Germany’s president hints hard-right AfD occasion might be banned and warns mainstream rivals in opposition to ‘co-operation with extremists’

Germany‘s president has hinted that the hard-right AfD party could be banned, as he warned mainstream political rivals against ‘co-operation with extremists’.

Speaking on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi regime’s pogrom against Jewish people in 1938, Frank-Walter Steinmeier made the threat without specifically naming any particular parties. 

He said: ‘A party that steps down the path towards aggressive hostility towards the constitution must always reckon with the possibility of being banned’.

AfD’s rise has worried many of Germany’s mainstream political parties. Currently the second largest party in the  Bundestag, AfD is now leading in some national opinion polls, and is expected to win major victories in two regional votes in east Germany next year. 

The party scored a 20.5 percent vote share in last February’s general election to place second, forcing first-placed Christian Democrats (CDU) to enter a coalition with the beaten Social Democrats. 

Many of its competitors describe it as an extremist organisation that threatens to upend Germany’s constitution. 

Steinmeier said postwar Germany was now facing its gravest threats since it reunified in 1990, from actors like Russia and ‘right-wing extremist forces that are attacking our democracy and winning support from our population’.

He said: ‘In my view, it is not enough simply to wait and duck for cover until the storm passes. We have no time to lose. We have to act — we must act … Democracy can defend itself.’

But only the country’s constitutional court can ban it, or cut off its sources of funding.

So far, over 150 MPs from different parties have requested some kind of ban from the Bundestag. 

Steinmeier described the ban of political parties as a ‘last resort’ that come with an extremely high legal bar, but said this move can be justified if said party ‘attack[s] our constitution, oppose[s] it [or] desire[s] a different, illiberal system’. 

For Steinmeier, ‘there must be no political cooperation with extremists. Neither in government nor in parliament.’

‘Antisemitism is not back, because it has always existed,’ he said, alluding to a record 6,236 recorded antisemitic crimes in Germany last year.

‘Is it possible that we have not learned the lessons of history?’ he said

Key to AfD’s rise in recent months has been German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s bumbling coalition, which is is facing infighting, policy deadlock and sliding poll ratings that are all undermining its efforts to take on the rising hard-right.

It marks a difficult start for the conservative politician who ran on bold pledges of reviving the stagnant economy, overhauling the threadbare military and toughening immigration policy after years of drift under the previous government.

In German post-war politics, ‘there has never been such widespread dissatisfaction with a government in such a short period of time’, Manfred Guellner, director of the Forsa polling institute, told AFP.

For Germans who hoped for more decisive leadership after the last government’s collapse, ‘their expectations have been dashed’, he said.

The winners of February’s general election, Merz’s centre-right CDU/CSU bloc now find themselves neck-and-neck in the polls with AfD. 

Merz’s junior coalition partners, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) of ex-chancellor Olaf Scholz, have seen their popularity slide further after a terrible election performance, and now sit around 13-15 percent in polls.

‘It is clear that many citizens are dissatisfied or disappointed with the government’s work so far,’ Roderich Kiesewetter, an MP from Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU), told AFP.

The government appeared to be ‘focusing only on migration instead of the economy, education and security’, he said.