judgments

Most telling of all, the BfV’s 1,100-page report justifying the classification remains secret—unavailable for public scrutiny in the true spirit of an unaccountable intelligence service. Selected journalists granted access have exposed some AfD statements deemed particularly dangerous, including one from Brandenburg state parliamentarian Dennis Hohloch. In a speech, Hohloch said,  “Diversity means multiculturalism. And what does multiculturalism mean? Multiculturalism means a loss of tradition, a loss of identity, a loss of homeland, murder, manslaughter, robbery and gang rape.“

Such statements certainly sound hysterical and deserve criticism. But when more than 20% of German voters feel that mass migration and multiculturalism have harmed their country, even these provocative views must be tolerated as legitimate, if unsavoury, contributions to democratic debate. The establishment, however, has become so fearful of populism that it treats any strongly voiced criticism of migration policy as an existential threat, preferring to silence dissent rather than engage with voters’ concerns.

Germany’s new government now faces a critical choice: Will it consider inflammatory statements by AfD politicians more dangerous than a state agency that actively intervenes in—and suppresses—democratic debate? If Merz’s government has any democratic instincts at all, it must end this authoritarian crackdown on the AfD. If it doesn’t, it won’t be saving German democracy—it will be destroying it from within.