(de-news.net) – The debate in Germany over a potential ban on the AfD reveals a sharp divide within the political establishment: Greens and some political personalities of the SPD contend that legal action should be taken, especially against the party’s most radical state organizations, while Union leaders question whether the legal and evidentiary threshold has been reached. Concerns about political timing, electoral repercussions, and the AfD’s level of activism are all part of the conflict, along with constitutional issues.
Union parliamentary group leader Thorsten Frei (CDU) currently sees insufficient grounds for initiating proceedings to ban the Alternative for Germany (AfD). During the second week of August, Frei emphasized that Germany’s Basic Law explicitly provides for banning political parties, but said he could not currently envision a scenario that would justify such a step. The central issue, in his assessment, is whether the evidence already assembled by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution would meet the demanding legal standard required to sustain a prohibition case. For now, he concluded that it would not.
The question has gained renewed political prominence after Vice Chancellor and SPD leader Lars Klingbeil argued in Die Zeit that Germany should seriously examine whether the constitutional requirements for proceedings before the Federal Constitutional Court have been met. Frei’s response underscored the gap between calling for such an examination and believing that the available evidence already provides a viable basis for a ban. He stressed that a successful proceeding would require a political party to pursue an actively militant campaign against the free democratic basic order or seek to abolish it.
That standard, Frei argued, means that statements by individual politicians cannot simply be treated as evidence of the position of an entire party. Remarks by figures such as Thuringia AfD leader Björn Höcke would have to be shown to be representative and politically formative for the organization as a whole. Frei pointed to the fact that the AfD has not incorporated its allegedly anti-constitutional positions into its formal party program, which he considers an additional obstacle to establishing the necessary case at present. The distinction is significant because a prohibition would concern the party as an organization rather than merely the conduct or rhetoric of selected individuals.
Political considerations also weigh against a ban, in Frei’s view. A proceeding that lasted for years could give the AfD an opportunity to portray itself as a persecuted political movement and assume a martyr role that it could then exploit for political gain. Frei also warned that demands for prohibition proceedings from parties with substantially less electoral support than the AfD could create an unfavorable political impression. Such calls, he suggested, could be interpreted as an attempt to use constitutional mechanisms to remove an increasingly successful political competitor rather than as a purely legal response to anti-constitutional conduct.
At the same time, Frei did not portray the AfD’s development as static. He sees a continuing process of radicalization within the party, particularly toward the political right. In comparing Germany with other European countries, he noted that right-wing parties in Italy and France have, over time, moved closer to the political center, whereas the AfD has followed what he considers the opposite trajectory. In his assessment, the party’s shift to the right is continuing and may not yet have reached its endpoint.
Green Party urges legal action against AfD
Greens parliamentary executive Irene Mihalic takes a fundamentally different view. She has called for proceedings against the AfD as a whole and has rejected efforts to distinguish between individual factions, ideological currents or state-level organizations when considering the constitutional question. In her view, maintaining such distinctions risks creating the impression that only one part of the party is hostile to the constitutional order while another remains clearly within it.
Mihalic argues that this division no longer adequately reflects the AfD’s development. She has said that, while such a distinction might have been more plausible when the party was founded, the situation has since changed. In her assessment, the AfD as a whole has increasingly positioned itself in conflict with Germany’s democratic constitutional system. She has pointed to a recent legal assessment by the Society for Civil Rights as supporting that broader interpretation of the party’s conduct and ideological development.
For Mihalic, the stakes extend beyond an institutional dispute over constitutional law. She has characterized the AfD as a concrete threat to people with migrant backgrounds, LGBTQ people and political opponents. In that context, she argues that the question of a prohibition should not be left solely to political debate among the parliamentary parties. Instead, the constitutional bodies authorized to initiate such proceedings—the federal government, Bundestag or Bundesrat—should ask the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe to examine the case, and she favors a review directed at the AfD in its entirety.
The Greens have already sought to turn that position into a parliamentary initiative. Mihalic said the party had contacted the other Bundestag parliamentary groups and urged them to take the necessary steps toward proceedings. The Union, however, had not committed to supporting the effort, leaving one of the country’s largest political blocs opposed, at least for now, to moving the issue forward. That divide reflects the broader disagreement over whether the current evidence justifies a legal challenge or whether pursuing one could itself carry significant political consequences.
The debate intensified after Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) and Baden-Württemberg Prime Minister Cem Özdemir (Greens) advocated proceedings focused on AfD state associations in Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg. Those organizations have been characterized as particularly völkisch, a term used in Germany to describe an ethnic-nationalist conception of political identity.
Özdemir has sought to draw a sharp constitutional distinction between German-national conservative positions and explicitly völkisch politics. In his view, a German-national orientation, however objectionable it might be politically, could remain within the boundaries established by the constitution. Völkisch politics, by contrast, presents a different constitutional question because of its implications for the democratic order and the status of citizens and political opponents. His argument is therefore not that every right-wing or nationalist position should trigger prohibition proceedings, but that certain ideological developments can cross a constitutional threshold. Özdemir believes that the direction taken by parts of the AfD has become sufficiently völkisch to warrant consideration of proceedings at the state level. His position places particular emphasis on the distinction between political disagreement, which is addressed through elections and public debate, and conduct that could meet the constitutional conditions for banning a political party.
According to a current article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Pistorius and Özdemir have held similar views on an AfD prohibition request for some time. Their intervention has also placed the issue more visibly in the political debate surrounding upcoming state elections. The two politicians believe the question should be addressed before possible AfD electoral victories rather than deferred until afterward. They reportedly expect the controversy over a potential ban to continue following the state elections and are looking to CDU state premiers Hendrik Wüst of North Rhine-Westphalia and Daniel Günther of Schleswig-Holstein for possible support.
Overall, the Union parties, meanwhile, have rejected an AfD ban, including one directed at individual state associations, at least for the present. CDU and CSU leaders have sought to prevent the prohibition debate from becoming a factor in election campaigns in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The disagreement therefore involves not only competing interpretations of constitutional law but also differing assessments of political timing. For opponents of an immediate ban, the risks of strengthening the AfD politically are part of the calculation; for advocates, delaying the question could allow the party’s electoral position and influence to grow further.
The legal framework is set out in Article 21 of the Basic Law. Under that provision, parties are unconstitutional when their objectives or the conduct of their supporters are directed toward undermining or abolishing Germany’s free democratic basic order or endangering the country’s existence. The provision establishes a constitutional mechanism for addressing parties considered fundamentally incompatible with the democratic system, but it does not allow the Federal Constitutional Court to begin such proceedings on its own initiative.
Instead, a formal request must come from one of three constitutionally authorized bodies: the Federal Government, the Bundestag or the Bundesrat. The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe then determines whether the legal requirements for declaring a party unconstitutional have been satisfied. This procedure places the political decision to initiate a case and the judicial decision on its constitutional merits in separate stages, a distinction that remains central to the current debate over the AfD.
