Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann has expressed skepticism about possible ban proceedings against the AfD. “The Federal Constitutional Court has set the hurdles for banning a party very high,” the FDP politician told “Welt am Sonntag”.
You have to be “100 percent sure that it will be successful” if you want to pursue such a procedure. “If such a procedure were to fail before the Constitutional Court, it would be a huge PR victory for the AfD.”
The AfD, founded in 2013, is listed nationwide as a suspected right-wing extremist case by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. In Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony, the state Office for the Protection of the Constitution sees the AfD state associations as definitely right-wing extremist. Politicians from the SPD, the Left and the Greens had recently advocated keeping the option of a ban open – even if the AfD had to be countered politically.
Buschmann now pointed out that the AfD is classified as definitely right-wing extremist in several federal states. “According to the previous rulings of the Federal Constitutional Court, an aggressively combative attitude of this party must also be proven, i.e. the willingness to violently eliminate the free-democratic basic order.” If it cannot be proven that the AfD poses a real danger of wanting to violently eliminate the free-democratic basic order, the ban procedure will fail.
