Germany’s domestic intelligence agency last week classified the largest opposition party, the AfD, as “confirmed right-wing extremist.” This has intensified debates over whether or not to ban the party.
On Friday, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) was classified as “confirmed right-wing extremist” by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV).
Now, there has been a first fallout: two AfD politicians and parliamentarians are not allowed to accompany Hesse’s Minister for European affairs, Manfred Pentz, on a trip to Serbia and Croatia. Pentz explained that he could not expect international partners “to sit down at the same table with representatives of a party that has been confirmed as right-wing extremist.”
Further measures also threaten the radical right-wing party: several federal states want to examine whether being a civil servant, including judges, police officers, teachers, or soldiers, is still compatible with being a member of the AfD.
That’s what we needed to do with MAGA.
That’s what we needed to do with the Republican Party. They’re one and the same at this point.
While I don’t disagree with you in principle, the reality of having only 1 political party after this also doesn’t look particularly good.
The main thing you need is a much better constitution
This is the right answer
It’s likely to blow-back domestically. Like other countries around the world, Germany’s far right nationalist party has strong domestic support right now. This may silence some politicians, bit t doesn’t address the underlying issues, nor the reasons that ppl are wandering towards fascism.
My opinion is that general failures of liberal parties to actually make life better, and reduce corruption. People have lost faith.
They have strong domestic support because they have been poisoning the public debate with always jumping on migration and inventing stories as well as blowing things out of proportion and the media and other parties playing along. The more politics shifted to the right because of the AfD, the stronger the AfD became.
Their ideas and the way they conduct themselves was normalized, so people approve of it, because they think it is normal and legitimate. If you make it clear that it is neither, it will defuse the far right. Also by banning them, their organizations are dismantled, their politicians thrown out of power and their assets seized.
If you want to stop a fire you need to stop fueling it with self-igniting fuel. Only then can you extinguish the fire.
It’s the same shit as the economist arguing against le pen being banned from running in France. Heaven forbid she and her party broke the fucking law and are being held accountable. They think the public somehow knows better.
Newsflash- we have laws for a reason. Laws without punishment are useless and so is a government that refuses to respect them. They will sow their own destruction with abdication.
“My opinion is that general failures of liberal parties to actually make life better, and reduce corruption. People have lost faith.”
They absolutely have lost both faith and hope. Our institutions lack integrity.
I think that is the global phenomenon
Germany decommissioned their nuclear plants for being scary with wind apparently being the future despite not having 100% uptime, and then spent a half a trillion dollars trying to generate power when they got cut off from Russia.
While all this is happening they lower barriers to immigration to depress salaries to try to counteract the inflation they caused, then you wonder why people are turning to the right. If I lived there I’d be miserable as well, these people running the country are incompetent. Trying to ban political the party for anti-immigration and trying to link them to the nazi party and is further idiocy, the party was created when Germany brought in a million poor refugees. If Germany managed integration better it would not even exist, there should just be a cap on country of origin like the US has, Germany does have a culture that is worth attempting to maintain.
Here is the kind of comment I was referring to. General distrust leads to propaganda like targeting connecting general incompetence to anger inducing “enemy” targeting.
All of the 1st world rely on immigration to keep population growth - but in Germany it has created an enemy? Here is how the ADD garners support.
It’d called the Phillips curve, they created a labor shortage via QE. Then to entrench asset price inflation they did higher than normal immigration.
Here’s a paper on it, which outlines how wage pressure is normal, and is desirable to reverse the wealth inequality caused by asset price inflation.
All of the 1st world rely on immigration to keep population growth
No they don’t. They rely on them to meet skills shortages and sometimes use them to lower the going wage.
They are supposed to use immigration for that, bit they also use it to keep population growth, because the long term economy growth need it.
Killing nuclear was the biggest own goal in political history.
They literally made themselves economically dependent on their worse enemy.
Big brain move right there.
Fuck no!
They’re self-identifying.
We needed to execute Trump for treason, then everyone with a Maga had should have been tracked for life as potential security threats.
The Germans have gone through their MAGA phase already though, so the hope has always been they’d have their shit sorted if it happened again. Here’s hoping that proves to be true.
The US constitution kinda sucks and just trusts those in power to uphold democracy. Germany learned from Hitler that that isn’t the case, so their constitution provides multiple defences against a dictator that US lacks
Ban the shit out of these fascists mfers.
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Any follow up organization is also banned. So if a new organization forms it will be much easier to see if they are a follow up organization and dissolve it right away.
You can’t just “dissolve” fascism though. Until the underlying problem is fixed it’ll keep resurfacing.
Yes and until then we will ban them so they don’t ger funding from the state they want to destroy.
I’d love to see a conversation of smart people discussing how we solve the underlying problems of fascism
Solve anxiety. The hatred, the desire to put down others, all that is caused by anxiety short-circuiting people’s minds, acting on, put very hand-wavily, reptilian instead of higher mammalian instincts, including social ones1. Without underlying anxieties fascism has nothing to latch onto, and nothing to make even worse so it can propagate and perpetuate itself.
Key anxieties to address nowadays, and feel free to add your own, are economical security, “will I be poor in the future”, as well as social alienation, “can people be trusted”. Both require overcoming neoliberalism. Also, yes, solve anxieties regarding the future of the planet but that’s more about saving the planet so we may continue to live on it than anti-fascism for the simple reason that eco-fascism is overall negligible as a political force.
How? First of all, stop acting from anxiety.
