There are ongoing efforts to ban the party (through constitutional instruments created specifically after 1945 to prevent a second NSDAP or other similar anti-constitutional extremists) and there is an argument to be made that this is strategical assistance for evidence-gathering.
There has been another effort [0] collecting _public_ statements that can be used in a potential future Constitutional Court case. Depending on your stance this leak complements the ban effort or undermines its legitimacy. Note, Germany has no fruit-of-the-poison-tree evidence provisions!
There has long been sufficient material to initiate the proceedings to ban the AfD party, but the conservative parties (CDU/CSU) have so far blocked this.
All the state bodies authorized to file such a request – the Bundestag, the Bundesrat, and the Federal Government – each require a simple majority to initiate the proceedings and thus rely on the votes of the CDU.
It is also important to note that this is merely a request for an examination; the final decision rests with the Federal Constitutional Court.
There is a recent comment from a very respected lawyer about the situation, citing Göbbels:
https://youtu.be/I87E0cV367I?t=11614
(use the auto-translated subtitles)
The full quote translates to something like:
"It will always remain one of the greatest ironies of democracy that it provided its own mortal enemies with the very means by which it was destroyed. As elected representatives, the persecuted leaders of the NSDAP enjoyed parliamentary immunity, a salary, and free travel passes. This shielded them from police intervention, allowed them greater latitude in what they could say compared to ordinary citizens, and—to top it all off—ensured that their activities were financed by their very enemies. This democratic stupidity could be exploited to great advantage."
> There has long been sufficient material to initiate the proceedings to ban the AfD party, but the conservative parties (CDU/CSU) have so far blocked this
While this might be true, it's at least half a lie – SPD, Grüne and SED could have initiated proceedings anytime targeting one of AfD's state chapters in Saarland, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower-Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg, or Berlin (2016-2023). They didn't. You should explain why their reasons to not do it have been valid, while not being valid reasons for non-leftist parties. Also, SPD isn't even trying to convince CDU/CSU right now... they benefit from the Brandmauer, because without AfD, there would be a clear majority for non-left parties and no one would need a coalition with the SPD.
> note that this is merely a request for an examination; the final decision rests with the Federal Constitutional Court.
Again, true, but also half a lie. It's not merely a request in the sense that there's no risk associated with it. The backlash of a failure to ban the AfD would be ginormous - the situation would be much worse than it is right now. That - and the fact that SPD and Green benefit from the Brandmauer - is the reason why even center left parties don't really move forward with a ban.
Why banning a political party and not the political views? It seems easier to punishing people based on what they say and write and throw them into prison, rather than trying to keep the same people from assembling together as a group and having people vote for them.
Make it illegal to hold and express the view that people should not be allowed to wearing the burqa. If someone is express that they are against same-sex marriage or against circumcision for non-medical reasons, let them sit in jail for a few years. Why allow people to legally hold those view and express them but then forbid them from being political about it?
let me introduce you to this slope, its pretty slippery but i am sure its fine. Nobody has ever slid down such a slippery slope before...
refresher course on reality: you want these views out in public so you can publicly ridicule the people expressing them. You send them to jail they learn from the real criminals how to be really criminal with their views and come out worse than before. That these views are taking hold more and more now tells you there is a legitimate problem not being addressed and either the view is some shade of correct or, more likely, the view is an incorrect solution to the actual problem that won't work. Either way you have to figure it out and fix it. Repressing the view just makes the eventual result more violent without solving the underlying issue causing the view
Because you need the organization to cause change. China figured this out. If everyone wanted something to happen, say the end of Covid restrictions, even the CCP wasn't capable of stopping that uprising. But if it's just a few weirdos spouting their ideas online or off, the local police can easily handle them. Looking at the videos out of France, it's not as bad as it looks, but also, organized via group messages/texts, but they're not trying to get people to get people to pass laws in a calm, diplomatic fashion.
As far as jailing people because they think or say the wrong thing? omfg no thank you! Saudi Arabia almost just beheader someone for that kind of WrongThink.
Do we have any example of a "good" country that has banned political parties for holding the wrong political views? The most recent example I can remember is Russia when they prevented a anti-war party for participating in the election, but I doubt that is example that people want Germany to follow.
The German constitution allow the legal system to limit the fundamental rights of individuals who are found to be undermining the constitutional order. It can punish people as well as preventing people to form political parties. If the political views are so bad that they are seen as undermining the constitutional order, allowing people to hold those views and express them but not to form parties seems odd and counter-intuitive. If the views are that bad they should not be expressed regardless if its done with or without a party hat.
