by Tyler Durden
Authored by 'eugyppius',
Old friends may remember the farce we experienced last May, when outgoing Marshmallow Interior Minister Nancy Faeser pushed her gaggle of goons in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to upgrade their political classification of Alternative für Deutschland.
No
longer did the BfV consider the national political party to lurk under
mere “suspicion of right-wing extremism,” oh no. They announced suddenly
and with much establishment fanfare that they had determined the AfD to
be “confirmed right-wing extremists.”
Faeser and her goons hoped this new designation would edge the AfD more firmly into Evil Nazi Fascist Hitler territory in the popular mind, thereby preparing the way for banning the party. According to the dumb Gender Studies-tier retards unassailable
and unbiased experts of the BfV, the AfD were more definitely Evil,
more definitely Nazi, more definitely Fascist and more definitely Hitler
than ever before. They had such clear proofs of all the Evil Nazi
Fascist Hitlerism lurking within the AfD that they could not even reveal
them. Doing so, Faeser said, would compromise the mysterious sources
and methods of her highly sophisticated political spy agency. Instead,
the Interior Ministry leaked a classified dossier supporting the upgrade
to sympathetic media like Der Spiegel, and these media
promptly published earnest articles telling us all how absolutely
Fascist and Evil and Nazi and Hitler all the secret evidence showed the
AfD to be, because trust us bro.
What happened next is that somebody leaked the full 1,000-page dossier to the alternative news outlets Cicero and NiUS, both of which promptly published the full .pdf.It turned out to be one of the stupidest and most trivial documents I’ve ever read. The
supersecret hyperspy sources tapped by the BfV? Google and social media
posts. The supersecret hyperspy methods used by the BfV? Compiling
interminable lists of potentially untoward or possibly impolite things
AfD politicians uttered in googlable documents or on social media. It
was so bad that almost overnight the dossier destroyed much of the momentum for an AfD ban –
exactly the opposite of what its architects had intended. Even many
establishment figures quietly admitted what a travesty the whole thing
had turned out to be.
NEVERTHELESS: The establishment moved quickly to capitalise on the new extremist designation. Various state governments began plotting to cleanse the civil service of AfD members on the grounds that they were affiliates of an officially “extremist” organisation. In Rheinland-Pfalz they even toyed with the idea of illegally excluding AfD candidates from running in local elections also
on the basis of this bureaucratic designation. The Social Democrats
began pushing to initiate ban proceedings against the AfD, a move that –
if successful – would grant the left parties indefinite parliamentary
majorities both nationally and across many state parliaments, amounting to a kind of legal coup and casting us into a new DDR-light regime.
Meanwhile, the AfD filed suit with the Administrative Court in Cologne to overturn their upgraded designation because it was so obviously dumb and unfounded. They also asked the court to prohibit the
designation temporarily, while their primary lawsuit is pending – a long
involved process that will take years. The Cologne judges released
their unusually extensive 55-page decision on the temporary injunction
yesterday. For the party-banning speech-repressing opinion-monitoring
enthusiasts of Our Democracy, it is a disaster.
From the Cologne court’s press release:
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) may not classify and treat the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation until the conclusion of the main proceedings … The BfV must also refrain from publicly announcing such a classification …
In its decision today, the court has rejected the BfV’s assessment. We give the following reasons: According to the findings of the summary proceedings, there is sufficient certainty that the AfD houses some efforts directed against the free democratic basic order … These efforts, however, do not characterise the AfD such that its overall essence may be described as anti-constitutional.
That is very important.
Not only the AfD, but all political parties, have randos saying potentially or probably or even certainly anti-constitutional things.
To justify a ban, you need more than random people saying random things.
You need to show a) that the party is fundamentally opposed to the “free democratic basic order” (an ideological trinity consisting of human dignity, democracy and the rule of law), and b) that it exercises this opposition in an “aggressive” or “combative” manner. The BfV have hardly addressed b) at all, and their evidence has not convinced the court that a) applies.
To argue their case, the BfV seem to have
positively emptied their archives, submitting not only the leaked
1,000-page dossier to the court, but also an additional raft of
supporting materials running to 7,000 pages across 20 different binders
and electronic files extending to 1.5 terabytes.
The court finds that some “anti-Muslim” demands formulated by the AfD in the course of the 2025 election campaign are contrary to the German Basic Law, because these would tend to vitiate “the equal practice of religion,” but the judges also find that these are insufficient to “establish the anti-constitutional character of the party as a whole.”
The court further noted that the BfV “has not disclosed any
intelligence information … even in court proceedings” relating to
allegedly secret anti-constitutional plots within the AfD, which means
that “we cannot assume to the detriment of [the AfD] that [the party] is
pursuing such further plans internally.”
A significant prong of
the constitutional protectors’ argument held that the AfD’s advocacy of
“remigration” was itself openly unconstitutional. Importantly, the court
completely disagreed:
… [N]o sufficient conclusions can be drawn from any plans pursued by [the AfD] … with regard to so-called remigration. The vague term “remigration” does not imply a concrete political goal in the sense of undifferentiated deportations … In the absence of a more concrete explanation of specific anti-constitutional intentions with respect to implementing a … remigration policy, such intentions are not apparent.
As I said, this is only a temporary ruling, but given the devastating wording of the court’s judgment, it seems unlikely that the judges in Cologne will ultimately uphold the “extremist” designation when to comes time to decide the main case some years from now. The
constitutional protectors may also appeal this injunction, but they
would be unlikely to win, and also too I think there is a substantial
chance that their ultimate boss, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt
(CSU), directs them to let this go. Whatever happens, the case for
banning the AfD has taken a major, perhaps a fatal, blow. The
fundamental problem this whole time has been that the AfD programme is
pretty much constitutionally unassailable. Those who want to ban the
party have had to hope against hope that the constitutional protectors
could unearth secret AfD Nazi plans via their super advanced espionage
methods. Instead they’ve spent years copying and pasting Facebook posts and they have basically nothing.
This
case converges with other evidence suggesting that the German state –
while it may presently wish to ban the opposition and repress its
critics – increasingly lacks the internal resolve and coherence for this
project.
I’ll write more about that tomorrow; today’s adventures
(see below) interrupted my routine, but I wanted to get this news out
there as soon as possible.
