The sentiment is good but that’s at best treating symptoms (at worst it gives them more legitimacy). Besides, if the German ruling class wanted the AfD gone they wouldn’t have funded it.
Wait…
The AfD is the far right parti isn’t it? Didn’t they just win an election?
If you want to get rid of a party, you do it at the voting booth. It looks to me like the majority decided to put them in power. Protests won’t be any good.
Edit: for the record, I’m antifascist. I’m just saying it’s a little late for protests when they could have had more impact before the election.
The German constitution allows banning parties, if said parties work to abolish the central concepts of said constitution. There’s nothing in it, that says “you cannot ban a party, if the party is too successful”.
On the contrary: some years ago a ban of the fascist NPD was on trial at the constitutional court. The court ruled, that the NPD qualifies for getting banned, but is not banned, as it was not successful enough in elections.
So, the AfD would be an easy case, as they basically mirror the NPD positions from that time and is successful. However, only the government or one of the two chambers of parliament can ask the court for checking a ban, and those institutions are seemingly full of idiots.
Anyway, all of that is, theoretically, a lesson from the rise of the NSDAP. But the lesson seems not to have been learned properly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Aaaaaahhh!!! Ok. Now it makes sense.
Thank you for explaining it to me. I didn’t know that was possible.
Democracy should not hand out its tools to parties who want to use them to actively dismantle it. We’ve seen where that leads to.
I mean, is there any evidence at all that defensive democracy actually works? Given the strength of the far right all over Europe I’m not convinced that it does.
It’s an ongoing experiment, but we know for sure that the alternative of letting the anti-democratic party win and rule does not work out.
False dichotomy. It could be that the solution to fascism can’t be found in institutions run by rich elites.
I didn’t present a dichotomy, actually. What is your solution then?
Short answer: Labor organization. Long answer: Organize the working class and force the elites to make the concessions necessary to solve the problems giving rise to fascism in the first place.
The paradox of tolerance.
If you allow people to participate in civilized society when they don’t believe in the foundations of civilized society then they will destroy civilized society.
Fuck Nazis. Quit defending them.
They just get a new name and come back. To solve the problem, address the roots of that problem. Of course, much easier said than done.
You would be right, that banning the party will not solve the whole problem. However, it would buy time to solve the problem.
Also it would not be easy for them to just come back under a different name. While the bar for a party ban is set high, once a party was banned, it is so much easier to immediately ban any successor. Possible successors will immediately be subject to investigations and the burden of proof is reversed. Now it is not the state that has to proof that the new party is lawful, the new party has to distance themselves from the “predecessor” and proof that they are a party operating on the grounds of the constitution.
They should demand that at the ballot.
No, they shouldn’t (they actually can’t). The AfD won an election in one federal state. The German constitution allows banning a party, if said party’s goals contain abolishing core concepts of the constitution.
The federal government or one of the two chambers of parliament can ask the constitutional court to check, whether a party (or parts of it) is to be banned.
So the course of action for the majority of citizens, who want the AfD banned, is to convince the federal government or their respective state governments to ask the court to do so. And the only way to do that, right now, is to take that demand to the streets.
