AfD Leak: What 421,179 Hacked Emails Show about the German Far Right
heistberlin.comSome context:
There are ongoing efforts to ban the party (through constitutional instruments created specifically after 1945 to prevent a second NSDAP or other similar anti-constitutional extremists) and there is an argument to be made that this is strategical assistance for evidence-gathering.
There has been another effort [0] collecting _public_ statements that can be used in a potential future Constitutional Court case. Depending on your stance this leak complements the ban effort or undermines its legitimacy. Note, Germany has no fruit-of-the-poison-tree evidence provisions!
There has long been sufficient material to initiate the proceedings to ban the AfD party, but the conservative parties (CDU/CSU) have so far blocked this.
All the state bodies authorized to file such a request – the Bundestag, the Bundesrat, and the Federal Government – each require a simple majority to initiate the proceedings and thus rely on the votes of the CDU.
It is also important to note that this is merely a request for an examination; the final decision rests with the Federal Constitutional Court.
There is a recent comment from a very respected lawyer about the situation, citing Göbbels: https://youtu.be/I87E0cV367I?t=11614 (use the auto-translated subtitles)
The full quote translates to something like:
"It will always remain one of the greatest ironies of democracy that it provided its own mortal enemies with the very means by which it was destroyed. As elected representatives, the persecuted leaders of the NSDAP enjoyed parliamentary immunity, a salary, and free travel passes. This shielded them from police intervention, allowed them greater latitude in what they could say compared to ordinary citizens, and—to top it all off—ensured that their activities were financed by their very enemies. This democratic stupidity could be exploited to great advantage."
Why banning a political party and not the political views? It seems easier to punishing people based on what they say and write and throw them into prison, rather than trying to keep the same people from assembling together as a group and having people vote for them.
Make it illegal to hold and express the view that people should not be allowed to wearing the burqa. If someone is express that they are against same-sex marriage or against circumcision for non-medical reasons, let them sit in jail for a few years. Why allow people to legally hold those view and express them but then forbid them from being political about it?
let me introduce you to this slope, its pretty slippery but i am sure its fine. Nobody has ever slid down such a slippery slope before...
refresher course on reality: you want these views out in public so you can publicly ridicule the people expressing them. You send them to jail they learn from the real criminals how to be really criminal with their views and come out worse than before. That these views are taking hold more and more now tells you there is a legitimate problem not being addressed and either the view is some shade of correct or, more likely, the view is an incorrect solution to the actual problem that won't work. Either way you have to figure it out and fix it. Repressing the view just makes the eventual result more violent without solving the underlying issue causing the view
Or… there is an intentionally manufactured problem, amplified and misrepresented by foreign adversaries through the internet and the mouths of the complicit elite, in an attempt to subvert democracy and rot societies from the inside out.
It seems quite worrying for the government to forbid certain views. For instance, some religious groups teach that same-sex marriage is wrong; would banning such views not infringe upon their religious freedom?
If those religious groups has views that undermining the constitutional order, then Germany could prosecute them. That is the underlying legal argument. The basic law give every German the right to any belief or non-belief, but then it also limit that freedom in case it undermines the law itself. Does the religion opposes human dignity, do it support democracy, and do it support the rule of law in Germany. Teaching that say that same-sex marriage is wrong could be seen as opposing human dignity, thus not allowed under the basic law.
Because you need the organization to cause change. China figured this out. If everyone wanted something to happen, say the end of Covid restrictions, even the CCP wasn't capable of stopping that uprising. But if it's just a few weirdos spouting their ideas online or off, the local police can easily handle them. Looking at the videos out of France, it's not as bad as it looks, but also, organized via group messages/texts, but they're not trying to get people to get people to pass laws in a calm, diplomatic fashion.
As far as jailing people because they think or say the wrong thing? omfg no thank you! Saudi Arabia almost just beheader someone for that kind of WrongThink.
Do we have any example of a "good" country that has banned political parties for holding the wrong political views? The most recent example I can remember is Russia when they prevented a anti-war party for participating in the election, but I doubt that is example that people want Germany to follow.
The German constitution allow the legal system to limit the fundamental rights of individuals who are found to be undermining the constitutional order. It can punish people as well as preventing people to form political parties. If the political views are so bad that they are seen as undermining the constitutional order, allowing people to hold those views and express them but not to form parties seems odd and counter-intuitive. If the views are that bad they should not be expressed regardless if its done with or without a party hat.
Spain banned parties that didn't explicitly condemn terrorism (in the context of Basque independece-related terrorism, but applies to all terrorism in Spain).
Up until then, certain politicians wouldn't explicitly support, but also wouldn't condemn Basque-independence-related terrorism when asked. Thankfully we're now past this! The terror group was dissolved.
Probably the law was a good thing? The danger being 'who decides what terrorism is', but I suppose the definition in the law is fairly clear (haven't read it nor plan to).
Two examples come from Germany's past - The KDP/Communist Party was banned in 1956, and by counterexample, Germany considered banning the neo-Nazi NPD party, but decided they were too politically irrelevant to bother banning them (2017). Turkey had the Welfare Party banned in 1998 but that one's a bit stickier.
That is a strange collection of hills to die on or to defend by blatantly illiberal means.
If Western Civilization prides itself on classically liberal freedoms, it cannot claim to do so while limiting them, especially for the sake of religion which is antithetical to the French forefathers of classical liberalism. The right to be "Free" from all religion is given, and therefore speech must be stronger than the right to practice any religion.
It's classically liberal to allow anyone to follow their religion, it's not classically liberal to restrict freedom of speech for the sake of religion, much less for the sake of a foreign religion.
> There has long been sufficient material to initiate the proceedings to ban the AfD party, but the conservative parties (CDU/CSU) have so far blocked this
While this might be true, it's at least half a lie – SPD, Grüne and SED could have initiated proceedings anytime targeting one of AfD's state chapters in Saarland, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower-Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg, or Berlin (2016-2023). They didn't. You should explain why their reasons to not do it have been valid, while not being valid reasons for non-leftist parties. Also, SPD isn't even trying to convince CDU/CSU right now... they benefit from the Brandmauer, because without AfD, there would be a clear majority for non-left parties and no one would need a coalition with the SPD.
> note that this is merely a request for an examination; the final decision rests with the Federal Constitutional Court.
Again, true, but also half a lie. It's not merely a request in the sense that there's no risk associated with it. The backlash of a failure to ban the AfD would be ginormous - the situation would be much worse than it is right now. That - and the fact that SPD and Green benefit from the Brandmauer - is the reason why even center left parties don't really move forward with a ban.
> While this might be true, it's at least half a lie – SPD, Grüne and SED could have initiated proceedings anytime targeting one of AfD's state chapters in Saarland, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower-Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg, or Berlin (2016-2023). They didn't.
While this might be true, I'd argue it's more than half a lie:
1. The SED couldn't have initiated anything since it doesn't exist anymore, but you know that.
2. Your wording implies that between 2016-2023 your implied parties only had a chance to initiate in the states you mentioned, but you selected both the states and the timeframe around the proceedings that they did initiate.
3. Your chosen timeframe also conveniently ignores the AfD's escalations over the last 2-3 years. There are a lot of people who were convinced of the need to ban the AfD explicitly because they started calling for removing people's citizenships (both of naturalized citizens and German-born ones) for populist non-reasons, which is overstepping our constitution.
> 1. The SED couldn't have initiated anything since it doesn't exist anymore, but you know that.
This is blatantly wrong. The SED has never dissolved - all they've done was changing the name.
> 2. Your wording implies that between 2016-2023 your implied parties only had a chance to initiate in the states you mentioned, but you selected both the states and the timeframe around the proceedings that they did initiate.
The years refer to Berlin only, hence the Oxford comma. In Berlin, they can initiate proceedings again once they've formed a coalition.
> 2. (...) but you selected both the states and the timeframe around the proceedings that they did initiate
No, I didn't. I chose the states where these three parties form a government without any other party right now, with the exception of Berlin, for which I gave the timeframe. Also, feel free to point to the proceedings "that they did initiate" before 2016, after 2023, and/or in other states. You won't find any.
> 3. Your chosen timeframe also conveniently ignores the AfD's escalations over the last 2-3 years.
Again, the timeframe refers only to Berlin. All other Länder are governed by a coalition of the mentioned parties right now, so they could initiate proceedings right now.
In that case you're blatantly lying, because in 4 out of the 6 states you mentioned, proceedings have been initiated by the parties you implied.
Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony): https://www.landtag-niedersachsen.de/Drucksachen/Drucksachen...
Bremen: https://www.bremische-buergerschaft.de/dokumente/wp21/land/d...
Hamburg: https://www.buergerschaft-hh.de/parldok/dokument/102051/23_0...
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern: https://www.dokumentation.landtag-mv.de/parldok/dokument/648...
And just for completeness' sake, Berlin 2025: https://pardok.parlament-berlin.de/starweb/adis/citat/VT/19/...
Landtag, Bürgerschaft, Bürgerschaft, Landtag, Abgeordnetenhaus – are you aware of the concept of division of powers? These parliamentary initiatives don't matter in any way. They are cheap talk or "Gratismut" because they have no legal consequences, and they do absolutely NOT initiate a proceeding. The government of a state must petition at the BVerfG. You had figured that out by yourselves if you had put in the effort to read any of the links you've posted: none of them creates a law that forces the state's government to act in Karlsruhe. These are "Entschießungsanträge". Nothing more than smoke shows to impress people like you who don't care about the rule of law, or don't know any better. You're really easy to impress and to mislead.
So let me ask you again: why were they willing to create Entschließungsanträge, but why weren't they willing to go to Karlsruhe?
Not sure those efforts will lead anywhere, as the conservative CxU party is already positioning themselves to be the "rational right-wing voice", parroting the same messages but more eloquently.
If it progresses like it ALWAYS does (EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.), the center-right party copies the far-right messages in hopes of gaining the votes of the far-right voters, then enters a coalition with them as the "voice of reason to reign them in", to ultimately just achieve normalization of those narratives, a hollowed-out democracy, destroyed political discourse and an empowered far-right party.
But one can hope, that THIS time it will be different...
> the center-right party copies the far-right messages in hopes of gaining the votes of the far-right voters, then enters a coalition with them as the "voice of reason to reign them in", to ultimately just achieve normalization of those narratives, a hollowed-out democracy, destroyed political discourse and an empowered far-right party.
Now imagine you had only a center-right and a far-right party, and you have the U.S. :/
But what is discussed here is not banning far right parties but a specific one that goes further than what should be allowed legally. From what I’ve read AfD goes way beyond what say Le Pen or Meloni parties propose.
Welcome in current Polish politics. Konfederacja from our ground in currently playing to be buddy buddy with winning party and is treated as semi part of current government
This is a genuine question to probe the solution space to the politcal problems in Germany: What do you think would be the right thing to do THIS time?
The problem in Germany has been that there was no center-right party. Center-left (SPD) and center-right parties (CDU with Merkel) met somewhere in the middle, which was a problem for right-of-center voters - there are many of them and they needed something reasonable to vote for and there wasn't. The CDU moved more to the right again, and it should because there was a giant hole in the political spectrum.
Well, someone has to represent these voters, or they will co-opt another party or put up their own candidate. And the government can’t just keep banning them, or they’ll catch bystanders (“dog-whistles”) and look super illegitimate (when you prosecute people for holding an empty sign, like Russia, you’re the baddie). Already I believe banning the AfD is stupid and would backfire egregiously in a few years at most.
Ultimately, you can’t ban ideas in a democracy, unfortunately even the idea to abolish it. What you can do it make that process harder and slower, so your opponents lose power before they succeed. Or, you know, convince people to drop the idea altogether.
> "Ultimately, you can’t ban ideas in a democracy, unfortunately even the idea to abolish it."