Spain banned parties that didn't explicitly condemn terrorism (in the context of Basque independece-related terrorism, but applies to all terrorism in Spain).
Up until then, certain politicians wouldn't explicitly support, but also wouldn't condemn Basque-independence-related terrorism when asked. Thankfully we're now past this! The terror group was dissolved.
Probably the law was a good thing? The danger being 'who decides what terrorism is', but I suppose the definition in the law is fairly clear (haven't read it nor plan to).
Two examples come from Germany's past - The KDP/Communist Party was banned in 1956, and by counterexample, Germany considered banning the neo-Nazi NPD party, but decided they were too politically irrelevant to bother banning them (2017). Turkey had the Welfare Party banned in 1998 but that one's a bit stickier.
If Western Civilization prides itself on classically liberal freedoms, it cannot claim to do so while limiting them, especially for the sake of religion which is antithetical to the French forefathers of classical liberalism. The right to be "Free" from all religion is given, and therefore speech must be stronger than the right to practice any religion.
It's classically liberal to allow anyone to follow their religion, it's not classically liberal to restrict freedom of speech for the sake of religion, much less for the sake of a foreign religion.
Society should be looking at why MAGA came about and what is the best solution to mitigate it (hint: spread the wealth more). Simply banning what you don't like is simply becoming what you don't like: intolerant.
“The iron hand crush'd the Tyrant's head
And became a Tyrant in his stead.” -- William Blake
Maintaining a balance of power between legislatory, judicatory, and executive organs, a system of free speech, securing fundamental constitutional citizen rights, and the enablement and guarantee of peaceful power transition is core to democracy. In addition to that, there is an federal power distribution axis in Germany.
Looking at historical precedents that tried to undermine this kind of democratic political system (e.g. PIS in Poland, NSDAP in Germany), the political systems were damaged (and are still not repaired) or outright hollowed out.
I think it is important that a dialogue exists in society, Even the radical parties have a chance to exist and represent the political opinion and direction of their voters. However, I think it is even more important than these parties stick to maintaining the very political system that they allows them to exist.
The AFD might not be such a party. In time, democratic state organs might be hollowed out, and an apartheid system might be installed in Germany.
It is worth fighting to maintain a suboptimal free political system than to succumb to madness. At least - in part - we can keep the idiots in check.
Not sure those efforts will lead anywhere, as the conservative CxU party is already positioning themselves to be the "rational right-wing voice", parroting the same messages but more eloquently.
If it progresses like it ALWAYS does (EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.), the center-right party copies the far-right messages in hopes of gaining the votes of the far-right voters, then enters a coalition with them as the "voice of reason to reign them in", to ultimately just achieve normalization of those narratives, a hollowed-out democracy, destroyed political discourse and an empowered far-right party.
But one can hope, that THIS time it will be different...
> the center-right party copies the far-right messages in hopes of gaining the votes of the far-right voters, then enters a coalition with them as the "voice of reason to reign them in", to ultimately just achieve normalization of those narratives, a hollowed-out democracy, destroyed political discourse and an empowered far-right party.
Now imagine you had only a center-right and a far-right party, and you have the U.S. :/
While it probably feels quite safe and dry under that rock you call home you might want to have a look around every now and then to get attuned to the zeitgeist. If you do you'll notice a bunch of useful idiots calling themselves the 'Democatic Socialists of America', a group which has been successful in many races and seems to be poised to take over the 'democratic' party. They have a major in New York and one in Seattle, they have a potential presidential candidate and they seem to be growing like fungus. Their program leads right to the bread lines which always seem to be the unspoken goal of socialist movements everywhere. They are at least as far to the left in their rhetoric as e.g. the Swedish and German communist parties (which both call themselves 'the left').
The mainstream left in the USA used to be comparable to the centre-right in most western-European countries but this is no longer the case.
They are the zeitgeist of the 'democratic' party. They are using it as a skin suit for their own purposes. Their potential presidential candidate might just get the nomination. The Bolshevik party was their name notwithstanding hardly mainstream yet they took over anyway.
There are no bread lines like the ones created by Socialist policies. America is the land of plenty, the land where the 'poor' are overweight due to the abundance of cheap and rather unhealthy foods. Ask an eastern European with more than a few decades on his name what bread lines look like, or a Cuban, a Venezuelan, a Cambodian, anyone who lived under the end game of the policies professed by the DSA.
