By Eugyppius
A Plague Chronicle
July 22, 2024
Without fully meaning to, authorities in Thüringen are inching closer to a state-level ban of Alternative für Deutschland. The AfD are the strongest-polling party there, and prohibiting them would effectively deprive 30% of Thuringians of their right to choose their favoured representatives in September. While I still think any kind of ban is unlikely, these developments are ominous. The state's own bureaucrats appear to be walking the Interior Ministry right up to the line - and not for any broader strategic purpose, but because of a separate escalation driven by their ridiculous crusade "against the right." Most in the establishment are aware that banning the AfD is a dumb idea, and so if it is to happen, it will be the result of idiotic self-reinforcing spirals like this.
Without fully meaning to, authorities in Thüringen are inching closer to a state-level ban of Alternative für Deutschland. The AfD are the strongest-polling party there, and prohibiting them would effectively deprive 30% of Thuringians of their right to choose their favoured representatives in September. While I still think any kind of ban is unlikely, these developments are ominous. The state's own bureaucrats appear to be walking the Interior Ministry right up to the line - and not for any broader strategic purpose, but because of a separate escalation driven by their ridiculous crusade "against the right." Most in the establishment are aware that banning the AfD is a dumb idea, and so if it is to happen, it will be the result of idiotic self-reinforcing spirals like this.
As Lennart Pfahler and Tim Röhn reported in Welt am Sonntag yesterday, the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution (LfV: the state's domestic intelligence agency) have prepared an internal report for the state Interior Ministry, in which they propose to classify the Thuringian AfD as "militant and aggressive":
The characterisation... goes beyond the mere identification of anti-constitutional tendencies required for observation by intelligence services. In practice, the authorities often use this harsher choice of words to justify banning an association. The report by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution could therefore fuel the debate about banning the AfD.
More specifically, the new designation could give the less strategically minded, more grievously unhinged and crazy people in Thüringen new arguments to push for a state-wide ban. It's also well to remember that these aren't just meaningless classifications. The more state actors define the AfD as an anti-constitutional, anti-democratic and generally evil party, the more they accept responsibility for thwarting their electoral success - and the more they risk being blamed should they fail to do so. A very similar dynamic applied to Covid, and it's very dangerous.
The personality behind this move is probably Stephan Kramer, who has headed the LfV in Thüringen since 2015, and who is a crazy social democrat and long-term sufferer of AfD Derangement Syndrome. On Kramer's watch, the Thuringian constitutional protectors were the first to place the AfD under official political suspicion in March 2020, and again the first to declare them guilty of "proven right-wing extremism" in March 2021. 1 The latter designation allows LfV agents to infiltrate the party with informants and to use other intelligence tactics against them.
With the militant-and-aggressive classification, Thüringen is again at the head of the pack, and (as our Welt reporters note) for an extremely stupid reason:
German crusaders against the right are very interested in treating "right-wing extremists" as criminals, and this entails - among other things - denying them weapons permits. Gang rapes and knife crime may be on the rise in the Federal Republic, but there is nothing more frightening to a certain kind of middle-aged dissolute urbanite, than the idea that somebody who votes for the wrong political party might have a gun somewhere.
In 2023, district administrators in Saale-Orla accordingly refused to issue an AfD member a weapons permit, on the basis that he suffered from "a lack of reliability under the firearms law." This, they said, was because he was a member of the AfD, and the AfD are a "proven right-wing extremist" party in Thüringen. Our man took them to court and the judges ruled in his favour, noting that it had not been "established with the necessary certainty that the entire state organisation of the AfD in Thüringen is anti-constitutional." The Interior Ministry appealed and lost; this time, the judges said that nobody had determined the AfD to be guilty of a "militant and aggressive attitude relevant to weapons law." Our Thuringian guardians of freedom and democracy took this judgement to heart: If AfD members can't be denied weapons permits unless somebody classifies the AfD as "militant and aggressive," well, then, it must be time to classify the AfD as "militant and aggressive." Kramer drew up the necessary internal assessment, which got leaked to Welt, and that is where we are now.
Of course, assessments produced for stupid ad-hoc reasons often turn out to be deeply stupid themselves, and this one seems to be no exception. To prove that the Thuringian AfD are militant and aggressive, the LfV have "compiled 35 individual statements from AfD functionaries... to prove a 'militant and aggressive' attitude." It is amazing to say, but that is mostly what the constitutional protectors seem to do - they collect snippets of politically suspect statements, put them into a massive database, and then string them together to make their bureaucratic case against you. Probably somewhere deep in the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution there is even a eugyppius file where all of my most antidemocratic sentiments are compiled, one after the other.
Anyway, 31 of these 35 snippets flow from the mouth or the pen of Björn Höcke, the evil right-wing extremist and leader of the Thuringian AfD. We have met Höcke before; he is the one who was prosecuted, and convicted, for using a very bad and forbidden phrase in his speeches, and whose appearance in a live televised debate caused a nationwide media panic. Höcke's "militant and aggressive" statements must be really terrible, you're thinking. He must be calling for genocide or something.
Well, Welt quote excerpts from the assessment, and I hate to disappoint you:
[The statements] include this passage from a speech Höcke gave at a Pegida meeting in November 2023: "Meet each other and believe me: when the going gets tough, we'll recognise each other. That's when we'll find each other. Then we'll be what we've always been: Loyal and German and a community that will fight for the future."
The LfV believe that this passage "demonstrates a 'spirit of resistance' directed against the state order." They are in the business of governing spirits now, I guess.
It goes on:
From a speech Höcke gave in Gera in December 2023, the intelligence service noted passages that were again interpreted as a call for resistance: "Resist, resist cleverly.... I have been on the front line for eleven years... in action.... Only in resistance can your will develop.... I know how difficult it is for us Germans to liberate ourselves"...
And there is still more:
.. [O]lder evidence comes from Höcke's book, Never Twice in the Same River. published in 2018. In it, the politician outlined a strategy for the 'reconquest' of Germany that sounds quite militant:"If all else fails, we will... withdraw to our rural retreats and the new Romans, who reside in the neglected cities, can gnash their teeth at the Teutonic Asterixes and Obelixes! The re-tribalisation... will however ...become a...new nucleus of the people... from which a reconquest will start."
The LfV also cite a 2019 Facebook post by Höcke's co-spokesperson in the AfD Stefan Möller, in which Möller says that "We're only defending our country under its flag against your totalitarian impositions, dear enemies of democracy! Because you are the DDR!" In the eyes of the constitutional protectors, this is "evidence of contempt for the state order." That's really all it takes to cross the line into borderline illegal speech in this, the best and most democratic Germany of all time. Call the state totalitarian, and they'll consider whether your political party should be banned to teach you how democratic they are.
It is a very bad sign, how much of the impetus in Germany against "the right" in general and the AfD in particular emerges from the bureaucratic machine, and merely finds final expression in the political arm. In a 2023 interview on Israeli television, our constitutional protector Kramer declared that the " The AfD is the parliamentary arm of a much bigger conspiracy, a revolutionary conspiracy." He said that "they want to overthrow the government, the state, and the whole system that has been set up in the Federal Republic of Germany." He has now apparently used his Interior Ministry's legal embarrassment as an occasion to force his personal opinions into an official assessment. Likewise, on the federal level, much of Interior Minister Nancy Faeser's campaign "against the right" appears to be rooted in the constitutional protectors' Covid-inspired obsession with " delegitimisers of the state." Banning the AfD would be a catastrophe, but more for the politicians and less for the bureaucrats of the permanent civil service. I fear that it's mainly the latter who won't stop compiling ammunition for this project and pushing from below at every opportunity.