What you can do though, is destroy the foundation of democracy by being tolerant towards discrimination, for the sake of not "banning ideas"
--> "Why not turn people who are not able to work anymore into a nutricious paste for others? It was just a question! You can't silence me, this is a democracy!!"
It goes both ways: you can also destroy the foundation by being too intolerant, suspecting your friends (or they start suspecting you), leading to a Reign of Terror.
You can’t ban ideas, because they will hide behind other ideas, until you ban everything. If the AfD is banned and voters start holding blank pieces of paper and posting *** like in Russia, everyone knows what they mean, but will you start arresting people holding blank pieces of paper and posting *** like in Russia?
> It goes both ways: you can also destroy the foundation by being too intolerant, suspecting your friends (or they start suspecting you), leading to a Reign of Terror.
But in this case, just listening to them is enough. They're openly calling for violations of our constitution. How much longer do we have to wait before we may take their threats seriously?
If you arrest them, they will quickly stop calling for violations of the constitution, but they won’t stop. Would you rather they act in the open, or with minimal plausible deniability, still recruiting?
The first step, arresting the most obvious, won’t lead to a Reign of Terror on its own. But I don’t think it will be effective either.
We're not talking about arrests, but about banning the party (and successor parties, which is a specific and well-defined legal concept). Since this prevents them from using their established structures and connections, new rightwing parties would have a chance to establish themselves without immediately being taken over by the extreme right again.
The comment at the top of this chain ("If it progresses like it ALWAYS does...") is predicting that CxU will be taken over if AfD is banned.
It predicts that first the CDU will form a coalition with the AfD. If we ban the AfD beforehand, this can't happen.
"far right" as a term can cover a multitude of things, some quite reasonable and some that you don't really want.
What 'quite reasonable' things have been labeled far right?
Controlling the borders and who gets in.
Every ruling party of every country on Earth already does that.
'I don't like who they let in' is an entirely different criticism from 'They let anyone in!'
It's dishonest to pretend that the latter is happening.
Not a rightwing idea.
However, violence, intimidation and human rights violations during immigration and customs enforcement in order to pump hateful and jingoistic populist support is a rightwing idea. The steelman for it is that it “intimidates” would-be immigrants, but the counterargument is that it’s senseless strongman violence enacted on desperate people[1] running from terrible situations that ironically the US have had a direct hand in manufacturing.
This is quite common to far-right rhetoric:
Edit: [1] and once you’ve built your apparatus for violence against migrants, and you’ve successfully dissuaded the migrants who are marginally less desperate, you’re now committing heinous crimes against the most desperate migrants, in a vicious feedback loop of unimaginable suffering. Like forcing a woman and her child who were fleeing sex trafficking into a camp under fluorescent lights where the woman will be raped, her child taken away from her, and both ending up with substandard care for infectious diseases that they catch.- You agree that we should [very mild and centrist idea, commonplace across the world] - Good, now that you agree then you should have no opposition to [human atrocities]That's neither a left nor right position. Many extreme capitalists, a right wing ideology, support open borders. Meanwhile China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam etc do not seem to have open borders / liberal migration policies
As a Brit, sending the Africans arriving in small boats illegally home rather than spending £200k a head getting them housing and the like?
If it costs you 200k pounds to house a single person, it sounds like the main issue isn't the immigrant/refugee but your economic system. What makes that far right is blaming the other for your society's greater ills
No it costs £200k because we have decent housing and services. What is so wrong with legal immigration rather than illegal?
The trouble with getting all this is terrible with normal law enforcement is the voters then elect Trumps because they are fed up with it.
> What is so wrong with legal immigration rather than illegal?
Nothing, but you have to be sure when they say "we want to get rid of the illegal immigrants" they don't really mean "we want to make all immigration from shithole countries illegal and get rid of people from those places", because they like to play those word games. This is what happened in the US.
People married to immigrants, who love immigrants, who work with immigrants, and even immigrants themselves heard Trump say "We want to deport criminal immigrants" and voted for that.
Next thing you know they're deporting your wife. Then they start chasing away foreign students, and companies who want to work with and hire foreigners are put on shit lists. Then they start narrowing pathways to legal immigration to create more strain on the system. Then they remove protected status from legal immigrants creating a population overnight who are illegal. Then they start looking at modifying the Constitution to change what makes someone a citizen in the first place, and whether they can retroactively strip people of that right. Then they start looking at naturalized citizens to denaturalize them.
Eventually they start going after political opponents who are immigrants, raiding their homes and threatening to deport them and their families.
These are not hypotheticals, it's where the US went in fewer than 2 years since giving the "just no illegal immigration, what's wrong with that?" crowd free reign to do whatever they want. And we specifically got here by taking the reasonable idea that illegal immigration is undesirable and running with it until the anti-immigration problem is far worse than the illegal immigration problem.
So if you think 200k to house an immigrant is bad, if your country is anything like the US (it is) soon enough you're paying billions upon billions for an unaccountable domestic paramilitary force that deports people to foreign torture prisons and executes citizens in the streets. Then you have a real problem.
Yeah but Trump got in partly because Biden didn't do common sense stuff to keep things under control. I remember watching this 60 minutes bit on China running package asylum tours to the US Mex border and thinking this is dumb, Trump will win at this rate https://youtu.be/M7TNP2OTY2g
I'm a Brit and anti Trump and not too worried about immigration but you've got to have some common sense.
Right and they will common sense their way right to a secret police force. Because it's common sense that immigrants are dangerous and must be excluded from society.
At the end of the day, that administration ended with the most comprehensive immigration reform in decades being tanked by Trump because he wanted to run on immigration being a problem. He told his party to kill the bill, and they did. Nothing common sense about that.
The AfD is clearly anti-democratic and will try to destroy our society if they are voted into power. CDU/CSU makes terrible politics but they are not fascist.
People putting those parties into the same category is a significant part of the problem.
If you read it again you may notice that I didn't put them into the same category.
CDU/CSU will try to take the same topics the AfD used to enrage its voter-base and will present itself as the "rational, conservative and experienced" alternative to the "concerns of the voter".
This is the process which will cause CDU/CSU to not publicly condemn the AfD and its narratives, will make the CDU/CSU to "sacrifice" themselves as the coalition partner who will "control" the AfD, secretly hoping to convert their voters into CDU/CSU voters while AfD destroys itself due to its lack of skills to actually deliver in government.
In the end the AfD MAY or MAY NOT actually collapse if they are forced to deliver on their unrealistic promises. But it won't matter, because #1 the party will not die because it will present itself as the victim, and #2 the whole exercise will do such a substantial damage to political discourse and democracy that it will take decades to recover from it.
Again, one can hope that THIS TIME it will be different...
This is what triggered my reaction:
> parroting the same messages but more eloquently.
But you are right, that was not the point you made. To the contrary, it's about the difference of AfD and CxU.
I fear what you write might turn out to be adequate.
To add to that: https://afd-verbot.de/
A bunch of AfD members self-reported their anti-constitutional statements to Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, an organization that again and again hilariously exposes AfD and their technological (and not only) illiteracy.
Isn't banning them acting like a Nazi, itself?
A better way to deal with extremism is to spread the wealth. The Elites just want us fighting amoungst ourselves.
Article without wall: https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/20/hackers-steal-421000-ema...
And the whole thing is here: https://www.hexane.cc/
And a [flagged] discussion linking to the source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50157664 (13 hours ago, 69 comments)
> This site is an index. The complete original emails — full headers, bodies and attachments, with DKIM signatures intact — are in the torrent.
Weird, if the original messages have been published, why do both OP and the EuroNews article linked by the GP say that "Hackers have published 281 GB of AfD emails as AI summaries" and "A website published what it said were summaries of some of the emails but not the original messages"?
That's not the whole thing. Looks like it's mostly meta data. The whole thing is some 200G+ bittorrent.
I have yet to see any actual data of this leak, even though it's all over the news.
Which is also linked on the site
This is an entirely different article than the OP
Yes, obviously. Another article on the same news but readable without registration.
Not enough details
Thanks!
To me it seems that a topic that is both popular and a taboo is bound to cause issues, one way or another.
There is little competition for taboo topics in politics, so those who lean into them become a kind of a monopoly for these issues. They don't need to play nice to compete, because they are the sole provider.
In Germany, immigration is the most popular issue and also a taboo. AfD has a complete monopoly on it. They get away with the baggage because for a large share of voters, the alternative just does not exist.
AfD also self-censors. They frame the whole anti-immigration debate as anti-Muslim/asylumseeker, but if you read between the lines they are making arguements that apply to pretty much everyone who isn't German.
So they frame the anti-immigrant debate as if they are fighting to kick out the Syrian asylum seeker who hasn't worked a day since he arrived in 2015. But in truth, they are basically saying, "we don't want too many foreigners, especially ones that don't look German". This applies to pretty much all the legal immigrants in Germany.
Nations should act in the interests of their people. Not everyone else.
What are the interests of their people?
Nations are a race to the bottom in 2026. We find more divisions, on purpose, than things to bring us together.
Politicians and capitalism figured out that division is engaging for the loudest people, which is profitable.
Using nationalism, the flag, etc are very very useful tools for politicians, capitalism and bad actors. Nobody wants to be say they aren't a patriot.
Israel, right now, is claiming to be acting in the best interests of its people. Would Palestinians agree? Race to the bottom logic, we will destroy ourselves before we give up our flags, it seems.
As developed nations destroy the environment, where are the people who had no say in that supposed to go? Who bears that responsibility? It certainly won't be the developed nations, which will act in the best interest of their people and deny entry to the climate refuges their citizens created with the latest plastic garbage that became cool on TikTok.
> Would Palestinians agree?
Do you think that the leadership in Gaza acted in the best interests of its people?
If they had, Gaza would’ve looked very differently today.
I'm not sure restricting immigration or being selective who is especially bad and pretty much every country does it to some extent. It's other stuff associated with that like buddying up with / getting paid by Putin, trying to overthrow democracy and the like that is more of a problem.
The entire leak is available here: https://www.hexane.cc/
>Internal AfD thread reveals party split over expelling a member for antisemitic writings and a plan to use Israeli government contacts to whitewash AfD antisemitism accusations.
The irony. All those parties really have no beliefs or principles, they only desire power and to use it for themselves. One may wonder what got so many people to decide those entities would deserve their vote more than the other establishment.
Excellent find. Confirms what I've suspected for years.
Article without the e-mail wall: https://vovavili.github.io/afd-leak-article/
> "as AI summaries"
Why not publish the actual emails? Why do they need to be summarised, perhaps incorrectly?
The actual emails can be accessed through the torrent. Although I can't imagine just publishing the emails in their entirety would be more resource/labor intensive than publishing individual AI summaries of each.
But legally pretty perilous regarding copyright and personality rights.
Considering the emails were originally accessed through illegal hacking, I doubt copyright and personality rights(?) are a factor in any way.
The hacker can remain anonymous, the publisher is easily sued.
Good luck suing the site that's hosted anonymously. I'm sure that won't be a futile legal exercise
Originals are in the torrent
To be able to browse by category and summary instead of just persons and dates, to then review the original documents: https://www.hexane.cc/
Quote from the website:
"This is an index. The original messages — full headers, bodies, attachments, byte for byte — are in the torrent, inside standard .mbox files. Download the archive, open those files in any mail client, and you have exactly what the party's servers held.
Nothing on this site replaces that, and nothing on this site should be cited as a primary source."
Sounds interesting, but this put me off: "You've read 21% Give us your email to read the full story"
You gotta respect the honesty.
Sweden is fairly well know for its public access to official records, and any email sent to an official position in government is part of the public accessible record. Politicians however all have private emails and are users of instance messages services that are not part of the public record. Public access is also only for the public role in government, not for example the role of being the party leader.
