Germans are taking to the streets en masse to stand up to the far right. As rejection grows over an obscure project of mass deportations of immigrants that the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) discussed with known neo-Nazis, a debate is fueled that resurfaces from time to time: should we try to outlaw them?
The demonstrations, which this weekend numbered more than a million people in different cities across the country, have given new urgency to the issue, but the debate actually opened a few weeks ago, when the co-president of the German Social Democratic Party, Saskia Esken , seriously raised it at the beginning of January. She said that talking regarding it would at least “shake up the voters” of the party, make them aware of what kind of party they are willing to support.
Concern regarding the rise of the AfD is growing as its popularity rises in polls and its growing radicalism becomes evident. The formation is already the second in voting intention at the federal level and all the polls indicate that in the next regional elections in September in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, three federated states in the territory of the former GDR, they would take first place and more than 30% of the votes. More and more politicians are wondering if making training illegal, or at least trying to, might stop this rise that now seems unstoppable.
As in any good debate, there are solid arguments for and once morest. Many also wonder if the legal battle would not end up further fueling a party that usually takes advantage of the slightest setback to present themselves as victims of a system that tries to silence them. They might – they have already begun to make statements to that effect – claim that the establishment politician resorts to illegalization in desperation, because he cannot win where the democratic will is decided: at the polls.
“It is difficult to know whether it would work or be counterproductive, but we have these instruments precisely to prevent a resurgence of fascism in Germany,” says Alice Blum, an extremism expert at the IU University of Applied Sciences in Erfurt. “On the one hand, a ban would not make people’s mental attitude disappear. On the other hand, it would be necessary to analyze, and that would make a difference, if being in the Government they can endanger democracy. I think the attempted ban is entirely appropriate,” she adds.
In the debate, as in so many others in German politics, the country’s Nazi past creeps in. Adolf Hitler did not stage a coup d’état; he won over the Germans at the polls. The founder of the Forsa demographic institute, Manfred Güllner, makes a comparison that he himself describes as “terrifying”: the current support for the AfD is higher than that of Hitler’s party in the early 1930s. “In the 1930 Reichstag elections, exactly 15% voted for the NSDAP. [el partido nacionalsocialista], which until then had only been elected by a small minority of 2% of all eligible voters in the previous elections,” he writes in his newsletter. Two years later they were already 30%.
The memory of those events, which led to the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933, makes many political leaders consider it almost obligatory to try to outlaw the AfD, which they see as an extremely dangerous formation for German democracy. As if there were not enough signs of its radicalization – the secret services of three federal states have formally classified it as an “extremist”, one of its leaders will sit in the dock for using a Nazi slogan and its youth are also under surveillance for considering themselves ” a danger to democracy”—, the exclusive from the investigation portal Correctiv regarding the meeting to talk regarding mass deportations has just turned on the spigot.
The dangerous concept of “re-emigration”
This publication revealed a secret meeting in a Potsdam hotel between relevant AfD members and known neo-Nazis in which they discussed a “master plan” to deport millions of people of immigrant descent, including German citizens with passports but “not integrated.” . The news regarding that meeting, which was also attended by two members of the CDU from its most right-wing faction (the so-called Union of Values), has brought to the fore the concept of “re-emigration”, a word voted a few days ago as “the worst expression of year 2023″ in Germany.
Originally, it is a word that describes migratory movements from the perspective of social sciences (return emigration, the return to the country of origin from which one originally emigrated), but the extreme right does not use it that way, but rather “as a term of struggle for their political agenda,” explains Blum. “They use remigration, which sounds harmless at first, to disguise their fantasies folkish [palabra de difícil traducción referida a una corriente etnonacionalista] of wanting to deport masses of people from Germany. “They are plans for an Aryan and ethnic Germany that not only question our Constitution, but also seek to abolish this State as it currently exists,” he adds.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz described the “reemigration plans” of right-wing extremists as “diabolical” in a video message on Saturday, while thanking the “tens of thousands of people” who were demonstrating their commitment to democracy. The AfD had been using the expression for years without fully clarifying what it meant, but the Potsdam meeting has lit the fuse. “The meeting has brought back to the memory of many Germans the Wannsee conference, which is very close and is the place where in 1942 a conference was held with senior officials of the Government of Nazi Germany and leaders of the SS to decide on the ‘Solution’. end to the Jewish question,” recalls sociologist Céline Teney, professor at the Free University of Berlin.
In this context of public outcry, left-wing politicians are the most determined to take the path of attempting to ban the AfD. The Vice Chancellor of Economy and Climate, the Green Robert Habeck, sees it as possible. “We have to gather evidence,” he said a few days ago. Among conservatives there are different opinions. The president of the most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hendrick Wüst (CDU) has called them an “extremely dangerous Nazi party.” CDU leader Friedrich Merz does not agree with that approach. He believes that if you want to win back your voters – of whom he says the majority are not Nazis, but disenchanted – you have to avoid insulting them. Sahra Wagenknecht, the former Left MP who has just founded her own populist party to win votes from the AfD, believes that “it would be dangerous for democracy” to try to ban them.
Outlawing is technically possible, but very difficult. It has not happened since 1956, when the German Communist Party (KPD) was banned. The Constitutional Court has decided on two occasions whether the NPD – the far-right party heir to National Socialism – should be banned: in 2017 it determined that, despite the existence of criminal elements, it is not in a position to influence German parliamentary life or form coalitions to pursue their unconstitutional objectives. The request for illegalization can be presented by the Government and the two chambers of Parliament and at the moment none of these bodies have made a decision on the matter.
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