Democracy is dying in Germany --but not because of the Alternative for Germany
On the latest attempt to shut down opposition to the elite class in Europe
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Let me tell you a story.
There’s a national election. The mainstream parties do badly. They are challenged by an insurgent party that seems more in touch with the country.
The mainstream parties then form a coalition, with no plan other than to keep themselves in power and the insurgent party out of power.
Then, the intelligence services in that country put out a report. It says the insurgent party is “unconstitutional”, which gives intelligence services the right to tap the insurgent party’s phones and recruit informants within the party.
Nobody is allowed to read the full report though. Oh, and the mainstream parties are already talking openly about banning the insurgent party altogether.
Which banana republic does this story take place in? Is it some tinpot dictatorship in Africa? An authoritarian regime in the Middle East? A fragile democracy in Latin America that is now sliding into the totalitarian abyss?
No. It’s taking place in Germany. It’s taking place in the very heart of Europe.
What on earth is going on?
Well, last week, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, called the BfV, drew up a report which claims the Alternative for Germany, the AfD, which finished second at elections in February, is against the country’s free democracy.
Previously, the AfD had been considered “suspected” right-wing extremists. But now, apparently, the insurgent party that has since moved into the number one spot in the national polls, has been supposedly confirmed as “right-wing extremist”.
What’s the evidence?
Well that’s where the story takes another dark turn. Because the report, all 1,100 pages of it, will not be published. It will not be made available to the general public.
Instead, parts of it have been leaked to favoured - by which I mean left-wing - media, leaving much of the country and indeed the party itself in the dark.
Just ask yourself, for a moment. Is this how a modern, healthy, functioning democracy should behave?
And from what those leaks have revealed so far, it all seems pretty tame.
I mean, get this.
Apparently, one AfD politician said, “there's more to being German than simply holding a citizenship certificate". Shock horror! Given that a British court stripped ISIS terrorist Shamima Begum of her citizenship, there are clearly many people and institutions that agree there is more to nationality than having such a certificate.
Or how about the AfD politician who dared to suggest multiculturalism means the "loss of tradition, loss of identity, loss of homeland, murder, manslaughter, robbery, and gang rape”?
Is this evidence of “extremism” or a reflection of the fact that, in 2023 alone, there were 761 gang-rapes recorded in Germany and almost half the suspects were foreigners?
Another AfD politician said that bad immigration policies have led to "the 100,000-fold import of people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures".
What, like the men who sexually assaulted 1,200 women in Cologne in one night in 2016, most whom were identified as Arabs and some of whom had just arrived as asylum-seekers?
Let’s be clear here.
This report isn’t about identifying extremism; it is about banning criticism of Islamism, mass immigration, and the state-backed policy of multiculturalism.
It is about stigmatising and attempting to shut down organised political opposition to the elite consensus that has governed Germany, and most Western democracies, for much of the last thirty years.
Are there people inside the Alternative for Germany who, individually, hold radical if not extreme views?
I suspect so, much like there are fruitcakes in every political party, such as the anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas and pro-Islamist loonies in many left-wing parties.
But do I think the Alternative for Germany, the most popular party in the country right now, as a whole should be branded “extremist” and kicked out of mainstream political and public debate?
Absolutely not. Because the only thing this will achieve is to further alienate and anger the forgotten majority who no longer feel their values and voice are represented and respected in the public square. The only thing it will accomplish, in short, is to make the already enormous gulf between the elite class and everybody else even bigger, pushing the people who control the institutions further away from the masses they need to govern over the long-term.
And just look at who’s behind these efforts to shut down opposition to the elite class.
When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the clampdown on the AfD as “tyranny in disguise”, echoing Vice President JD Vance’s concerns about the erosion of free speech and free expression across Europe, the German Foreign Office replied on X and said it was the result of “a thorough & independent investigation”.
But the federal office that is overseeing this clampdown against the AfD, the BfV, is not independent. Far from it.
It is, to use the German word, “weisungsgebunden”, which means it is bound to the Interior Ministry. And the Interior Ministry is run by Nancy Faeser, of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). That’s the same Nancy Faeser who …
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