Would it be a good thing or bad thing if this was scaled up so email servers and instance messages services was all public if the message involved a member of a political party, without allowing any back channel or ways to avoid the public record?
It is a cat-and-mouse game. In the UK, when email rules started getting enforced, politicians moved to WhatsApp and then Signal. If Signal becomes subject to enforcement, they will probably find other ways; and the collateral damage will likely be that everyone's messages will become fair game even more than it already is.
The reality is that backchannels have always existed. People used to meet discreetly or through emissaries; or had phone calls from secure lines; etc. There is so much that we will never know, even about times that are well-documented.
To be honest, I am not a big fan of "thoughtcrime" being pursued. Let them be racist if they want to; we should make sure the population is smart enough to reject racism on its own. Maintaining a working democracy requires some violence, sure, but if we over-use it it will stop being a democracy.
I largely agree with you, but the problem is when they try to get away with being racist in private and hide or obscure their views in public.
What is phenomenally stupid is that the UK is a major player in demanding encryption backdoors.
Same thing in the Netherlands. I believe our previous prime minister (now secretary general of NATO) even used an extremely old phone which can only keep a 20 message history to have a “plausible” excuse why he can’t comply with the requirements.
These types of shenanigans were even named after him, “Rutte doctrine”.
He might have just been hooked on snake.
I do think politicians should waive some privacy rights when elected. Same thing for their bank accounts and other assets.
> I do think politicians should waive some privacy rights when elected. Same thing for their bank accounts and other assets.
This would make surveillance laws socially much more acceptable. The politicians will claim:
- "We are surveilled anyway, so we can pass surveillance laws against citizens, too.", or
- "The citizens really ask for surveillance laws against specific groups (in this case: politicians). So, we will, of course, give the citizens what they want and pass surveillance laws against potential terrorists/child abusers/[whatever is currently fashionable]".
If you consider privacy or the right not to be surveilled to be important, this better should hold for the enemy (politicians).
> “The citizens really ask for surveillance laws against specific groups (in this case: politicians).”
?? The root of the idea is not bi-directional. Politicians have a particular type of job: public service. It’s this “job” that requires the transparency.
And not transparency into their public life. Though, as a public figure if your private life becomes embarrassing, or salacious you’re guaranteed to have news hounds on your trail. Not least because your public service rivals will use whatever they can to discredit you in the court of public opinion.
It’s the same for the work product. All of the material of governance should be the “property” of the people governed.
Can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
> Though, as a public figure if your private life becomes embarrassing, or salacious you’re guaranteed to have news hounds on your trail.
This is like: if you engage in anti-social behaviour or plan some crime, you deserve to have hounds (law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies) on your trail because of surveillance data that was gathered about you.
> Can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
This is like the political argument: "If you have nothing to hide, why are you opposed to the new surveillance law?"
In the first instance, I was making a statement about human nature, and not a moral justification.
And in the latter my statement is true by definition. A tautology.
Really, I don’t know what you were hoping to accomplish with those similes, but they’re simply not equivalent logically.
But I understand you disagree.
In this email leak, it is all emails from members of the party, not just elected officials. It is also emails sent from the outside to party members. Is that going too far? In term of transparency, allowing the public to see everything that happens and communicate within a political party would give some insight in what kind of people a party is made from.
It is definitely an interesting discussion to have in where the lines should be drawn in transparency and public insight into political landscape and behavior inside it. In Sweden, every person, regardless of position, has their income as public information. How much a person pay it taxes is also public information, so in some sense you can guess how much assets a person own and how much they have in the bank based on what they declared.
It wasn't so long ago in America that having a private email server was actually the main complaint about a presidential candidate. Everyone knows that they all do it one way or another.
That was never the "main complaint". It was just a complaint or the most convenient complaint at the time.
Conservatives are vibe haters. They feel something is wrong and will figure out how to justify their feelings. The email server was just one of many excuses to dislike Hillary. But it was never the "main" one. It was just one that gained a lil traction.
Hillary also caught crap for Benghazi, her husband, her aides, her outfits, etc. It never ends with conservatives because how they feel is as important as reality. They'll find anything to justify their vibes.
I think transparency in government is really important, but I don't think making ~all communication between officials public is the way. For the well behaved people it has all sorts of funny second-order effects, like people being reluctant to ask questions which might make them look silly in case they're taken out of context. For the poorly behaved they'll just work around it.
You cannot prevent private communication. It is just not possible to stop people from finding ways to exchange information in nonpublic ways.
Sure, you can make it the law, but technically there are infinite ways to get around it, including ones that are impossible to get rid off, like using the shared folders on systems that are non-publik for safety reasons.
Would it be a good thing or bad thing if this was scaled up so email servers and instance messages services was all public if the message involved a member of a political party, without allowing any back channel or ways to avoid the public record?
They did this in the Netherlands and the result is that politicians started sending voice notes...
You also sometimes need to be able to just discuss stuff, privately. Not all phrases uttered in the context of government do well when interpreted by the general public.
Just start the process to ban this party already. There is enough evidence that they are enemies of our constitution.
They just won a state election a few weeks ago, and they're also ahead in nation-wide polls - how can you ban a party that receives the majority vote of the population?
If the party is actively working, in a combative and aggressive manner, to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany, the constitution allows for this party to be banned.
Popularity isn't a limit here, at least not in this direction. If the party were irrelevant, it would prevent the ban since the party would not be able to achieve those anti-constitutional goals anyway.
You're not protecting democracy by not letting people vote for the only party that even pretends to care about their concerns. If you want people to vote for other parties then those parties should change to serve the people again instead of trying to make the people serve them.
Different talking points. A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic. People need to be protected from that no matter who or how popular they are.
>A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic.
Does AfD actually do that, though?
This is a bad faith response. Don't feed the troll
Even if it's in bad faith, that doesn't make it invalid, and internet argument rules require you continue to engage.
The thing that invalidates it is that its a classic right wing troll tactic that actively hurts actual discussion of serious topics. I think I'll rise above internet argument rules this time and exercise free will
Free will is the most expensive thing in the world.
Only one instance can answer that, the Bundesverfassungsgericht. Getting that answer is part of the process to ban a party. Some people might not want that question answered.
Yes, they do that by fearmongering, calling the current government a "cartel", as if such a level of corruption could only arise due to current democratic processes.
So talking shit about other parties and/or alleging there's a conspiracy to keep them out of power (ie. brandmauer) should be enough to get them barred for being "anti-democratic"? That seems a hilariously low bar and totally arbitrary. It's not exactly an unpopular talking point on the left that politics are being secretly controlled by The Billionaires™ (or Israel). Should they be barred as well?
If it can be shown that left-wing politicians in key positions of their party want to abolish core concepts of the democracy or constitutionally guaranteed rights: sure.
Why are the goalposts getting randomly nudged around? First it was
>A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic.
Then it was
>fearmongering, calling the current government a "cartel",
And now you're saying
>abolish core concepts of the democracy or constitutionally guaranteed rights
In other words, it went from "afd wants to get rid of democracy" to "afd's policies breaks the constitution". Of course you guys are different people and are entitled to your own opinions, but it's tiring arguing on a slippery topic that keeps on getting redefined.
Nobody is nudging anything.
If you wish to quote me, then do it accordingly: the AfD is blaming the established democratic processes for the current "cartel" situation. As if that's the only thing to blame, and not that the AfD is not willing to collaborate with other democratic parties or even respect the democratic process.
You are right, my answer didn't account for the specific citation you were answering to. Sorry.
Of course democracy is being protected, when it is clear such a party is being actively used and supported by foreign actors which have no right to vote in the affected country. People are being manipulated. The law comes first, then, people can choose. It's why a judicial branch exists.
Well, actually it is.
The other option has been tried 100 years ago and didn't go so well.
> If you want people to vote for other parties then those parties should chagne to serve the people again instead of trying to make the people serve them.
This doesn't work when the party doesn't serve the people in the first place.
It doesnt even help most of their voters.
You're not protecting democracy either by letting people vote on a party that aims to undermine said democracy.
There are democratic parties that care about people's economic concerns. Just because they get discredited by extremist trolls doesn't mean they don't exist.
Pretending to care is worse than not pretending to care.
It's hard to work against pretense, because pretending is lying, and shortcutting reality is hard to compete with, if people start to believe in the lie.
For example: I can promise to gift everyone a unicorn for upvoting this comment (thanks in advance!). Instead of working on a concept of how to make that happen, I can instead just pretend to work on making that happen and mostly work on selling that to you.
It's not necessarily easy, but much easier.
That's how we got literal Hitler back in the days, I'm not sure your argument is very strong in practice
Right wing talking points and moving the goal posts. The constitution comes first. Popularity is not a shield. We have to ban them, and ban them fast. Irrelevant what people think, there is a judicial process exactly to avoid this empasse. The reason this is unpopular is because every coward party politician in power is worried about their own electoral consequences for supporting this process. Cowards who will go down in history as the vile scum who let it happen again.
“party is actively working, in a combative and aggressive manner, to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany”
You declared it, so it must be true.
If the majority of citizens want a thing but somehow the few elites ban that thing, it can, often does, and probably should result in a violent uprising. Every time this happens in history we praise the rebels. So I have to say that if AfD gets banned I will not be surprised or upset if politicians end up murdered over it.
If people dont want democracy they should be able to choose so. Its clear that democracy has proven its failure for long term planning and useless bureocracy.
That is not how the German constitution is set up. You can do what you wish in your country, but here the "freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung" is not up for debate. There are also specific clauses in the constitution that cannot be amended or changed, one of them ensures Germany is a democracy.
> If people dont want democracy they should be able to choose so.
Debatable. One of the core ideas of democracy is to protect minorities. Democracy has been built around the concept that a majority cannot restrict basic rights of minorities. Arguably no one should be allowed to create a system which allows the violation of basic human rights of minorities.
The core principle of democracy is doing what is popular, not what is right.
The idea that democracy is synonymous with the current neoliberal order is nonsense.
At what point does a minority become a majority? Is that defined?
I invite you to look up those two words in literally any handy dictionary. Their definitions are quite uncomplicated.
We have a "minority" which votes en masse and can sway the results of an election.
Is that still a minority? I invite you to introspect more. It's not complicated either.
You are using the general term "minority" without context. That is intentionally deceitful.
A voting minority cannot by itself gain power in a democratic election.
A population minority may vote with, against, or mixed versus the eventual majority. It is not the same as active participation in voting.
It is mathematically possible when voters are pooled into districts, you create super districts to concentrate the opposition, then create local majorities in the remaining districts.
This is the essence of gerrymandering and why only ~10% of US house races are competitive. It's related to why there are only seven swing states in the US for our only national election, which should be changed to a national popular vote.
Vote banks. Look it up.
Counting.
10% is all you need as a vote bank to flip an election.
if a person doesn't like democracy then they should simply not vote
I told the leopard I did not consent to my face being eaten, but it ate my face anyway.
If the majority of German voters want "to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany", then is it not their democratic right to do so?
I'm confused, do you seriously think the AfD runs on phrases like "we want to get rid of the democratic system"?
It's actually quite the opposite, they are running on things like a direct democracy[0], with phrases such as "Wir sind überzeugte Demokraten"[1] (eng: We are confident democrats). And they do that for good reason, as running a party that openly wants to abandon the democratic process would be against the constitution.
[0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_f%C3%BCr_Deutschla...
[1]: https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Programm_AfD_D...
No, because it may cause the violation of basic human rights of minorities.
However, it is in our democratic right to fight parties that are anti constitutional. It's in the constitution.
The rest of the world did object the last time we did that. I'd prefer if we don't try that again, and our constitution is specifically set up to prevent this.