The DSA may be the 'zeitgeist' of the democratic party, but the party institutions are still firmly under the control of the party's most conservative faction, the neoliberals formerly of the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council), a group specifically founded to "exterminate the progressives" according to Clinton adviser Bill Curry. The DNC (Democratic National Committee) very visibly and explicitly ratfucked the progressive candidate in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, and barred pro-Palestinian delegates from their 2024 national convention. When a DSA-backed candidate defeats a DNC-backed candidate in a primary, it is a big upset and a high profile news story. But it is also extremely rare, and when DSA-backed candidates get into office, they often tack to the right in order to work with the existing power structures.
Welcome in current Polish politics. Konfederacja from our ground in currently playing to be buddy buddy with winning party and is treated as semi part of current government
But what is discussed here is not banning far right parties but a specific one that goes further than what should be allowed legally. From what I’ve read AfD goes way beyond what say Le Pen or Meloni parties propose.
The problem in Germany has been that there was no center-right party. Center-left (SPD) and center-right parties (CDU with Merkel) met somewhere in the middle, which was a problem for right-of-center voters - there are many of them and they needed something reasonable to vote for and there wasn't. The CDU moved more to the right again, and it should because there was a giant hole in the political spectrum.
This is a genuine question to probe the solution space to the politcal problems in Germany: What do you think would be the right thing to do THIS time?
Well, someone has to represent these voters, or they will co-opt another party or put up their own candidate. And the government can’t just keep banning them, or they’ll catch bystanders (“dog-whistles”) and look super illegitimate (when you prosecute people for holding an empty sign, like Russia, you’re the baddie). Already I believe banning the AfD is stupid and would backfire egregiously in a few years at most.
Ultimately, you can’t ban ideas in a democracy, unfortunately even the idea to abolish it. What you can do it make that process harder and slower, so your opponents lose power before they succeed. Or, you know, convince people to drop the idea altogether.
> "Ultimately, you can’t ban ideas in a democracy, unfortunately even the idea to abolish it."
What you can do though, is destroy the foundation of democracy by being tolerant towards discrimination, for the sake of not "banning ideas"
--> "Why not turn people who are not able to work anymore into a nutricious paste for others? It was just a question! You can't silence me, this is a democracy!!"
Linking to that Wikipedia article doesn’t change the fact that the data obviously show Europeans will become a minority in almost all of their homeland countries within the next 50 years. It’s irrefutable.
There’s nothing “supremacist” about not wanting to become a minority in your own country. It’s not hateful, it’s a very human desire that every nation shares, including China, Japan, Korea etc.
Is Japan “white supremacist” for implementing an immigration policy that keeps their society homogeneous? No.
Citing classic great replacement theory rhetoric on the 'data of a disappearing people' is not compelling. Miscegenation is very human that happens in every society. Ethnicity and culture is mutable and always will be. People move and intermingle. That is human. Trying to artificially isolate a group of people with a particular set of genes is unnatural, gross, and eventually leads to genetic stagnation.
Your whataboutisms are weak. Other dominant ethnic groups can be supremacist. Backwards logic is not limited to white peoples.
To echo my sibling comment, it seems kind of like you moved from “it isn’t happening” to “it is happening but it’s a good thing”.
Don’t you think that a nation should have a conversation about how they want their own people to evolve? This is a group of people which has existed for thousands of years and this idea of open borders and pretending like race doesn’t exist is a very new idea.
Something as momentous and irreversible as ethnically replacing your own population should at least warrant a national conversation/debate about the topic.
Trying to shut down discussion by labeling it a conspiracy theory without actually engaging with the facts of the topic is just a tactic to force your worldview onto your fellow countrymen.
>Backwards logic is not limited to white peoples.
Okay well it’s good you clarified that, most normal people would not think about how Japanese people are “supremacists”. They are known for being extremely nice and welcoming to strangers. They are not “fascist” and don’t even have a military. Yet they have preserved their country and people in the way it has existed for millennia, and there are many benefits to it (high social trust etc).
Globally speaking, your worldview is in the minority and would be regarded as extreme or “backward” to many people.
I didn't move from anything. The concept of white europeans being intentionally erased by a concerted immigration effort is non-sensical.
Which group of people have existed for thousands of years? Be specific, then I'll point out the multiple times in history that they've intermingled with other cultures and societies to form new ones.
Ethnically replacing a population isn't happening and is a false premise that I'm not going to continue debating as if it has any merit.
My 'worldview' is not an opinion. It's a historical observation of humans and their physical and cultural migration patterns.
>intentionally erased by a concerted immigration effort is non-sensical.
