this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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It's more complex than that. Simply banning it could make everything worse. First of all, banning a party is something that's very hard. It only happened twice in the history of Germany(except for the banning during the third Reich). Trying to bam them could make everything worse than it currently is, since it would look like the older parties are scared and try to keep their power. This could give the AfD a big boost. Another thing is, that in the case of a failure the AfD could use the fact they weren't banned to promote themselves as "Democrats" that don't want to do anything illegal. In the case it would be banned it would take exactly 2 weeks and you have at least 2 or three parties that do exactly the same and maybe would transform into one big party and we have the exact same problem. More effective would be to stop them from receiving money from the government(every party does that so that they can focus on their political work), or to not give the the possibility to enter the Bundestag(or to hold any other form of political office) as its the case with the NPD.
Of course it is complex. A few points:
If you ban a party in Germany, it’s automatically bans all „clones“ of that party, and all of its members in high functions can’t participate in these clones. Failure to comply would lead to an immediate ban of the clone. While I agree that eventually, a new far right with other people will probably form, it would take years for them to reorganize and they would have to be extremely careful. I believe that a ban would probably yield at least 10 years of far-right free politics.
Appeasement of the far right has failed every time in history, they will cannibalize every attempt to include them in any sort of „rational“ discourse. Banning parties is a lever that exists precisely because of Germany‘s history. IMHO it sends a strong message to all the non-far-right people (of which there are approx. 60-70%) that bullshit will not be tolerated.
In contrast, doing nothing signals that what the AfD is doing is fine and will move the discourse farther and farther right.
Stopping funding and preventing them from entering the Parliament is precisely what a ban would do, so I am not sure why the difference is between that and what you are suggesting.