No, article 20 of the German constitution forbids this, and article 79 forbids changing article 20 in the way you suggest.
Edit: There is a loophole, though. Article 146 allows the German people to replace the constitution in its entirety.
There is an extralegal loophole as well. There always is; it's the explicit motivation behind the USA's 2nd Amendment.
History should be a lesson on why. Wouldn't be the first time a German far right party became a dictatorship from a minority rule.
The exact purpose of a constitution is to protect people from voting their rights away. There is lots of history establishing why successful democracies need strong constitutions.
Because Germany has laws specifically to ban parties that are shown to undermine democratic order, specifically to stop another situation where they gain a majority vote.
> Because Germany has laws specifically to ban parties that are shown not to be working in the best interest of the people
The laws don't work like that, otherwise we arguably would not have any parties left.
You're right, I've updated my comment with the correct wording
That is not the criteria of banning a party. There is the Verfassung or constitution. If you work towards the abolition of the constitution, then you will get punished.
And that AfD is against the best interest of the people, i guess, you can not be serious. It is a populist party that picks up all the things that people are not happy about and are popular, but ignored. It is actually in the very interest of the people who vote for them. But of course scary for the people, who get voted out. Majority wins.
Just because people think something and it becomes popular doesn't make it in their best interest.
Who is to judge? From my perspective i see everyone else walking in a wrong direction. And from theirs probably me plus everyone else. The outcome will only be known in the future. The system adapts. For some it works, for others it doesnt. That's democracy. Got to live with what is maybe not in my interest, when other people vote for their own and are a majority. That's why people leave countries and hopefully find other places.
They don't get a majority. They get 28% of the votes at current polls.
Germans, of all people, should know the danger.
Some of them know the exact danger, and want it to happen because they assume they will be part of the in-group.
So should Jews/israealis but who is genociding right now?
Yes they should also know.
Democracy isn't two wolves and a sheep voting about what's for dinner.
Just ask yourself if you would be ok with the majority of the population voting to abolish private property. Or Islamists voting to end votes. Or men voting to remove the voting rights of women.
Read the definition of that word. It literally is. And strict democracy is therefore a bad system of governance.
"Democracy" is not synonymous with "good".
>Read the definition of that word. It literally is.
Let's turn to an actual dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/democracy-and-republ...
Not a dictionary, but an article from a company that sells dictionaries. It's sad that you don't even understand the definition of a dictionary.
well for example in Romania (EU member state), they canceled the presidential elections (2024) after they were won by a person no one knew anything about.
he posted & advertised heavily nationalistic videos on tiktok and gained huge following.
court said the election had been affected by irregularities, alleged foreign interference, and problems with campaign financing and online campaigning.
You're holding up unelected judges overturning an election as a good example of democracy?
Afaik, didn't the Romanian election also feature Russian money literally buying votes?
I.e. people asking at the polling places who was going to pay them the money they'd been promised
[Edit: nope, that was neighboring Moldova in 2024]
It does beg a question of how to run an election as a smaller state when faced with overwhelming propaganda from a much larger one (the US or Russia).
That's never not been true, I suppose, but with large unregulated, privately-controlled social media platforms it feels more pressing.
How does one run a "fair" election if the voters are being irradiated with one-sided messaging sufficient to turn an election? Is the result really the will of the people? And yet, what's the alternative?
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. So that everybody can live their life as they please. The AfD clearly is against all of that. Our constitution offers a way to defend against these forces and it is time that the process is started.
I'd like to agree with you, but what you really mean is "limited democracy".
Democracy's definition contains no such safeguards, just as pure capitalism doesn't prevent monopolies.
Pretty much everyone agrees that "50.01% of us agreed to slaughter the rest" is not a good decision, but it is technically a democratic one.
By following Article 21(2) of the Basic Law and Sections 43 et seq. of the Federal Constitutional Court Act
> How can you ban a party that receives the majority vote of the population?
Why not?
Because who decides when its not in the people best interest? Oh right, not the people since they clearly voted for them for a reason.
Noone decides that, because that's not the metric. The metric is whether the party is antidemocratic. As we know from history, sometimes people do vote for antidemocratic parties. But back in 1946 it was decided that no antidemocratic parties shall be allowed anymore, no matter how much support they gain.
>Because who decides when its not in the people best interest? Oh right, not the people since they clearly voted for them for a reason.
In Germany we have laws to ban parties that work against our constitution, exactly because of what happened in Weimar. The AfD is classified as confirmed right-wing extremist in five states. Starting a ban process is more than justified. The process is not arbitrary. Only the Bundestag, Bundesrat or government can apply, and the Constitutional Court decides after checking if the conditions are met. Also, just because a majority votes for something doesn’t make it right.
Let us take an example. A politician shot someone in broad daylight in front of everyone. The majority want to vote for him. Should he not be jailed? No amount of votes can change the legal outcome of breaking the law (short of obviously somehow voting murder is legal).
This appears to be an old german law right after nazis were defeated, so its not like someone invented a law specifically to target afd.
> who decides when its not in the people best interest? Oh right, not the people
Damn right it isn't, because for most of them it is against their own interests. They vote out of emotion.
I want to start by saying I think the AfD is detestable so that you don't get the wrong idea from my question:
In other parts of this thread we have people saying that the AfD must be banned because they are a threat to democracy and that the German constitution has provisions which prevent amending it to weaken the guarantee of democracy...
But how do you then reconcile the idea that people must be prevented from voting for the party they wish? Is that not undermining democracy when you only let them vote when they vote "correctly"?
I don't understand how this can be asked in good faith. How does Germany believe that sometimes democratically elected governments can be dangerous? Germany?
You don't understand how they may have a historical election or two that led to some kind of event proving that sometimes the people need to be protected from themselves short-term in order to preserve their constitution and democracy long-term?
Most people do NOT vote for them though, we're talking about 30% at most, and the other 70% are definitely not supporting anything close to the afd
Who is the banner? The public?
It's in Article 21 of the Grundgesetz
not a majority, just biggest share
This is correct. They won ~43% of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. It is also worth mentioning that the population in that state is tiny, just 2.1 million people.
I think they are worried by the wrath of AfD voters. Would've been easier if they had done it years ago, I think there has been a lot of evidence that they are unconstitutional in Germany for a long time?
Similar to the UK. Neither cons or labour want to take action against reform, because then it labels them as the party that is overreaching
I'm not here to be an AfD apologist. I think a lot of their rhetoric is awful. However, in German constitutional law, there is a very high bar to ban a political party. In defense of the German Constitution, I think it is a good thing that there is a very high bar. If the bar was low, it could easily be abused.
Two important facts:
Also, it incredibly rare to ban political parties in Germany.> Under Article 21, Paragraph 2 of Germany’s Basic Law (Constitution), a party can only be banned if it actively seeks to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or threaten the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany. > Proving the Whole Party is Extremist: Courts require proof that the entire party—not just individual members or radical factions—is systematically anti-constitutional.
Whenever I see Alice Weidel, I see a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is pretty genius that AfD selected her as head of the party. She provides a thin veneer of suitability over a horrible underbelly.> In the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court has banned only two political parties: > Socialist Reich Party (SRP) (Sozialistische Reichspartei): A neo-Nazi and far-right party considered a successor to the Nazi Party, banned in 1952. > Communist Party of Germany (KPD) (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands): A Stalinist party, banned in 1956.Not sure why you get the downvotes. There is indeed a strong barrier towards making a party illegal in Germany.
It is hard to understand how countries work. Whether France, US, Germany or China, these are very different animals. It is also tricky to be well informed regarding the struggle for power in politics, since this is not material that is properly explained in every day press publications.
On a personal level, I am also a bit defensive of Germany. A lot of low quality Internet discourse likes to shit on Germany, and I don't like it. Sometimes it is dumb stuff like "Hilter this/that" or trafficking in stereotypes. Part of what fascinates me about Germany is that they were able to completely reboot their society after an awful, destructive war. Plus, they survived the Cold War, and managed to merge again. For my generation, it still feels like a miracle when I say it out loud.
If a constitution had a pro slavery clause and a party is trying to change that we would consider them heroes, so why is it such a bad thing to change the system if it is failing to provide for the people?
The entire point of a constitution is to remain unchanged.
The constitution protects people from voting their rights away forever just because they look for a quick solution. This has happened in the past, and to prevent it from happening again, the constitution has been strengthened to the point of banning anticonstitutional parties.
That assumes the constitution isn't tyrannical or hasn't been conceived at a time where everything was different. It's like telling a slave you should follow the law because it's the law.
I don't see how you would look at the German constitution as tyrannical. It guarantees rights, not restrictions. (The German constitution is fairly weak btw, most of its articles are optional.) The only potentially oppressive article is the military draft for men.
What the AfD struggles with is that the constitution enforces democracy. And while this is obviously an instance of the tolerance paradox, prohibiting people from removing democracy is the only way to ensure their rights and freedoms, and most importantly their power to control the government (by voting).
All governments fail their citizens. Nothing is a panacea.
Constitutions exist to provide friction to fast-moving populist votes. They prevent the two wolves from eating mutton after the vote. They are not immutable; they are hard to change, and can limit simple-majority votes.
The same question goes the other way as well. If a constitution does not have a slavery clause and now people want to add it, should they be allowed to do that?
I read into your question, that they should be allowed to do that. The question is, why should they?
History tells us, that only works in shortest of terms. If anything it raises their anti-establishment reputation (see how NDSAP was banned and it did nothing to stop Hitler's rise).
EU and Germany's woes won't go away with banning a party. You can't have a single currency without a joint fiscal policy (aka federal state).
The lesson the US should have taken from that period in Germany is that if a party leader attempts a coup once, you should not let them and their party get elected to finish the job.
A better lesson would be that if you keep ignoring the will of the people they might just choose a new leader to replace you.
You definitely can, and should.
Letting bigots and racists continue to express these views is extremely problematic.
What? The opposite is true. It was treating Hitler with kid gloves that enabled his takeover.
What makes you say that? Between being sent to prison for high treason and having his party banned, what part was kid gloves handling? Not shooting him in the head? That's how you make a martyr for someone worse to take power. He was allowed to get close to power because he was less threatening to capitalist interests.
Hitler was sent to a gentlemen's prison (Festungshaft) for high treason with a sentence of five years, but released after eight months. That is completely ridiculous for high treason. The regular sentence was life, the absolute minimum in case of exonerating circumstances (in this case most likely being right-wing, sorry, "wanting the best for his country") was five years. I'm pretty sure that he would have spent life, or at least many years, in prison if he had been a communist.
Judging by (https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47780/how-did-hi...) the judge and other were already tilted in his favor, as was the Bavarian state as well.
And it also, kind of worked, from then on Hitler preferred the legal way instead of doing it like Mussolini (i.e. a putsch). It's one part taking the fall for the Ludendorff, one part Bavaria already being sympathetic to him.
The main problem is that these far-right parties have backing of all billionaires around the western world. They are extremely well funded, they have used propaganda to lie to their citizens and gain adepts, they have loyalists inside institutions that will undermine any attempt to apply the law.
Never let your far-right parties grow. It should be banned, it should have been banned years ago.
By the way, defund billionaires. The Epstein class is behind the funding of these extremist dangerous parties.
Added to that, these parties often get helped by Russian troll farms. A divided Europe that is occupied by infighting is great for them.
Are you sure about that? Because troll farms will troll anything that helps to disenfranchise - either far left or far right.
Wasn't recently shown that after an attack on a Russian data center, the amount of right-wing supporting tweets went down by a large amount? Which is in my opinion a big supporting factor in your assessment
That was hoax. Basically they confused yandex search engine scrapping bots, with "troll bots" and media just ran with that.
https://netzpolitik.org/2026/angriffe-auf-yandex-aus-brennen...
https://rohtext.de/news/afd-bots-offline-yandex-angriffen-wa...
https://www.br.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/faktenfuchs-irrefuehr...