Whether it’s concerted or not doesn’t matter at all, I’ve never made the argument once that it is concerted. It seems you want to attach that to my argument so that you can help to associate my argument with a conspiracy theory Wikipedia page so it’s easier to dismiss without having to engage with the data.
The data unequivocally show that Germans will be a minority soon in their own homeland. That’s what matters; it’s happening and it’s provable. There’s nothing false about that premise. Nations do control their own borders, it’s a conscious choice to allow migration at these levels.
>I'll point out the multiple times in history that they've intermingled with other cultures
Chinese people have done this too, same with Indians. Yet to say that Chinese people don’t exist as an ethnicity is just obviously not true. Go to China and try to explain to a Chinese person how their people don’t really exist and how they are just a product of intermingling cultures over the course of history. Tell them that an African who moves to their country is just as Chinese as an ethnic Han Beijing resident who’s family has been there for thousands of years. They would laugh you out of the room. That’s the crux of what makes your worldview nonsensical. You are saying something doesn’t exist which everyone knows intuitively and innately from childhood does exist.
Your argument really isn't any different than the conspiracy theory as the alleged end result and preventative measures are indistinguishable. You just don't want to be associated with it because its been thoroughly debunked as racist swill.
Similar data has been shown about WASP identity in the U.S. to which I say, the only people who care are not serious or intelligent people. Like you're so afraid and incapable of coping with change that you have to enact mass violence against immigrants to preserve some perverted since of identity.
Cultural and ethnic shifts are happening, have always happened, and will continue to happen, even as far right wing brains atrophy in their attempts to stop the inevitable.
there is a massive difference between a natural and consensual cultural and ethnic shifts and one manufactured against the populations best wishes and interests. i guess what is happening in gaza is also "inevitable" so why resist.
Are you willing to enact great suffering and violence upon many people just to maintain your artificial idea of what it means to be a certain nationality, frozen in some arbitrary time? Because, historically, that’s what we’ve seen it takes. Segregation. Camps. Apartheid.
> Linking to that Wikipedia article doesn’t change the fact that the data obviously show Europeans will become a minority in almost all of their homeland countries within the next 50 years. It’s irrefutable.
Where do my quarter-Mexican, quarter-Italian, quarter-Croatian children fall in that census? Are they white? Are they a minority, or not? Does it matter how Mestizo their grandmother was? What if she was indigenous?
Hopefully the next generation ignores retards that hold on to ideas of ethnicity like they’re some sacred line in the fight between good and evil and just fucks like all their ancestors did and life moves on.
> it’s a very human desire that every nation shares
Nations are a very recent construct in the history of the world. Your appeal to nature is audaciously ignorant.
Which went through a bloody religious partition in 1947 to become two separate countries because of incompatible competing cultures not able to live together. And one country promptly wiped out the other culture almost completely to become a mono-culture. And that enmity between the two countries (cultures) follow to even now with wars and other hostilities.
What is called multiculturalism in India is a mix of indigenous sub-cultures who share many similarities, which the different cultures of EU/Europe can be considered to be following as well.
> two separate countries because of incompatible competing cultures not able to live together.
India has one of the world's largest muslim population. Pakistan separated due to religion and not culture. In fact Pakistani has Punjabis that are quite similar to Indian Punjab and Bangladesh & Indian West Bengal has quite similar cultures.
> What is called multiculturalism in India is a mix of indigenous sub-cultures who share many similarities
Are you claiming that Assam, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Bengal cultures are the same? They dont even share the same scripts (and in case of Tamil it is even a different root language)! They may be sharing same religion for majority of people, but that does not make it a subculture.
“Fascist” means nothing in this context, not wanting to become a minority in your own country is a human desire which all people share. It’s not hateful at all, it’s just human nature.
Ethnicity and culture is mutable and always will be. People move and intermingle. That is human. Trying to artificially isolate a group of people with a particular set of genes is unnatural, gross, and eventually leads to genetic stagnation. Your thinking is backwards and unsustainable which is why movements espousing these views always fail.
No because to great replacement theory supporters it’s not actually about nationality, like they claim. It’s about skin color. Dark Germans are not actual Germans to them, which is why they want them gone.
The obvious solution to this fake “ohhh everyone is immigrating to XYZ!” panic is obviously just making citizenship easier to achieve.
It’s the same in the US. Too many people are undocumented? Okay, so document them, problem solved. But the right won’t do that, because they are lying to you. They don’t care about documentation or illegal immigration, they care about skin color and white purity.
