German Federal President: “A Party Ban Is the Ultima Ratio of Defensive Democracy”

On what planet is the banning of an increasingly popular party the "Ultima Ratio of Defensive Democracy"? On one ruled by the Left, obviously!

From The European Conservative

By Christina Holmgren-Larson

In a speech on Sunday, Frank-Walter Steinmeier alluded to bans on “extremist” political parties, clearly indicating the AfD without ever mentioning the party.

German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) took the occasion of November 9—a date Germany marks as the proclamation of the first German Republic in 1918, the pogroms against Jews of 1938, and the start of German reunification in 1989—as an opportunity to circumspectly accuse populist right-wing Alternative für Deutschland of extremism, antisemitism, and wanting to overthrow the democratic order.

Without ever mentioning the party by name, Steinmeier gave a speech filled with poorly cloaked references to “right-wing extremism” and “threats to democracy”:

Increasingly I hear worried conversations: What will happen here for us—if extreme parties become stronger, if people with immigration history, if Jews are no longer safe? Is it possible that we have not learned from history?

There is only one party growing decidedly stronger in Germany today. The AfD, in an Insa poll, for the second time in a short while, polled at 26% on Sunday, ahead of Friedrich Merz’s increasingly wobbly governing CDU/CSU. Steinmeier’s own SPD polled at 15%, with 49% of the party’s voters being disappointed with its performance.

German democracy, the president said, is under threat—not only from Russia, but also from “right-wing extremist forces that attack our democracy and gain support among the population.”

While mentioning that “violent attempts to destroy the constitutional order” are equally unacceptable whether the origin is “right-wing, left-wing, Islamist,” it was obvious from which direction Steinmeier sees the most serious threat coming. In what cannot but be interpreted as a reference to Joachim Paul, the AfD candidate banned from the mayoral race in Ludwigshafen, he said,

Enemies of the constitution can also be excluded from election to district administrator or mayor. Such exclusion is not inherently undemocratic. On the contrary: It is the expression of the defensive democracy!

Paul was excluded after incumbent Mayor Jutta Steinruck (formerly SPD) reported him to the SPD-controlled Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Interior for, among other things, lecturing on “remigration,” quoting JRR Tolkien, and liking Wagner.

Not only individuals, but also political parties must expect the risk of being banned, Steinmeier said:

A party ban is the ultima ratio of defensive democracy. 

But since the road to a potential ban of a political party is long, were the country to follow the procedure laid down in German Basic Law, the president encouraged the political center to uphold the established Brandmauer—again, without saying out loud that there is only one party on the other side of that firewall. Extremism, Steinmeier said, “succeeds because others enable it”:

With extremists, there must be no political cooperation. Not in government, not in parliaments. If, as a result, part of the democratically elected parliament is excluded from shaping, that exclusion is self-chosen.

We see all over Europe how right-wing parties combine hard enmity against the system with self-trivialization; how in Germany they offer themselves to the center as a partner from the same bourgeois root. No one should fall for this claim.

While celebrating the crucial role of a “free public space, in which arguments can be exchanged and people are heard,” Steinmeier denounced the internet and social media as a “danger to democracy,” saying algorithms “damage trust in rational arguments and democratic politics.”

The rhetoric sounds frighteningly familiar: In order to preserve democracy, we must abolish democracy. The people cannot be trusted. “Defensive democracy” means only one thing: overruling the voice of the people when the people have the audacity to reject the political establishment and vote ‘wrong.’ As Mick Hume so succinctly put it in an editorial earlier this year:

What does Western democracy really mean if voters are denied their choice of candidates, or those elected are denied the chance to fulfil their promises to the electorate?