Nope, not a single proof. The only thing that went down is the number of yandex search engine related automated traffic, aka "bots", which has nothing to do with disinformation "bots"
Europe is divided by design. Not by Troll farms. I'm sick and tired of hearing every thing that went in EU favor is glorious success of EU and every EU failure is the work of evil Russian bot farms.
The trend is unfortunately active a lot further afield than just Europe or the USA. Similar recent spikes in political polarisation are showing up everywhere. Everywhere that there's been free social media for the past ~20 years, that is.
Whether it's Australia : Pauline Hanson, an anti-immigration nationalist widely lampooned as a walking faux-pas for the past two decades, now virtually leads the polls with her One Nation party, which has gone from about 5% support (when the current center-left government was elected mid-2025) to over 25%! today. In the space of 17 months.
New Zealand : From the globally-lauded center-left Jacinda Ardern, at home she was soon all-but-bullied out of politics by a significant and very vocal portion of NZ males angry at her shortcomings - she lives in Australia now - and NZ has since been led by a coalition of three increasingly-right-wing businessmen doing their best to "crack down" on the poorer classes to "balance the books".
Brazil : The big swing from Bolsonaro on the right to Lula on the left.
Japan : Increasingly fragmented, moving rightward and nationalist, centrist rule threatened for the first time since 1955.
Argentina : The populist president Milei, whose strategy-of-least-thought - rip off the whole bandage, right now - proudly sacrifices the hopes of a generation-or-three to gain a form of Economic Satisfaction post-haste.
Polarisation is just the unfortunate necessity to win the war of capital against labor. Divide et impera.
> By the way, defund billionaires. The Epstein class is behind the funding of these extremist dangerous parties.
I am increasingly aligned to the position that every billionaire is a policy failure.
Wealth inequality of the degree we have today is not sustainable.
Yeah, nothing smells like protecting the democracy more than banning opposing parties. /s
Even a tolerant society has to be selectively intolerant to preserve itself. The goal is maximally tolerant, not absolute tolerance.
Hypothetically, should a party running on a platform of ending democracy be allowed to participate in democracy? Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
Has the AfD stated they would “end democracy”?
I wouldn’t expect them to state it plainly and publicly if they were.
so they should be banned based on thoughts there opposition claims they have?
Nope, never said that.
Are you for real lmao?
https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilung...
There are several ex high ranking afd official who left the party because of nepotism, internal authoritarianism, etc.
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/afd-niedersachs...
https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/inside-afd-...
> https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilung...
You're leaving this out?
On 26 February 2026, the Administrative Court of Cologne (Verwaltungsgericht Köln) ordered Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), in interim proceedings, to refrain from classifying and treating the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation” pending the conclusion of the main proceedings at first instance.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/afd-einstufung...
The only reason AfD grows in popularity is because the other parties are deaf to what worries their constituents.
Other parties are so indoctrinated and zealous in their beliefs that they fail to see this simple truth and would rather resort to some authoritarian actions than think of changing their ways and try to win the electorate back.
> Hypothetically, should a party running on a platform of ending democracy be allowed to participate in democracy?
I think any party not encouraging others to commit violence should be allowed to run, if majority of all voters don't want democracy, it should be their right to vote for such party, which wants to end democracy. Democracy is here for the people/voters, not vice versa, it should have no self-preservation mechanisms, if it has it's not really an democracy anymore, if opinion of majority of the people is not respected to preserve it.
> Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
Well, look at the Brexit referendum, it's kinda same thing.
Does the current USA smell democratic to you? Are the powers there working or just even more generalised corruption?
The US still generally has freedom of speech and association. We don’t ban political parties from organizing, nor do we tell voters who they cannot vote for.
Reminder that Trump's admin is going after election officials and public officials using nonsense charges.
A sitting US member of the house had their house and offices raided just the other day.
He is also very directly going after journalists.
Freedom is speech is very much not guaranteed in the US.
Reminder that a bunch of states tried to remove Trump from the ballot 2 years ago
After he staged a coup? That? Lol what? He absolutely should have been removed from ballots.
He literally encouraged a coup and then pardoned people who took part. That's not hyperbole. He instructed Pence to coup, who refused, then he instructed his followers to march down there. A literal coup.
The states had good reasons to remove him from their ballots.
Now he's harassing state workers to remove Americans from voting rolls. Classic coup/anti-democratic stuff. Textbook.
America is a one party state. It's just that in typical American extravagance, there are two of them.
I wonder what is the longterm plan of those that want to ban the party. We have a situation where (depending on the state) more than 40% of the voters vote AfD. If you ban the party, where would one expect the current voters to go to? I don't think they would vote center-left then...
My personal belief is, that a big share of AfD voters don't know what they vote for. We saw it in the US, where Hispanic people were surprised that they are targeted by ICE. They are manipulated by propaganda. And this can be stopped by destroying the propaganda infrastructure and defund the people behind it.
Probably Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW? Ticks many of the same boxes: anti-immigrants, anti-EU, nationalist and pro-Russia. The primary difference is that they are socialist. So probably the techbros wouldn't be as happy.
Its not about opposing parties. It is about parties opposing democracy.
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. The AfD clearly is against hates both, is not democratic and should be banned.
> Democracy is not only rule of majority.
It is. Use a dictionary.
The fault is in equating "democracy" with "fair and stable governance through mostly democratic means". A LOT of people in this thread are making that incorrect gloss of the terms.
Not a dictionary. Also, your link admits democracy may be defined as pure populist voting, so you self-defeated.
It's called wehrhafte Demokratie - not easy to translate, something like fortified democracy. The paradox of tolerance is not the clever counter-argument that you think it is, it's a general problem. An open, permissive system cannot allow a closed system to use its freedoms against it to replace it.
Come on now. AfD is not arguing for or against social or economic issues. This isn't a spat about budgets, or energy.
AfD leaders want to bring back the German nationalism of the 30s/40s, fullstop.
Can we please stop pretending this isn't the case? It's so tiring.
citation needed
The first image on the article this comment thread is attached to: https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/53/98532a3a-3542-4bcd-a05e-a26...
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dangerous-liais...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/23/afd-na...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/11/afd-mps-scruti...
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.thetime...
And about a million others if you search them up. They are the neo-Nazi party. The leaked emails this article is about speak volumes.
Take a look at the leaked mails
"People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance> The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945),[1] where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance. Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.
> Just start the process to ban this party already
Oh dear.
Whatever happend to Voltares "I disprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it"?
EDIT: The irony of this post being downvoted in an attempt to hide it, rather than discuss an opinion you disagree with!
EDIT2: Please understand I have no love for AfD, rather a love of open politics (let everybody hear how crazy they are!).
> Whatever happend to Voltares "I disprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it"?
O tempora, o mores. Back in Voltaire's (sic) days, this would have been an issue between debating gentlemen, not one of massive spreading of hate. It's the fault of media and internet, I know, but that's not so easy to stop.
Voltaire never said that. However I understand your point, the truth is Europe has been on the precipice of far-right rule for decades and the only solution the European democracies found has been to push for banning, cutting funds, censoring the beast.
Anything but address the actual issues that helped catapult them to the top.
> Anything but address the actual issues that helped catapult them to the top.
The goal posts for those issues will always move.
Look at Japan for instance. For decades, its government's stances on immigration were far to the right of anything in Europe, and guess what, that still didn't stop a far-right faction and its sentiments from taking over.
You can always manufacture anxiety over literally anything, see for instance how the US republican party has made a fight over, like, 10 trans athletes a core pillar of their national culture war.
Free speech in Germany is limited. Hate speech, nazi slogans, etc... are banned.
And regardless, banning a political party (the process for which is set in Germany's constitution) is not the same as banning its former members from speaking.
Hmm. I will bite.
We have to see this through the lens of modern German history, and the corpus of rules (and lessons from history) that allowed the German Federal Republic to become an independent state again. I think this is not about saying things, but about saying things that foreshadow an attack on the constitution, and then perhaps very likely damaging the institutions of a country in the future.
A democratic state is a suboptimal construct. Once the politcal damaged, it is not easily repaired (See: Some countries East of Germany).
Well, given it is in none of his published works: nothing?
Even if the quote was correct, it is about free speech. Being elected and holding political office is beyond that.
It's usually superseded by "don't piss on my head and then tell me it's raining"
There's nothing the German state hates more than democracy.
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. The AfD clearly is against both and thus is not democratic and should be banned.
You are bending a word to mean things it has never in its entire history meant. There is absolutely nothing intrinsic about democracy that protects minorities.
There is nothing intrinsic to democracy that means you need to have a constitution. This should be obvious since many democratic states and organizations have no constitution! The UK has no formal constitution, neither does Israel. Canada also has no single constitution document. There are probably lots of non-democracies out there that have constitutions. It's completely orthogonal to whether or not a place is a democracy.
Ok, there might narrower and wider definitions of Democracy: "Under a narrow definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections, while broader definitions also link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy)
But Germany has a constitution and it allows to ban parties, that act against it. Would you say, that makes Germany not democratic?
I have grown tired of anyone calling mildly conservative views as far right or authoritarian. Look at the condition Europe is in.
And do you also include the forced deportation of people with non-German ethnic backgrounds, even if they are citizens of Germany, in these "mildly conservative views"?
Hasn't mass immigration ruined Europe? Genuinely curious.
Ruined? You mean the continent with the highest life expectancy, highest rate of higer education, lowest infant mortality, and lowest rate of child poverty (and relative poverty in general).
The world is angry, we live in the age of the predators. European youth are also disappointed, just as in north America, that higer education is no longer a highway to a better life than our parents. But ruined? No.
No?
I have grown tired of people not accepting that a party can truly be far right and try to put it off as being a shift in perception of the general public.
Today anything that is not left is labeled as far right in the media.
I think journalists have to realize that crying wolf always stops working when you need it the most.
Germany has five to six parties (depending on election cycle) in the parliament. Noone calls the SPD far right. You may find people debating whether the SPD or the CDU marks the center, but the AfD is clearly far right.
It's funny how people avoid this term. The far left party in the German parliament ("Die Linke") would never deny they're far left. (Their name literally translates to "The Left".)
I am not informed enough about AfDs platform to judge.
My comment was more about how the US media/english-speaking media describes non-left parties. All the populists on the left side of the spectrum are “left wing”, but their political counterparts are always “far” right.
> My comment was more about how the US media/english-speaking media
So, irrelevant to the topic under discussion?
And in the opposite media anything not right is "far left socialist extremists".
This doesn’t help either. That being said, I don’t get this finger-pointing at all — how does it help?
Why does my finger pointing not help, but yours does? That is my point.
You’ve read half of my comment and ignored the second half. My comment is not claiming that only the left-wing media is doing bad things, it’s about the role that media has and modern media failing it.
But sure, let’s continue this whole “he did it, so I’m doing it too”
I didn't only read half of your comment. I just think it is silly to vent about US politics in a conversation about Germany politics.
Are you saying the AfD represents "mildly conservative views"?
Well, they aren't running any camps yet, so how can you prove they will actually run camps in the future? You can't, so internet argument rules require you must accept that the opposite is factual.
As the misinformation botnet commands!
What condition the Europe is in and in comparison to what?
They mean immigrants.
"Look at the conditions X is in" is a common dog whistle for anti-immigrants and racists. It's a flare sent up to say, "Hey, who else thinks all these X are ruining our country?"
The AfD became relevant precisely because the conservatives (CDU) were not far right enough. They exist to be more right wing than the conservatives. They are as blatently far right as it gets.