One can argue about refugees, I myself see that critical, but we are in dire need of more regular migration for demographic reasons and because the general lack of work force in multiple sectors like health care.
Ethnic erasure is a crazy concept, we are mixing ethnically for centuries and who cares about color of eye or skin anyway? What we need is cultural preservation and coherence to some degree. So we should improve on refugee laws - which btw the green party had started before they were bullied out of government by the elites.
Cultural preservation is for museums when it can no longer be organically sustained. Coherence is as non-sensical as trying to preserve eye and skin color. Culture is mutable and always will be. You might as well try to stop the tide
Culture is as mutable as borders of nations. Culture and nations are often seen as synonymous, to the point where one often get defined by the other.
Valuing a nations culture, values in society, borders, and maintain coherence within society are not far right idea. All political platforms strive more or less for those things, through they do differ on what values they want to focus on and deploy different strategies.
Preservation not in the stricter sense, but meant as "reasonable slowly moving culture" as it implies stability. You also need coherence to some degree to maintain a functional society. As an hypothetical extreme example imagine one half of the population not even understanding the language of the other half, such a society would break apart real quick.
Your assertion on coherence for a functional society and your extreme hypothetical is fallacious. Multiple governments and societies across the globe operate effectively without a single national language.
The united states for example, current situation acknowledged, saw a meteoric rise even with, perhaps even because of a rich cultural tapestry that could be in no way described as coherent. Sure there are large blocs of cultural identity across multiple regions, but that's about it, and even then that's been on the decline for some time.
Germans are people having a German passport. They will not be a minority.
There is already no single German ethnicity as the history and culture has been diverse regionally.
Stopping legitimate refugees is extreme in my view (against human rights). What you are doing is classic right wing rhetoric mixing legitimate refugees and illegitimate into one pool.
This is exactly the problem, this is genocidal language. To deny the existence of an ethnic group and culture which has existed for thousands of years.
There’s nothing hateful about noticing the data showing that Europeans are being ethnically replaced in all of their homeland countries. Also, there are many ways to oppose it peacefully and morally.
> "To deny the existence of an ethnic group and culture which has existed for thousands of years."
Noone is denying the existence of Germans in Germany. Germans are a product of their current culture.
Ethnocide is describing the erasure of culture, not the organic evolution of it.
I don't wear the same clothes as my grandparents did, I don't eat the same food, don't do the same work, don't have the same social life.
This is my culture, I am a product of it, my grandchildren will have a different culture. It is arrogant to assume my culture is the "peak" of my countries' culture (or "ethnicity"), just as it is not the place of my parents or grandparents to claim as such.
What is propagated here is that Germany (or whatever nation) needs to proactively reject the coexistence of other cultures within its borders for the fear of any kind of impact on itself in the future, taking effort to (depending on the age of who you ask) preserve or reverse its current state. THIS is genocidal language.
I don't care at all about ethnicity, but that sentence is part of the problem. Lawfully spoken it's a tautology, but that's not the concern people have. They are concerned that the German culture get erased within a few generations, because to many people with a too different cultural background enter the society.
That's a legitimate concern nobody really wants to address.
> concerned that the German culture get erased within a few generations
It seems to me that you do not know what ethnicity means.
> They are concerned that the German culture get erased within a few generations, because to many people with a too different cultural background enter the society
I addressed that by saying there has never been a coherent German culture
> I addressed that by saying there has never been a coherent German culture
Do you think that's true for German in particular or generally for countries? Like, do you think there isn't something like French or Italian culture? I always found it very weird how people think that Germany is somewhat special in that regard that we somehow ended up without having a coherent culture.
This a US centric platform here and so many words in the US come from Germany. I just learned that "Rucksack" (for large hiking backpacks) has become part of the English language in some regions. We totally need to introduce "Döner" as well.
It's not random words that join other languages.
By that same logic there has never been “a coherent Chinese culture”, therefore Chinese people do not exist or deserve to have their own country.
What are your requirements for a “coherent culture”? Every country in the entire world has some variability within its culture depending on region.
Whatever your criteria are for a coherent culture, I’m sure China or India would surely fail them. Yet to deny the existence of Chinese culture or Chinese people would not only be extremely offensive, it would be genocidal language.
Denying the existence of cultures and ethnicities is a hallmark of genocide in fact.
>The United Nations and atrocity-prevention frameworks identify the denial of the existence of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as a core risk factor or precursor to mass violence and identity-based conflict.
Are you really going to sit here and pretend if the place you grew up in and invested your life began changing very drastically in a short time frame you wouldn’t be concerned for things you cherish? Why must the liberals always pretend to be inhuman when trying to discuss human rights? Refugees need homes and love and Germans are allowed to care about their culture.
