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The German far-right political party, AfD, is both too big to ban and too big not to.
In the year leading up to Germany’s February elections, the far-right party Alternative for Germany was rising fast in the polls. It would ultimately increase its seats in the Bundestag from 76 to 152. But when I talked with supporters, I found that they were cynical. One of the most consistent messages I heard when I visited Germany was that the government had rigged the game against them. “It’s not just the opposing parties that don’t want us; the system itself doesn’t want us,” said a member of the crowd at a rally in Thuringia. Now that claim seems undeniable.
Last week, the German domestic spy agency Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz declared the AfD an “extremist” organization, which makes it eligible for surveillance, infiltration, and a potential outright ban. Other groups previously singled out for attention and investigation by the agency include the Islamic State, various unruly Marxist-Leninists, and the Church of Scientology. These others can boast a ragged caliphate, closets full of Che T-shirts, and an upcoming Mission: Impossible movie, respectively. But they do not have what the AfD has: nearly a quarter of the seats in the German Parliament. The AfD has already challenged the “extremist” label in court, and the BfV has withdrawn its finding until the court rules on it. The case is expected to take months, possibly years, and in the meantime will throw German politics into disarray.
The AfD hates immigration, and some of its leaders, such as Björn Höcke, have a disturbing tendency to say things that sound, if not outright Nazi, then at least Nazi-curious. If loathing immigrants and swiping right on the Third Reich is extremism, then the label does seem to fit at least part of the AfD’s leadership. The election results suggest that most Germans find these views, or the impulse to base a political party on them, repugnant. But the BfV’s actions would remove that judgment from the ballot, leaving AfD supporters unable to vote for the party and other voters unable to vote against it. Germans remember their authoritarian past, and they remember, too, that authoritarianism arrived by democratic means. These memories have led to ambivalence about democracy. Declaring a quarter of the country so extreme that the other three-quarters cannot be trusted to defeat it reflects this insecurity.
The BfV is roughly analogous to the FBI in the United States. But the FBI spies mostly to catch criminals, and it does so with, in theory, a certain amount of independence while being run by the executive branch and overseen by Congress. The BfV is not a law-enforcement agency—it does not arrest; it does not charge—and it is run and overseen by whichever party or coalition wins the latest election. Its mandate is not limited to or guided by a quest for violations of the law, but represented by the vaguer standard of “protection of the constitution.”
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Both Democrats and Republicans think, sometimes with justification, that the FBI and other agencies have been used by the party in power to investigate political opponents. In Germany, there is no doubt, because the BfV is run this way by design, and it has openly declared its finding: that the country’s main opposition party can be spied upon using aggressive and invasive measures.
Hans-Georg Maassen, who ran the BfV from 2012 to 2018 and is now head of the Values Union party, told me that the agency has gotten out of control. “Germany and Austria are the only countries in the Western world who use a domestic intelligence service to observe political opponents,” he said. “It is unthinkable in other democracies. But in Germany, it’s standard political practice.” He said that as the agency’s leader, he’d tried to end the practice, but his successors had instead expanded it. “To observe parties is a task for other parties, not for an intelligence service,” he told me.
The AfD is strongest in the former East Germany, where economic development has lagged and where older folks in particular remember the invasive investigations of the Stasi. Although the BfV is not the Stasi, the allegations it has lodged against the AfD do suggest that it is enforcing a political orthodoxy. Last year, it issued a report that accused AfD leaders of promoting an “understanding of the nation that is racist” and “based on ancestry.” It said they held “views hostile to foreigners and Muslims” and that they “accused asylum-seekers and migrants from Muslim countries of origin of cultural incompatibility and a strong propensity for crime.” In the report, the BfV cited a 2022 court case that upheld the finding that the AfD is “suspected” of extremism—one step away from the “confirmed” extremist declaration of last week—because its anti-immigrant views violate the German Basic Law’s protections of “human dignity” and equality before the law.
AfD members would welcome at least some of these accusations. The belief that Germanness has something to do with ancestry, and that recent immigrants are bad for Germany, is very much the point of the AfD. The belief that recent immigrants commit more crimes than the general population is uncontroversial; the reasons for those disparities are not. In Article 116, the German Basic Law itself refers to the concept of Germanness-by-descent. (After the Second World War, the German state included this provision to recognize the citizenship of ethnic Germans outside of Germany, especially in Soviet Bloc areas.) Until recently, no German would have been shocked by the idea that German ancestry has something to do with being German.
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A quirk in the interpretation of German law about banning political parties states that a party can’t be banned unless it is actually strong enough to threaten German democracy. Parties that are unpopular or followed by just a few yahoos, such as the odious right-wing National Democratic Party, do not rise to the level of banning. This provision contains within it the tension underlying the whole project of banning parties: Once they are big enough to ban, they are also so large that to ban them would entail undermining the will of many Germans, and the value of subjecting difficult questions to the democratic process.
At this point, the AfD is a force of that magnitude: too big to ban, and too big not to. The proper solution was political all along. The other German parties delayed their reckoning with popular discontent over immigration, and instead let the AfD dominate that issue, which heated up politically until it could not be ignored. Now a harder task will fall to the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz. He has already stumbled in efforts to show that he will reform immigration. He will have to show that his own spy agency is not just playing politics as it goes after the party that cared about immigration long before his own did—the party that is either too German, or not German enough.
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