> And, for anyone who might have grown confused about claims of antisemitism while it was plastered over the German news media in the weeks following the Berlin election: here you can see what it really looks like.
Oh well, Querfront doing Querfront things. At least they can agree on hating Jews.
I don't see the metadata of ALL 421 179 emails available on the index https://www.hexane.cc/table/?board=mail. Am I missing something?
"AfD party member email contains antisemitic trope that Israel does the dirty work for us." [0]
The LLM-generated summaries seem a bit overly dramatic at times, making it hard to judge how serious some of the content actually is. Looking forward for a website with the original emails.
[0] https://www.hexane.cc/detail/?uid=9DF63C5C-F244-4763-BF2A-90...
We had to make them illegal while we could, but we went too soft on these Russian assets. Now we gotta deal with the consequences
It's misdirection to the point of conspiracy theory to assume that Germany is incapable of organically producing a hateful far-right movement like AFD without it being manufactured by Russia
It’s obscene to think they would be so successful however without Russia’s active role in it.
It's pretty easy to be successfull when your competition is the established parties who make they contempt for Germans clear every day.
The German-Russian sympathy is the most incredible oddity and never fails to breed a major fraud - Schroeder, Wirecard, AfD.
What active role? The far right is surging all over Western countries because the post-WW2 liberal, progressive, multicultural order has completely failed.
The experiment has failed so we're moving back to things that are known to work. No need to blame Russia.
Honestly, I hate to tell you this, but the Germans have a whole track record of this fascism malarkey. I'm sure Vlad is pleased as punch, and definitely nudging it along, but if the influence was quite so impactive it would also be a lot more visible.
Never said they were installed by Russia. Putain only has to find the proper bad seeds and water them. That is clearly what is happening here. This is well known in Germany, and they are even kinda fighting internally over how much display of sympathy for Russia is proper to show publicly.
Why?
Honestly because they are fucking nazis in disguise, and it’s clear just by scratching the surface. The dog whistles alone were enough.
I don't know what to trust anymore. One group calls the other Nazis for literally anything. And the other calls the other corrupt.
Moot point akin to trump’s “good people on both sides” comment after Charlotte. One side is deliberately taking inspiration from nazi slogans and such…
That comment was debunked.
Did they also publish the prompts and models they used for the summaries? It'd be nice to test this on some examples :)
Thanks to everyone who commented -- I'm not German so I'm not going to wade into the discussion on this particular thread.
Good luck comrades!
I am no fan of the AFD (especially because I live in Poland) but mostly because I don’t like having opinions on political parties in countries where I don’t live and don’t speak the language.
But I think this kind of moral approach is precisely why right wing parties have been winning globally, in the US and elsewhere. For many voters, the overwhelmingly important thing is individual economic security and personal/familial safety. Full stop.
And so if you force them to choose between a morally off putting party that at least claims to care about their problems, and one that is ostensibly morally less bankrupt, but hand waves away those problems – they’re going to hold their nose and vote for the former. Shame and outrage doesn’t work in a society that is uncertain and scared about its future.
It seems like a handful of candidates are beginning to understand this, in the US at least, but for some reason this level of realpolitik is just beyond many center and center-left parties.
The right only cares about wellbeing of the rich, and is usually keen to exploit the demographic majority in the interest of the few (see what is happening in US now). I follow politics of democratic countries closely for few dozen years, but I have yet to find an example of rightist party which improved economic wellbeing of its constituents (except those who are already rich)
Worth considering Spain. Spain should be much wealthier than it is. And that's due to Franco.
Exactly. The establishment doesn’t care about the people and wave them off, so populist parties took the advantage. This happened before and will happen again.
Let's be crystal clear, parties like the AfD don't care either. History is chock full of examples where far-right leaders got into power and broke most of their promises and achieved the polar opposite for most of their followers. For example Trump campaigned on "eggs too expensive" and promptly passed legislation that allowed the farms to price-fix even harder leading to "eggs even more expensive". The same has happened again and again with the "let's make the country secure again" claims, e.g. starting WW2 did not in fact make the average German's life safer.
Their propaganda is that they care so the point is that the other guys don’t care so people flock to someone who says they genuinely care. It’s hard to fix the economy so I don’t think anyone can fix it. And as history shows again and again I think whoever gets the government is going to sleep with the big corps anyway.
Are you not a fan of AfD if you believe everything they claim and completely demonize the other side?
I don’t really understand what you’re asking, but I don’t think the AFD is really a unique phenomenon. The popularity of right wing parties is across the entire West and IMO it’s for the exact reasons I just wrote.
Harris lost to Trump in 2024 for what I see as exactly the same reasons.
I think you downplay the role of social media in fanning the flames.
"Careless People" talks about it and how it was the inception of Meta's powerplay into politics by becoming indispensable for politicians to use their platforms to reach voters. The only thing they cared about is engagement and avoiding regulations, both are easily achievable if polarisation becomes the norm, the obliteration of proper political discourse into the form it exists now is a consequence of that.
I don't believe those far-right parties would have this much support if public discourse wasn't mostly focused on online platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, etc., they wouldn't have the reach nor the tools for creating information bubbles as existing right now. Those platforms allow for the formation of entire separate realities that are self-reinforcing.
Sure that’s a factor. But I think it’s pretty obvious in reality that a lot of people are not having a good time in contemporary western society. Social media didn’t invent that.
> Social media didn’t invent that.
Hence why I started with "fanning the flames". It means the issues are there, they need to be worked on but with social media we are stuck, solving complex issues require compromises, long-term thinking and planning, nothing that is enabled by social media's knee-jerk reactions, ephemeral messaging, etc.
I think both can be true: there are issues with affordable housing and integration of immigrants. But at the same time parties are poisoning minds with mass-scale disinformation, propaganda, trolling, through social media. These are even more effective when issues already exist.
Sadly, some of the parties that are involved (tech bros, Russia, etc.) are not going to do any good when it comes to these issues. They'll only make the housing issues worse (by accumulating even more wealth and invading your country, respectively). But blaming everything on immigrants and elites has always worked extremely well, in-group vs. out-group is something that our brain needed for survival in the past, so it is very easy to trigger.
The saddest part is that those that push the anti-elite narrative (Trump, Musk, etc.) are often the elites themselves.
That's like saying the establishment would have an easier time controlling the unruly populance if they still had an iron grip on all public communication. True, but doesn't exactly advance the argument that I think you want to.
That's not at all what I'm saying, you can make your point without trying to stuff words in my mouth.
The mistake in your analysis is that it is not just the far right but populism in general is on the rise, Mamdani, Green party in the UK etc.
I don’t see how that goes against what I’ve said. It’s not about right wing parties becoming more inherently popular, it’s about them taking advantage of the unpopularity of the establishment, and voters looking the other way on moral issues because of it.
That doesn’t imply that the candidate must have morally dubious character, just that morally dubious characters are taking advantage of it.
> I don’t like having opinions on political parties in countries where
and then proceeds with extreme opinions on that parties.
Far-right parties have increased their presence thanks to inequality created by conservative parties and well funded campaigns by billionaries.
Let's not pretend that this is the will of the people when so much money is put into moving the blame of the current state of the economy from billionaires and monopolies towards working class people of foreign origin. (Like if it was working class people the ones hoarding money and power)
It's a little condescending to treat millions of people as puppets of billionaires. Are there not billions behind the media you consume? (ycombinator...)
A lot of 'extreme views' being bandied around are not really any different to what was spoken about in the 90s, tbh. Even Tony Blair was making comments on topics like immigration which would make today's audience blush.
We've had decades of centrist governments all throughout Europe. Do they not shoulder any blame for the rise of the far-right? Or is it only the "billionaires" who have agency?
> ... centrist governments ... shoulder any blame
I agree somewhat. However, the fault of mainstream politics is one of failure. The fault of extraterritorial actors is one of action.
I think that mainstream governments in the rounds haven't done enough for hoi polloi in the past few decades, but also that perceptions of what they could have fine may often be unrealistic. There are many prophets - some shallow thinkers might say "just read [ Das Kapital | Friedman ] and do that", but i don't agree that ideology delivers the benefits it promises.
It was a tall order to expect the past few decades of governing parties to satisfy the people enough that they don't turn to AfD shit.
Mainstream politicians' capital comes from votes, an expensive and limited resource. Extraterritorial actors do not have this constraint.
Where i end up is: yes, we should blame tired neoliberal parties for failing the people and driving then to charlatans. But that blame should be tempered by an understanding that government is a game that never leaves everybody satisfied. But extraterritorial actors? They are somewhere between philosophically vacant and hostile, and they are fucking with us just because they can. The blame is categorically greater.
The economic platform of the AfD doesn't even pretend to care about normal people. Neither does the Republican platform and Trump in particular in the US.
This argument has been repeated for decades, but I just don't see it.
> the AfD doesn't even pretend to care about normal people.
It explicitly cares about people who identify as traditional Germans, who in their own eyes are "the normal people".
On the economic side, Gemini tells me that they favour deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy for small and medium-sized enterprises (Mittelstand). They also want to increase family support payments to incentivise having children. These are all economic policies that make sense to conservative-minded "normal people".
Deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy aren't conservative values. Any conservative that believes that has been duped into libertarian capitalism.
> Deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy aren't conservative values.
They're fiscally conservative values, as you likely already know. Social and fiscal conservatism are correlated, as you likely also already know.
In order for you to make this statement, you had to take a word ("conservative") that can be interpreted in one of two well-known ways ("social conservative", "fiscal conservative"), and pretend that when I used that word, I must have meant the way that doesn't make sense, instead of the way that obviously does.
Sure, fair enough, but in my defense, "conservative" used to mean fiscal conservativism is a very American concept. I wouldn't say 'conservative-minded "normal people"' in a discussion about the AfD necessarily or obviously invokes the idea of fiscal conservativism.
You're probably too well informed. Most people aren't.
Most people, at least in the US, have no clue wtf is going on.
I'd seriously wager maybe 20% of the US population even understands the basics of how their state government functions. Less than 10% probably understand their local government or could name more than 1 local politician.
This isn't hyperbole. A shocking number of Americans are PROUD to not be engaged in politics in any way. Especially for young folks, politics and understanding the government are just not cool.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv98ze40jz18o
Correct, everyone is paying more except the top 1% under Trump.
I agree with much of what you are saying. Personally, I have a distaste for far-right and far-left parties, to put it mildly. However, I think it's really telling that the term "populism" has been so vilified. Here is the definition of populism according to Merriam-Webster:
> 1. a political philosophy or movement that represents or is claimed to represent the interests of ordinary people especially against the Establishment
> 2. general concern for ordinary people
In US politics, both Bernie Sanders and Trump were put in the same bucket and derided as populists by the media, even though their policies could not be more different.
One thing I would add is that we have the most concentrated control of media/influence since pre-Gutenberg times. This is a huge issue, as a very small number of people have control of our politics and emotions, and use that to further their own increasingly weirdo interests.
The Nazis became popular during The Great Depression (which affected Germany) and we are seeing history repeat itself. Someone is now going to tell me we aren't in a recession because "number go up!" while everything around us tells us a different story.
The great depression was just as much a wealth concentration at the cost of the 95% as is happening now, history will repeat itself. Speculation followed by wealth inequality followed by tarifs followed by reduced international trade. Sounds familiar.
I have different hypothesis. How I see it democracy have 2 very good feedback loops.
Fast one - the one that used journalism (so called 4th branch of government) that enjoyed public trust and more or less was factual which in turn kept public opinion more or less in one shared and factual reality. This in turn put pressure on actual government in between elections.
And there is second one - slower - public could change government in elections based on the lived experience of last N years.
The monopolies broke 1st loop completely. And the 2nd was hindered. Now ppl cannot choose directionally in slow loop (elections) what is good for their self interest bcs they do not have factual picture of reality. So they can choose based on vibes which in turn is as good as "random move away form current status quo".