Every place changes drastically. My country does not have an immigrant influx but is a completely different country from 20 years ago. Every person has what need as an excuse to become "conservative".
The changes are a constant everywhere. Using that as an excuse to hate is political manipulation.
Is it the case that all people concerned with preserving that with which they are familiar, in all circumstances, are hateful? Because there doesn’t seem to be a way for someone to express sentiment or care for a time and place without someone like you coming in to deliver that precise unfounded moral judgment. I will assume there IS a way to both be attached to something you care about and also be European so please just tell us what that way is so we can move forward. Because the longer people are scolded and called monsters for being attached to little delights they have grown accustomed to that might be changing, the more they will simply begin to identify as monsters. Let’s make room for different points of view.
You just can't stop the change. Much less decide how it will change. Hating different people and blaming them for your unhappiness won't solve the issue.
Think about it: 20 years ago you weren't a hateful person, that also changed. Why not get back to an older version of yourself? I'm sure at the time you thought things were amazing, there was already a bunch of frustrated middle aged men hating what you now love and miss.
Neither the person you respond to nor me wrote anything that indicates hate for anybody, this comes completely out of your head with no connection to the posts you are reacting to.
> They are concerned that the German culture get erased within a few generations, because to many people with a too different cultural background enter the society.
That's how German culture as it is was created in the first place. And that's how the future German culture will be created, ad infinitum.
However, violence, intimidation and human rights violations during immigration and customs enforcement in order to pump hateful and jingoistic populist support is a rightwing idea. The steelman for it is that it “intimidates” would-be immigrants, but the counterargument is that it’s senseless strongman violence enacted on desperate people[1] running from terrible situations that ironically the US have had a direct hand in manufacturing.
This is quite common to far-right rhetoric:
- You agree that we should [very mild and centrist idea, commonplace across the world]
- Good, now that you agree then you should have no opposition to [human atrocities]
Edit: [1] and once you’ve built your apparatus for violence against migrants, and you’ve successfully dissuaded the migrants who are marginally less desperate, you’re now committing heinous crimes against the most desperate migrants, in a vicious feedback loop of unimaginable suffering. Like forcing a woman and her child who were fleeing sex trafficking into a camp under fluorescent lights where the woman will be raped, her child taken away from her, and both ending up with substandard care for infectious diseases that they catch.
That's neither a left nor right position. Many extreme capitalists, a right wing ideology, support open borders. Meanwhile China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam etc do not seem to have open borders / liberal migration policies
If it costs you 200k pounds to house a single person, it sounds like the main issue isn't the immigrant/refugee but your economic system. What makes that far right is blaming the other for your society's greater ills
> What is so wrong with legal immigration rather than illegal?
Nothing, but you have to be sure when they say "we want to get rid of the illegal immigrants" they don't really mean "we want to make all immigration from shithole countries illegal and get rid of people from those places", because they like to play those word games. This is what happened in the US.
People married to immigrants, who love immigrants, who work with immigrants, and even immigrants themselves heard Trump say "We want to deport criminal immigrants" and voted for that.
Next thing you know they're deporting your wife. Then they start chasing away foreign students, and companies who want to work with and hire foreigners are put on shit lists. Then they start narrowing pathways to legal immigration to create more strain on the system. Then they remove protected status from legal immigrants creating a population overnight who are illegal. Then they start looking at modifying the Constitution to change what makes someone a citizen in the first place, and whether they can retroactively strip people of that right. Then they start looking at naturalized citizens to denaturalize them.
Eventually they start going after political opponents who are immigrants, raiding their homes and threatening to deport them and their families.
These are not hypotheticals, it's where the US went in fewer than 2 years since giving the "just no illegal immigration, what's wrong with that?" crowd free reign to do whatever they want. And we specifically got here by taking the reasonable idea that illegal immigration is undesirable and running with it until the anti-immigration problem is far worse than the illegal immigration problem.
So if you think 200k to house an immigrant is bad, if your country is anything like the US (it is) soon enough you're paying billions upon billions for an unaccountable domestic paramilitary force that deports people to foreign torture prisons and executes citizens in the streets. Then you have a real problem.
That's a interesting theory. Usually what happens is the opposite: a right-wing party will pretend to be right-wing to win the election and then when in power it will do whatever the left-wing party does.
For example, they will promise you to kick one billion immigrants, and then when in power they will say that they actually can't do that because of law or economic concerns… and then they will increase the rate of immigration.