1 Is that where the “lizard people” thing comes from?
Propaganda feeds the anxiety. We have to understand that propaganda is not free speech, and shut it down.
The other big source of anxiety is the capitalist tendency to drive working people into a situation of precariousness so that they remain compliant. Mitigating that requires a social safety net similar to that provided in northern-tier social democracies.
I never thought that I’d be impressed by soap
Exactly this happened with the extreme right in Flanders (Belgium). They were convicted for racism and promptly refounded themselves under a new name.
Ineffectual regulation doesn’t work. There needs to be more resolve.
Apparently, they have been able to not be blatantly racist enough in their new incarnation. Perhaps they should have gone more after the core leadership instead of only the party.
And where are they now?
Still being kept out of government roles, still being dangerously big. Last municipal election they got an absolute majority in one town and got included in one or two coalitions. Last Flemish elections, they were tied as the biggest party with about 25%. While the other big party is also right wing Flemish nationalist btw
The problem I see is people accepting to form coalitions with them. That is centrist (read: milder fascist) behavior.
Yeah, it was a little shocking to see this happen now. Though to be fair, it only happened with local parties that did not belong to a national umbrella party. All the parties that matter at the provincial level and above still maintain the principle of not working with them.
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Blue is the new brown.
And the afd gaining power just a symptom of the younger generation getting targeted by the camouflaged propaganda media.
Yea, we all are from all sides always, though the younger gens are far more susceptible.
It’s not even the media. There are groups targeting kids in online games. There’s a cult called 754 I think that’s the correct number. And they’re radicalizing kids.
Good and all the AfD asswipes can join the Russian infantry. Take the Die Linke with you too.
Please germany, please be based 🥺❤️ (and bad the asdf)
Maybe Germany should also focus more on creating a lot of good jobs too. There will be less people attracted to alternative parties peddling them crazy solutions to their problems
Germanst will ban every group protesting against genocide before they ban the people doing a Nazi salute.
Does it matter if its BlackRock or GoldmanSachs?
It will only serve to make AfD supporters even more convinced they are right. The leaders of the party might stay quiet but they are not that important, nobody on the top really believes their own ideology.
But the perception of being silenced by the government is a great motivator for those who feel emotionally connected to those ideas which seems to be about 20% of the German voters.
nobody on the top really believes their own ideology
Source?
But the perception of being silenced
They are constantly invited to talk shows, news interviews, get frontpages of national magazines etc. and they are still convinced they are silenced.
Do you reason with pedophiles, trying to convince them of why what they do is wrong?
Or do you at least stop them from getting material and close to kids first?
Are the Afd voters pedophiles?
If you have large part to f the population moving to support fascism, them they need to be addressed. Their real issues need to be addressed. It doesn’t just go away.
First you cordon, then you address.
And yes, fascists are the pedophiles of politics and society.
It will only serve to make AfD supporters even more convinced they are right.
Caring what the fascists think is a recipe for failure. All they respect is power. You don’t persuade them, the best you can do is behavior modification.
This only works if fascists are not the majority. But they are.
The often mentioned “silent majority” are actually latent fascists who were previously apathetic. They are awake now and have the momentum, the cultural power, and the dominant position in public discourse. Any move that validates them is dangerous.The often mentioned “silent majority” are actually latent fascists who were previously apathetic.
You saw the silent majority on the streets when that “remigration” talk leaked out of closed AfD circles: The streets were literally not big enough to contain them. 70% oppose any other party going in coalition with them (unsurprisingly, the rest are AfD, BSW, or FDP voters), about half want to see them banned, which is a question more nuanced than “I want them gone”.
I guess that after a ban, the BSW could gobble up most of that support for them. And while Wagenknecht is a clown and at least veering towards Nazbol she’s far less of a danger to democracy.
There’s only one political party in German history who banned other political parties. Just because you call a different party a fascist, doesn’t mean you get a pass to act like a fascist.
Being intolerant of fascists does not make one a fascist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
He’s MAGA
Yeah but he’s on Lemmy and engaging in discussion so there’s potentially hope
That only applies if you are the objective truth. If you are wrong, then it’s just another tool for bigotry, an excuse to ignore other opinions.
That is why it has to first be proven in a court of law
Who gets to decide who is a fascist and therefore doesn’t deserve to participate in democracy? What is the criteria for not deserving a voice? How do you define fascist? Maybe I’m cynical, but if you can eliminate popular political opposition by branding them as something, that’s a lot of motivation to brand them.
I’m not defining anything. Fascism is an already well defined term with very clear criteria, such as being opposed to democracy and replacing it with an authoratarian, one-party state. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
In Germany there is a special, independent court, at a similar level to the US supreme court but without the ability for parties to appoint the judges like they can in the US, that reveiws hard evidence and determines whether a political party can be proven to be actively trying to break the constitution (including the part that makes Germany a democracy, for example). So it’s not left up to someone’s opinion, nor can one party simply label another as fascist to ban them (like Hitler did)
This wouldn’t be a party banning another party, it would be the independent constitutional court
No the court labeled afd as “confirmed right wing extremist” and someone else decided that that meant they couldn’t participate.
Not true, there have been multiple banned parties since WW2
Yeah you are right. There have been a couple others, but quite a few attempts to ban various parties. I don’t quite understand the system and it’s possible that banning a party there isn’t near as big of a deal as it seems to me. If a party were banned in the united states, it would be very alarming. I think the only party ever banned was the communist party in 1950s, but even that is no longer really in effect.
ehhhhmmm… how about no?