IMHO still way better then autocracy.
Case in point - ppl voted for Trump among other things bcs of gasoline prices. How it turned out...
And why right wing - bcs said monopolies put thumb on the scale - as their are capital after all. And they do have more self awareness what is best for their interest. If democracy survives next will move will be ditching current right wing for whatever else and then even monopolies thumb on scale probably will not help current regimes.
Well, this is exactly how people voted for Hitler, and I would have assumed people know from history how it ended when "moral approach" was thrown away.
Apparently, everyone forgot already.
You’ve taken the exact opposite point from the comment I wrote. Please try again.
> But I think this kind of moral approach is precisely why right wing parties have been winning globally
No, right wing parties have been winning globally because they are vastly more resourced both financially and media-space-ly than the opposition. If you can constantly flood the zone with bullshit, it becomes impossible for the opposition to correct the disinformation before the next flood arrives.
It wont change anyone's opinion. People vote for them because they are the only serious anti-immigration party.
People vote for them because the media has spent decades learning that the easiest way to gain ad revenue is by spreading outrage. And now it's coming back to bite many countries
Ah so you want the media to not report on the replacement of western populations with third world migrants nobody voted for. Got it.
"Sensationalism is the problem"
And you reply with sensationalism.
You fell for it. Congrats. You played yourself.
When we engage with such tactics we harm ourselves and the people around us. We become stooges for politicians. We repeat their nonsense. Cmon.
The problem is people’s concerns not being listened to or downplayed, and this thread shows it in action.
The green username is always such a giveaway
Ah so you're responding with a bad faith reductio ad absurdum argument. Got it
People still think that's possible? lmao.
And this is the party endorsed by Elon Musk. The guy who performed a Nazi salute on stage, twice.
> there are jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots, discussions of whether refugees should be shot at the border, a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”.
> The AfD party is currently polling at 29% nationally – even while they fight a designation by the Verfassungsschutz as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party in court.
The system is working
Uh, I have a few immigrant friends in Germany. This is really uncomfortable.
There are parties like this in every European Country. E.g. RN in France, FPÖ in Austria, Fidesz in Hungary, PVV in Netherlands and so on. These populist parties get a lot of votes, mainly because the parties that have been in charge for the past 10-30 years have failing to address issues of voters. Doesn't mean that these ones are any better - they arent.
The only advantage most of these parties have is not having been in a position of power to demonstrate they are at least as incompetent as other parties that have, if not significantly more so.
The PVV in The Netherlands twice (once as a coalition supporter, once as part of a coalition). Both times were a disaster. People just go to the next populist right-wing party (e.g. FvD, which is more extreme right than the PVV, pretty similar to the AfD) and then after a few years they come back.
I guess the upside is that in countries with a multi-party system (happens more frequently without first-past-the-post), they virtually always have to form a coalition, which typically ends up in infighting within a party or between parties. E.g. in The Netherlands you typically need four parties nowadays to form a coalition.
Germany's immigration policy over the last decade wasn't an ooopsie though but a deliberate choice by the establishment.
I know, I have them in my country too. But sometimes this reality fades in the background and every now pops up again and hits you hard.
The people funding the Nazis won't let the moderate parties do anything useful for the common person, they protect their own wealth while they force the politicians to implement austerity that drives people to support Nazis.
I leave it to the reader to decide if I'm talking about now or the 1930s.
"Give us your email to read the full story"
no thanks
On Mac one can create throwaway iCloud email addresses for such cases, but yeah..
too much hassle especially considering I dont live in Germany and I was only mildly interested, closing the tab is much easier
the whole article isn't even hidden inside the HTML code
mailinator works.
yo@grr.la
It's fair that you disagree with AFD, even disagree a lot. But could we please rethink the use of "far", when they have 20% of the seats in parliament?
Their views, are the views of 1/5 people you'll meet in Germany, on average. If we mirrored this logic, the SPD should be "far-left", Grüne should be "far-left pro" and Links should be "ultra far-left pro max".
This use of language waters out the meaning. Just like calling everyone commies and nazis... also I think it'll have the opposite effect you hope.
In 1933, NSDAP gained about 44% of seats which would make them more centrist than AfD by your logic.
By some measures... yes? Take slavery, which would be considered even more right wing than whatever the current US "far right" is, but was more or less tolerated before abolition. Does that make all parties of the time far right?
I think you didn't get the point GP was making, so let me rephrase:
A popularity in election results doesn't define a parties position on the political spectrum. A lot of people are voting for change to occur, but that doesn't mean that that change already happened just by counting the votes.
My thoughts: Far right doesn't just mean "bad" or "likes human rights violations." It's a specific modern political movement, one which is contiguous with the actual Nazi party and parties who were sympathetic to the Nazis prior to and during WW2.
>but was more or less tolerated before abolition
What? Slavery wasn't tolerated. It was celebrated(still is) in a large amount of the country. It was considered a right by many white people in the US. Something they were entitled to(entitlement is a big theme with American conservatives) and still are.
Let's not forget, or maybe let's try to learn, that racism was the united states original social/cultural export. Back in the day Americans were seen as the most racist people on the planet and they were proud of it. Americans minstrel shows were big business and a very early one in the countries history.
Let's not forget that well after slavery was outlawed, Americans were still firebombing black/indigenous neighborhoods, towns, and lynching people. Americans still kill native Americans to this day, lookup native American women going missing.
Let's not forget that Kanye, just a few years ago, said that slaves had it good and should have been thankful. While that was absolutely the ramblings of a mentally unwell person, he was simply restating what is prevalent in many circles in America today. Kanye was just repeating what was said around him and is repeated in "private" across much of the country.
Lol wtf ya think ICE actually is? It's just a government force meant to remove the blacks/browns/foreigners who take all the good jerbs from the hard working whites.
As we all know, any popular political party in Germany can never turn out to be literal facists
Just because far right wasn't as popular for a longer while, doesn't mean it's not far right just because more people vote for them. And you shouldn't start suger coating it to protect their voters. They vote far right, they might even be far right. If we think far right is something bad calling it what it is is the only way too go. If it's not bad the voters should have a problem being defined as far rights.
Well they are definitely far right especially if you compare them to other right wing parties in Europe. AfD is monitored by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and their former youth organizations have been designated as confirmed right-wing extremist by them. They talk about mass deportations of citizens termed as "remigration" and leading party figures intentionally used the banned Nazi SA paramilitary slogan "Alles für Deutschland" ("Everything for Germany") at campaign events.
they are nazis, and should be called as such. go away if this bullshit of both sides are bad.
>This use of language waters out the meaning. Just like calling everyone commies and nazis... also I think it'll have the opposite effect you hope.
Just because you don't like the fact that someone is being called a Nazi does not mean that they aren't a Nazi.
>Just like calling everyone commies and nazis I don't think it's helpful to put extreme labels on >everyone<. As it waters out the meaning of extreme labels.
I assumed that what you wrote was intended to be relevant to the thread, and that you meant to imply that if you're calling AfD Nazis than you might as well be calling everyone Nazis (I disagree with this because the AfD are actually fascists).
If you literally just meant to say that the Nazi label shouldn't be applied indiscriminately, without commenting on whether you think it should be applied to AfD, then of course I can't argue against that statement.
Anyone have the full article?
this is bullshit, lets look at this "email leak": "https://www.hexane.cc/detail/?uid=!%26!AAAAAAAAAAAYAAAAAAAAA..."
the summary is: "AfD member Matthias Funk writes and forwards racist dehumanizing incitement: Neger, Muselmanen, Hinterwäldler, dreckige Monster Merkel, Pest, calls patriots to rise against Verbrecher."
I'm not sure about the actual email, but am certain that there are a lot of "left coded" agents that would find any discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants "dehumanizing". Also considering the WWE style of modern politics calling one of the leaders of your opposition "dreckige Monster Merkel" is not something strange.
> would find any discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants "dehumanizing"
You think the term "muselmanen" could reasonably be used in a civilized "discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants"? You do know "muselmanen" has a very specific link to WWII concentration camps, right?
Let me tell you a secret, most people even more so none Europeans use derogatory terms of that level daily in their private conversations. Considering the rape rates in the EU you can't begrudge some Germans having low opinion of Muslims.
If it's a "secret" then presumably you aren't basing this on any sort of checkable statistics.
So, er, I think your argument comes down to "sure, they're bigots, but most of the people I know are bigots too so stop complaining". I don't find this a very convincing argument.
(And "the filthy foreigners are coming for our women" is, like, the oldest accusation in the book. Don't forget to add that they also kill children to use their blood in their blasphemous religious rituals.)
My experience is sure subjective, and maybe it just so happened that I associate with "bigots" exclusively, but rape statistics are open in a lot of places, pretending they are not true or trying to straw man them is cruel to the victims[1][2].
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/new-years-eve-in-cologne-5-years-after... [2] https://pardok.parlament-berlin.de/starweb/adis/citat/VT/19/...
Der Anteil nichtdeutscher Tatverdächtiger liegt bei Vergewaltigung/sexueller Nötigung bei 38,5 Prozent (konstant gegenüber dem Vorjahr)
So, 61.5% of all suspected rapists/sexual assaulters were German.
considering only ~15% of the population are immigrants this isn't looking good for them, there has also been documented a constant bias from the government to undercount immigrant related crimes.
Don't like 100% of migrant women get raped on the way to Europe? Good thing they have technology to stop the bad people .... Oh wait
Re your last sentence: US politics is "WWE style", certainly. Is German politics like that? Or are they more... European or something, where there's still decorum?
The EU is a little bit more tame than the US, but not by much, also those are private emails, not public statements. My point is using such language is (unfortunately) not something "scandalous".
That they are rabidly pro-Israel while simultaneously glorifying Hitler and indulging in conspiracy theories of Jewish domination certainly lends credence to the idea that anti-Zionism ≠ antisemitism
One can be an anti-Semite ("Jew hater") and pro-Zionist ("Israel supporter") at the same time: "I hate them so much that I want them out of my country and into their own country".
This however speaks nothing of anti-Zionism.
Because Israel is their wet dream: an ethno-suprematist country, with right to self-determination only for the majority group, that seeks for lebensraum and shoots anyone who opposes it.
Frankly, I think their supposed "antisemitism" is a joke compared to their anti-Arab and anti-muslim attitude. Those are their real enemies now.
The reality is that quite a bit of islamic attitudes and culture don‘t fit in in the west. We‘ve not figured out how to counter this yet.
A lot of this is this is just invented.
Many French would have you believe women wearing Hijab should be banned lest it destroy their "western culture" when even the most Islamophobic Americans don't care
A 5% Muslim population in UK is supposedly threatening to send them back to the dark ages when Singapore is at 15% with codified multicultural guarantees and somehow annihilates them in every measure of modernity and development
> Many French would have you believe women wearing Hijab should be banned lest it destroy their "western culture" when even the most Islamophobic Americans don't care
citation *desperately* needed
> A 5% Muslim population in UK is supposedly threatening to send them back to the dark ages when Singapore is at 15% with codified multicultural guarantees and somehow annihilates them in every measure of modernity and development
Mate, you're comparing the population of Singapore, a country among the world's strictest immigration laws and mostly local Mayal Sunnis who are cosmopolitan academics, to Britain, of which most ob its muslim inhabitants arrived there from central Africa and the ME via small boats, while also being largely uneducated *and* statistically likely to be a product of incest [1]
[1]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4442010.stm
I don't care more or less about Islamic attitudes than I do about Catholic or Jewish attitudes. It's all the same to me, people who are unable to divorce themselves from their heritage to perceive the world in terms unrelated to their parentage or place of birth, which together explain the vast bulk of the religious affiliations.