> "Usually what happens is the opposite: a right-wing party will pretend to be right-wing to win the election and then when in power it will do whatever the left-wing party does."
That's a fascinating perspective. Do you think they "do whatever the left-wing party does" because
1. they are secretly not right-wing?
2. they rallied on matters which were anyway already worked on by the existing government, and reality is not as simple as they claim it is?
3. they had no clue how to actually achieve anything they promised on the required scale, just said anything to enrage people and get their vote and now have to work in the same system as everyone else?
1. They secretly defend the interests of the wealthy, which want slave labour from the third world. This coincides with left-wing policies, even though they do it because they want to see the civilisation destroyed.
In any case, the average plain, poor person of the country gets screwed.
The AfD is clearly anti-democratic and will try to destroy our society if they are voted into power. CDU/CSU makes terrible politics but they are not fascist.
People putting those parties into the same category is a significant part of the problem.
If you read it again you may notice that I didn't put them into the same category.
CDU/CSU will try to take the same topics the AfD used to enrage its voter-base and will present itself as the "rational, conservative and experienced" alternative to the "concerns of the voter".
This is the process which will cause CDU/CSU to not publicly condemn the AfD and its narratives, will make the CDU/CSU to "sacrifice" themselves as the coalition partner who will "control" the AfD, secretly hoping to convert their voters into CDU/CSU voters while AfD destroys itself due to its lack of skills to actually deliver in government.
In the end the AfD MAY or MAY NOT actually collapse if they are forced to deliver on their unrealistic promises.
But it won't matter, because #1 the party will not die because it will present itself as the victim, and #2 the whole exercise will do such a substantial damage to political discourse and democracy that it will take decades to recover from it.
Again, one can hope that THIS TIME it will be different...
A bunch of AfD members self-reported their anti-constitutional statements to Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, an organization that again and again hilariously exposes AfD and their technological (and not only) illiteracy.
Sweden is fairly well know for its public access to official records, and any email sent to an official position in government is part of the public accessible record. Politicians however all have private emails and are users of instance messages services that are not part of the public record. Public access is also only for the public role in government, not for example the role of being the party leader.
Would it be a good thing or bad thing if this was scaled up so email servers and instance messages services was all public if the message involved a member of a political party, without allowing any back channel or ways to avoid the public record?
It is a cat-and-mouse game. In the UK, when email rules started getting enforced, politicians moved to WhatsApp and then Signal. If Signal becomes subject to enforcement, they will probably find other ways; and the collateral damage will likely be that everyone's messages will become fair game even more than it already is.
The reality is that backchannels have always existed. People used to meet discreetly or through emissaries; or had phone calls from secure lines; etc. There is so much that we will never know, even about times that are well-documented.
To be honest, I am not a big fan of "thoughtcrime" being pursued. Let them be racist if they want to; we should make sure the population is smart enough to reject racism on its own. Maintaining a working democracy requires some violence, sure, but if we over-use it it will stop being a democracy.
Same thing in the Netherlands. I believe our previous prime minister (now secretary general of NATO) even used an extremely old phone which can only keep a 20 message history to have a “plausible” excuse why he can’t comply with the requirements.
These types of shenanigans were even named after him, “Rutte doctrine”.
In this email leak, it is all emails from members of the party, not just elected officials. It is also emails sent from the outside to party members. Is that going too far? In term of transparency, allowing the public to see everything that happens and communicate within a political party would give some insight in what kind of people a party is made from.
It is definitely an interesting discussion to have in where the lines should be drawn in transparency and public insight into political landscape and behavior inside it. In Sweden, every person, regardless of position, has their income as public information. How much a person pay it taxes is also public information, so in some sense you can guess how much assets a person own and how much they have in the bank based on what they declared.
>
I do think politicians should waive some privacy rights when elected. Same thing for their bank accounts and other assets.
This would make surveillance laws socially much more acceptable. The politicians will claim:
- "We are surveilled anyway, so we can pass surveillance laws against citizens, too.", or
- "The citizens really ask for surveillance laws against specific groups (in this case: politicians). So, we will, of course, give the citizens what they want and pass surveillance laws against potential terrorists/child abusers/[whatever is currently fashionable]".
If you consider privacy or the right not to be surveilled to be important, this better should hold for the enemy (politicians).
> “The citizens really ask for surveillance laws against specific groups (in this case: politicians).”
?? The root of the idea is not bi-directional. Politicians have a particular type of job: public service. It’s this “job” that requires the transparency.
