Germany’s February election produced an unprecedented result. The center-right Christian Democratic Union, led by Friedrich Merz, won the most votes and the largest number of seats in the Bundestag. But a strong second place went to the populist, nationalist, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland, widely known by the acronym AfD. The party's 10.3 million votes — 20.8 percent of the total — gave it 152 of 630 seats, by far its best showing since its founding in 2013.
The sheer speed of the AfD’s rise has been extraordinary. In 2013 it did not meet the threshold for a single Bundestag seat; in 2017, with nearly six million votes, it won 94; there was an ebb in 2021 to 83 seats; and now it is the second-largest party, the primary opposition to the coalition between the CDU and the center-left Social Democratic Party of Germany.
With the backing of one in five German voters, the AfD cannot be lightly dismissed. No far-right party in post-war German history has ever enjoyed such strong support.
This month, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic security agency, announced that it had concluded that the AfD was a “proven right-wing extremist organization.” The Office, after compiling a 1,100-page report, is satisfied that it has proven that the AfD seeks to undermine the democratic system. This new status lowers the legal bar to carry out surveillance of party members and scrutiny of its finances, including the use of undercover informants and communications interception.
The next sanction, for which many are calling, would be to prohibit the AfD altogether as “unconstitutional.” Article 21 of the Basic Law, Germany’s constitution, allows the banning of parties that “seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany.” This only been invoked twice: in 1952, the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party was prohibited, as was the Communist Party of Germany four years later. But these were both fringe groups, with no more than 2 or 3 percent of the vote.
Inevitable accusations of political repression and censorship followed. Vice President JD Vance railed at the German political establishment, posting on social media, “The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, and by far the most representative of East Germany. Now the bureaucrats try to destroy it.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was equally vehement in his condemnation, posting that “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy — it’s tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD — which took second in the recent election — but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.”
As usual with members of the Trump administration, there is a disingenuous conflation of free speech and espousing views with which the president and others are in sympathy. Remember that Elon Musk gave an address at the AfD’s campaign launch in January, weeks after conducting an uncritical softball interview with the party’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, on his own social media site.
That is not to say that formal censure of a major political party is straightforward or without nuance. Germany’s history has left it with an acute sensitivity to the “normalization” of extremist politics. Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933 through democratic methods, although the Nazis never won more than a third of the national popular vote. Nevertheless, it is quite a significant step to say that a party 20 percent of Germans have voted for is “extremist.”
Vance and Rubio have, however, ducked the harder issues. They present any measures against a political party as illegitimate in principle, but is the AfD, as the intelligence service claims, “opposed to the free democratic order”? If so, what limits should be placed on such an organization?
Does the support of a certain proportion of the electorate give a political party carte blanche and legitimize any behavior? That surely is not a sustainable argument. After all, the U.S. State Department maintains a list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, which includes political parties such as Hamas and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Although there is no suggestion that the AfD is involved in or anywhere close to terrorist activity, it demonstrates that the American government does recognizes limits to acceptable political conduct.
German intelligence believes it has evidence that the AfD has incited hatred, expressed racist beliefs and stereotypes and sought to undermine the democratic system. If the evidence is valid, what is the appropriate reaction?
Trump habitually talks of his political opponents as “traitors” and has implied that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, should be executed. He is no free speech fundamentalist. In Washington, the German situation is a proxy for legitimizing anti-immigration rhetoric and the supposed suppression of conservative voices and opinions.
The condemnation of the AfD has raised a fundamental dilemma of democracy: How does an open, free, pluralistic society tolerate the intolerant without sacrificing its own principles? When are censorship and exclusion necessary to preserve freedom?
Those questions require hard intellectual labor, but it is not a discourse that preoccupies Vance or Rubio. They are simply acting on MAGA partisanship.
Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
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