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Posted on 05/09/2025 5:43:52 AM PDT by MtnClimber
A German spy agency deems the party a threat to the “democratic order,” but voters say otherwise—should they be silenced, too?
Alice Weidel may get the last laugh yet.
The co-leader of Germany’s most popular party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), was visibly amused on Tuesday morning when Friedrich Merz, the head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), lost the first vote for the Bundestag’s next chancellorship. Never before in German history had a presumptive chancellor been rejected in an initial ballot. But 18 members of Merz’s 328-member governing coalition had bolted and cast their secret votes against him. That betrayal left Merz six votes shy of the bare majority of Bundestag seats (316 out of 630) needed to assume the chancellorship. After a hastily convened second round, Merz pushed his total up to a sufficient 325 votes (with three holdouts, still anonymous), but the damage had been done.
As Weidel wrote on X, the first ballot revealed the “weak foundation” of Merz’s coalition between his moderate Christian Democratic Union and the left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD). That coalition had been cobbled together for one purpose only: to ensure that the AfD, a strong second-place finisher in the February parliamentary elections, was kept out of government. Since those elections, the AfD’s approval ratings have only risen, and now, at 26 percent, they exceed the CDU’s 24 percent. Were new elections to be called today, as Weidel demanded after Merz’s first round loss, AfD could well end up with the most seats in parliament. And the new government’s ideological fissures, put on stark display during the chancellor voting, all but guarantee that Merz will not be able to accomplish the reforms necessary to pull Germany out of its two-year recession.
The humiliation of Merz and his shaky CDU-SPD government must have provided grim satisfaction to the AfD’s voters and leaders. Just four days earlier, on May 2, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency had declared the AfD a “right-wing extremist” organization, inimical to the “free democratic basic order” (die freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung). This declaration was just the latest of the German establishment’s efforts to discredit and disempower the AfD.
The “right-wing extremist” designation means that the domestic intelligence agency, known as the Office of the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV), will have even greater latitude than before to wiretap party members, infiltrate the organization, and investigate its finances. Moves are already afoot, following the BfV ruling, to forbid AfD members from serving in government jobs, including as police, teachers, and civil servants. Party members currently employed in law enforcement may be required to repudiate any right-wing sympathies. Cutting off public funding is under consideration, and the ever-present hope among Germany’s political elites to ban the party entirely has gained new momentum.
What has the AfD done to merit the BfV’s unprecedented excommunication of a nationally represented party? Has it been plotting a coup? Defying the norms of parliamentary democracy? Violating court rulings? Engaging in violence? Fomenting rebellion?
No. To the contrary, its leaders have dutifully acceded to novel procedural maneuvers designed to deny them committee chairmanships and other democratically earned parliamentary privileges; they have obeyed judicial decrees shutting them out of power; they have submitted bills and voted on legislation using the same protocols as other members of Parliament. They have run campaigns exploiting the same tools of modern communications as have their rivals—and nothing more than those tools. Their rallies are peaceful and make no effort to summon the anarchic furies of political retribution— unlike, arguably, the incendiary rhetoric of their foes.
So wherein lies the AfD’s crimes against the “central fundamental principles of the constitution?”
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, this alleged defender of Germany’s “free democratic basic order,” has not deigned to publish the 1,100-page secret dossier on which its judgment rests. The public cannot evaluate the BfV’s decision. The AfD cannot respond to or defend itself against the agency’s indictment.
But the BfV’s press release makes clear that the AfD’s sins are purely conceptual: It rejects what would appear to be contemporary Germany’s most fundamental value—demographic replacement. In calling for an end to mass migration—the AfD’s central tenet—party leaders notice things that one is not allowed to notice in Germany today and hold views about nationhood that one is not allowed to hold.
The AfD has had the temerity, reports the BfV, to use terms like Messermigranten [knife migrants], presumably in reference to the long train of knife attacks by Muslim immigrants. (As long as it was at it, the AfD might as well have also coined the phrase, Menschenmengerammende Migranten [crowd-ramming migrants], in reference to terrorist vehicle rampages in Christmas markets and elsewhere.)
After the BfV’s announcement, Germany’s media, barely tamping down their elation, rushed to fill out the details of what the BfV calls AfD’s “xenophobic, anti-minority, anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim statements.” (Apparently, postcolonial studies has reached even the denizens of Germany’s sprawling government bureaucracies.)
A favorite video clip making the rounds on ZDF, a large public TV broadcaster, shows Weidel telling two women: “These phenomena, people walking around armed with knives, the rapes, are completely new in our country. . . . We are experiencing Jihad on our streets.”
Hyperbole is now apparently a political crime. Of course, knifings and rapes occurred before mass migration into Germany. But the scale of post-mass-migration violent crime is unique. Germany never experienced mass sexual assault before the New Year’s celebrations in 2015. From 2019 to 2023, asylum seekers, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, have sexually assaulted more than 52,000 females. In 2023, Germany saw 761 group rapes. Half of the suspects were foreign nationals; others were of immigrant parentage. There were nearly 40 knife attacks a day in 2023, with non-Germans six times more likely to be the assailant than Germans. In 2023, foreigners committed 41 percent of all crimes in Germany, though they were about 15 percent of the population....SNIP
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I wish AfD well. They are fighting against evil.
I don’t know enough about German politics to know what AfD is.
I do know that Germany tried the exact same method to squash the Nazi party and the result is the party became both more powerful and more radical, so you’d think they wouldn’t repeat the same mistake.
They put Hitler on trial for the Beer Hall Putsch, and for all intents and purposes that launched his political career.
People don't seem to mind when it's one minority group doing the crime but statistically not against the majority group, we have it in America. People get upset when it spreads. Liberals who live in gated communities don't punish criminals because they are not affected.
Sounds like they took a lesson from the American Democrat Party.
The AfD is the conservative party in Germany. Everyone to the left of them is trying to frame them as terrorists even though the radicals are all on the left.
AfD is going to continue to grow and grow regardless of how much the suicidal Leftist parties persecute them.
The leader of AfD describes herself and her party as “Libertarian”. Suppressing a popular movement of any sort usually just makes it stronger. Especially when those suppressing it demonstrably incompetent.
We need to stop pretending that Germany and the UK are free nations. They aren’t.
This kind of story reminds me of our own election situation and that I’m always surprised there are so many candidates for President on the ballot who I’ve never heard of.
I think it’s because they are never invited to debate (except for Ross Perot). Personally, I’d like to hear what some of these people have to say, knowing full well I’d probably think they’re nut cases. Still, I think their ideas should be heard.
Wow, immigrants are now 15% of Germany’s population. They are screwed...
The wrong kind of immigrants.
Heather MacDonald is an excellent writer.
The immigrants are also fecund and have many more children than the native Germans. Same goes for the Austrians where 50% of the school children in Vienna are Muslim.
In a few generations the Muslims will be the majotity.
Oktoberfest and Fasching will be history. Dirndls out and burkas/hijabs in.
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