> It's all the same to me,
Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of people, including queer people and women, do not have your luxury. They do in most Christian countries and Israel.
There's a general issue with immigrants coming from different cultures and whose values and traditions don't align with our, often in ways that go against the principles of our societies. It's something that needs to be addressed seriously, and the failure of political parties to do so has fuelled the growth of a right that profits from the issue and tries to paint it bigger than it is.
That of course has nothing to do with the fact that extreme-right parties look at Israel, with its ethnic suprematism, as an example. The only connection I see is backwards: Israel is undoubtedly doing its best to fuel racism against muslims because it wants us to believe we have a common enemy.
That's very simple: stop destabilizing the Middle East.
Most of Europe never did.
Was that also your argument before the crusades?
I'm honestly struggling to see what the crusades have to do with this discussion, mind helping me out?
I think they don't know much about history but think they do, and believe that the Crusades were the West heroically coming to help oppressed people because Arabs. 'They started first', basically.
Actually, it was a response to the Ottomans capturing spain
I think it was a response to 9/11.
There are plenty of “ethno-supremacist” countries that fit your description, many of them Muslim. But you pick on the Jewish one only. I wonder why.
And I wonder why instead of dealing with the fact you try to divert the attention to a Muslim country (which one btw? And, do you approve it?)
Its actually quite simple:
They hate Jews
They really hate muslims
Jews are grandfathered in, muslims are the new enemy.
It's hilarious watching old European neonazis allying themselves with Israel today.
The confusion is palpable.
I think it is even simpler than that. Populist parties need to have a simple message that their supporters can easily understand. Having two quite different enemies at the same time would make things harder.
If there were 0 muslims in Germany today, their politics would be 100% about Jews controlling the world and all that stuff.
There is no confusion: Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein famously denounced the right-wing tendencies of Israel in 1948 in a letter to the New York Times:
"Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine."
The leader of that party was Menachem Begin, later prime minister of Israel and founder of Likud, Netanyahu's party.
I'm convinced that many right wingers pretend to support Israel while being secretly delighted to see the country heading deeper into trouble. It serves as a convenient disguise for their antisemitism.
This somewhat worries me, because I am not sure if the trade was worth it, strategically speaking.
They're right-wing extremists. We know that for a fact and have known that without commiting cybercrimes. So what is there to learn?
Maybe embezzlement or similar, but.
We have to keep in mind that they have in fact become the victim of a crime, which they (best case) will spin to their advantage.
Worst case they will use it as a justification to commit such and other crimes themselves.
They commit all the crimes already. If afd was anything but a political party, the security agencies would investigate them using those measures.
They've already been investigated by security agencies in Germany
They've already infiltrated all the agencies in Germany
I think part of the advantage is providing public evidence in favor of a Verbotsverfahren, e.g. the process of banning a political party for being counter to the principles of the German constitution and with that, pressure towards the state organs to stop ignoring the threat and finally do their job.
Yeah that's also what I thought the idea is behind that, but I'm afraid that at this point, a Verbotsverfahren will not work out the way people hope it will.
If you look at the numbers of votes they're getting, you see a group of people that is so large, it will be self-sustaining, instead of fizzling out. Or so is my prediction.
Idk. I just don't see this ending up in the way we want things to end up. It's not going to affect me personally all that much, because I can be "passing" so to speak, but that's not exactly what one should strive for tbh. Keeping your head down and not caring as long as you're fine, I mean.
I think the ideal moment to ban them was years ago. The next best one is right now.
And I agree, now that we've waited so long (gee, I wonder if the far-right Verfassungsschutz leader had anything to do with that?), banning them will be ugly and lead to civil unrest. I think realistically, we will need some major state repression of these Neonazis and good luck with that given the political leanings of police.
But I don't think there's a way around that at this point, we still have to try.
"Wehret den Anfängen" and "Never Again" and all that.
Maybe, but otoh, action bias alone is a terrible advisor.
"You gotta do something" is correct, but not every something is suited.
But I think at this point we're entering the circular stage, so. Idk. I don't want to live in this world we see developing, but what I want seems to be not all that relevant to said world.
Look at this tyrant trying to ban popular ideas that he doesn’t like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Sometimes you gotta, if you want to keep a free society free
If "popular ideas" == Neonazis trying to overthrow the German constitutional order, then yes, that is the appropriate response.
There's no awards to be won for coddling fascists. The protections of a free society cannot be extended by those trying to extinguish it.
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935
And I understand that this might seem like hyperbole to the less-informed American reading this.
It is for their benefit I have translated a few quotes from leading AfD members so they can paint their own picture what those "ideas I don't like" are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536747
You don't need more evidence for a Verbotsverfahren. That's not the reason one wasn't already started. It's the unwillingness of the parliament to initiate one
Well, duh, I mean, if they have to pick a side, how are they supposed to continue fleecing both sides?
I don't think being hacked by an anonymous entity grants much political advantage? If anything the downside is shifting the overtone window by dumping all the far right takes on the broad public and making them a bit more familiar.
If you allow me to play spin doctor:
Just claim that the anonymous entity wasn't anonymous. Claim it was your enemy. "Look, the Antifa hacked us. We need to ban them just like the US did"
Or blow it up bigger. "Look, the system itself is corrupt and 'the left/the altparteien/whoever' stopped using democratic measures to compete against us. That is because they cannot win on their own merit. Meaning that the system and its safeguards are meaningless."
Something like that. Given more time, one could flesh out this back-of-the-napkin thing into a likely working strategy.
___
Fascism fundamentally isn't data-driven but narrative-driven. So data alone is not going to work against it (though it is a valuable pillar).
Nazis and fascism are getting socially acceptable again. The revulsion after WW II didn't last very long.
It lasted whilst it was still in living memory
Like I said, not very long.
Article text:
A vast archive of hacked emails from the AfD was published online on Monday: 281 GB containing 421,179 internal party emails. And, for anyone who might have grown confused about claims of antisemitism while it was plastered over the German news media in the weeks following the Berlin election: here you can see what it really looks like.
In email after email, party supporters use racist slurs and share antisemitic theories of Jewish world domination; there are jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots, discussions of whether refugees should be shot at the border, a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”.
The entire archive is available online – though it may be a criminal offence in Germany to torrent the material or distribute it online. Yet the journalists who’ve been able to examine parts of the hack consider it authentic. The methodology behind the leak is also quite interesting: the vast archive has not been published directly on the site. Instead, it is available via a series of AI summaries, which have been filtered according to severity (CRITICAL, HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW) and type, with categories including “racism_xenophobia”, “corruption_money”, “leadership_feud”, “conspiracy”, “violence_threats” and “antisemitism_extremism”.
The party itself has confirmed the hack to Bild: “In September 2026, a hacker attack targeted one of our party’s hosting service providers, during which portions of a few email accounts – most of which had not been used for years – were apparently illicitly copied.”
Many of the summaries are the party’s own internal disciplinary proceedings, with emails sent to party boards to decide whether to open expulsion proceedings against members. Here, what is shocking (though perhaps not surprising) is the depth and breadth of racist feeling from party members: slurs, fantasies of violence, and antisemitic statements appear commonplace. One email from 2016 appears to show Weidel forwarding a member’s antisemitic material to the federal board as the party weighed his expulsion, while including a warning to her colleagues that the Verfassungsschutz – Germany’s domestic intelligence service – might be reading.
There are some cases which do not appear to have drawn the ire of the party, including one Bavarian official urging party leaders to chant “Merkel croak” every day, or another thread in which staff at the party’s federal office apparently discuss luring a photographer to a party event and removing him by force.
The anonymous hackers claimed their motive behind the leak was to show the “degeneracy and hypocrisy” of the AfD. Among the countless acts of hate speech, there are also allegations of embezzlement and financial misconduct, according to DDoSecrets, a transparency collective which republished the archive: the site’s software flagged 34 documents for misuse of funds, 23 for off-the-books payments, 14 for undisclosed donations and seven for embezzlement.
The AfD party is currently polling at 29% nationally – even while they fight a designation by the Verfassungsschutz as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party in court. That designation has already been made by state intelligence offices for some state branches, such as Sachsen-Anhalt — though it did not seem to hurt their electoral success. The party achieved 43.8% of the vote there in September.
Here's a helpful diagram:
Politics <--------- Left ------ Center ------ Right ---------->
| | Neoliberalism |
Economics | Anti-capitalism | Capitalism |
US | DSA Democrats Republicans |
Germany | SPD CDU/CSU AfD |
UK | Greens Labor Tories Reform |
France | LFI Renaissance RN |
1. The far-right parties are linked and coordinated and generally funded by very wealthy people;
2. The rise of far right parties is a direct result of declining material conditions;
3. Far right parties get to blame immigration and trans people because, in general, there is no counterbalance to that narrative blaming the actual cause: capitalism and ever-increasing income and wealth inequality;
4. The "moderate" (which really means centrist or center-right parties) will predictably and routinely ally with far-right parties to crush any leftist momentum. As an aside, the term "moderate" is intentionally conflated by pollsters, politicians and the media and really means nothing;
5. The topic of economics is typically avoided in most Western countries because the economics are indefensible. Instead you have manufactured wedge issues to divide people such as immigraiton, gay rights and the existence of a handful of trans people. This suits both major parties in most countries because they're both neoliberal, which is to say that they are uniparty on defending capitalism;
6. People will defend capitalism and attack socialism without knowing what either of those things are. Ask someone what capitalism is and you'll usually get a hand-wavy claim about "free markets" or even just "markets", which isn't true at all. No markets are free and markets exist in every economic system. Some of our earliest writings from 4000+ years ago are about market transactions.
So when you see things like protests in France, the rise of Reform in the UK and the rise of AfD (as well as others such as in Italy) know that it's all related and has the same root cause.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis. We saw how that worked out in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. In the US, FDR was forced to make concessions to the working class to stave off the perceived threat of communism. In Germany we got Hitler. And after WW2, the US went on an imperialism frenzy, imperialism being the highest form of capitalism.
All of this is only going to get worse until we address the core issue, which is capitalism.
These comments are getting spicy... sad.
this discussion is gonna escalate quickly I fear. But I hope any mods here can unflag as much as possible to not skew the discussion.
The timing of the release is rather sinister
This comes after a campaign that has been going on for weeks claiming that Die Linke is antisemitic (the left-wing party that got the most votes in Berlin's most recent election). CDU (the current national governing party) has been pushing the narrative that Die Linke is comparable to AfD, because they call for human rights in Gaza and to stop the unconditional support for Israel by the German government.
the timing is fortunate then in my opinion :)
How so?
Nothing speaks more about the quality of your newsletter than forcing people to sign up for it.
It’s clearly the central topic here, congratulations
In all fairness, handing over emails does seem like the central topic here.
First they came for my email address…
I dont know why almost everyone is Labelled far right who have mildly conservative views.
If you have mildly conservative views in Germany, you vote CDU or FDP. You don't vote AfD.
Left and communist views have failed. Hence such parties rise. If the centrist parties can take bold decisions, such parties won't be needed.
Centrist and far-right views have failed. Spectacularly so in Germany. Maybe spectacularly is not the right word for WW2 and the Holocaust?
Things that far right people say who consider themselfes mildly conservative for 100.
> a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”
Ahh, old good mild conservatism.
It is not "mildly conservative" to call for deportation of citizens with middle-eastern roots, removing disabled children from normal schools and glorifying Hitler while taking money from Russia
This submission is against the guidelines. And several comments are illegal. But no one cares of course.
I don't see how it is against the guidelines. And no comment here is illegal, everybody is entitled to their own opinion about the party.
In Germany, a lot of things related to these themes are illegal to say.
hard to imagine HACKED emails be against guidelines of HACKER news