And not transparency into their public life. Though, as a public figure if your private life becomes embarrassing, or salacious you’re guaranteed to have news hounds on your trail. Not least because your public service rivals will use whatever they can to discredit you in the court of public opinion.
It’s the same for the work product. All of the material of governance should be the “property” of the people governed.
> Though, as a public figure if your private life becomes embarrassing, or salacious you’re guaranteed to have news hounds on your trail.
This is like: if you engage in anti-social behaviour or plan some crime, you deserve to have hounds (law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies) on your trail because of surveillance data that was gathered about you.
> Can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
This is like the political argument: "If you have nothing to hide, why are you opposed to the new surveillance law?"
It wasn't so long ago in America that having a private email server was actually the main complaint about a presidential candidate. Everyone knows that they all do it one way or another.
That was never the "main complaint". It was just a complaint or the most convenient complaint at the time.
Conservatives are vibe haters. They feel something is wrong and will figure out how to justify their feelings. The email server was just one of many excuses to dislike Hillary. But it was never the "main" one. It was just one that gained a lil traction.
Hillary also caught crap for Benghazi, her husband, her aides, her outfits, etc. It never ends with conservatives because how they feel is as important as reality. They'll find anything to justify their vibes.
I think transparency in government is really important, but I don't think making ~all communication between officials public is the way. For the well behaved people it has all sorts of funny second-order effects, like people being reluctant to ask questions which might make them look silly in case they're taken out of context. For the poorly behaved they'll just work around it.
Would it be a good thing or bad thing if this was scaled up so email servers and instance messages services was all public if the message involved a member of a political party, without allowing any back channel or ways to avoid the public record?
They did this in the Netherlands and the result is that politicians started sending voice notes...
You also sometimes need to be able to just discuss stuff, privately. Not all phrases uttered in the context of government do well when interpreted by the general public.
You cannot prevent private communication. It is just not possible to stop people from finding ways to exchange information in nonpublic ways.
Sure, you can make it the law, but technically there are infinite ways to get around it, including ones that are impossible to get rid off, like using the shared folders on systems that are non-publik for safety reasons.
They just won a state election a few weeks ago, and they're also ahead in nation-wide polls - how can you ban a party that receives the majority vote of the population?
If the party is actively working, in a combative and aggressive manner, to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany, the constitution allows for this party to be banned.
Popularity isn't a limit here, at least not in this direction. If the party were irrelevant, it would prevent the ban since the party would not be able to achieve those anti-constitutional goals anyway.
You're not protecting democracy by not letting people vote for the only party that even pretends to care about their concerns. If you want people to vote for other parties then those parties should change to serve the people again instead of trying to make the people serve them.
Different talking points. A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic. People need to be protected from that no matter who or how popular they are.
Only one instance can answer that, the Bundesverfassungsgericht.
Getting that answer is part of the process to ban a party. Some people might not want that question answered.
Yes, they do that by fearmongering, calling the current government a "cartel", as if such a level of corruption could only arise due to current democratic processes.
So talking shit about other parties and/or alleging there's a conspiracy to keep them out of power (ie. brandmauer) should be enough to get them barred for being "anti-democratic"? That seems a hilariously low bar and totally arbitrary. It's not exactly an unpopular talking point on the left that politics are being secretly controlled by The Billionaires™ (or Israel). Should they be barred as well?
If it can be shown that left-wing politicians in key positions of their party want to abolish core concepts of the democracy or constitutionally guaranteed rights: sure.
Why are the goalposts getting randomly nudged around? First it was
>A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic.
Then it was
>fearmongering, calling the current government a "cartel",
And now you're saying
>abolish core concepts of the democracy or constitutionally guaranteed rights
In other words, it went from "afd wants to get rid of democracy" to "afd's policies breaks the constitution". Of course you guys are different people and are entitled to your own opinions, but it's tiring arguing on a slippery topic that keeps on getting redefined.
If you wish to quote me, then do it accordingly: the AfD is blaming the established democratic processes for the current "cartel" situation. As if that's the only thing to blame, and not that the AfD is not willing to collaborate with other democratic parties or even respect the democratic process.
The thing that invalidates it is that its a classic right wing troll tactic that actively hurts actual discussion of serious topics. I think I'll rise above internet argument rules this time and exercise free will
Of course democracy is being protected, when it is clear such a party is being actively used and supported by foreign actors which have no right to vote in the affected country. People are being manipulated. The law comes first, then, people can choose. It's why a judicial branch exists.
The other option has been tried 100 years ago and didn't go so well.
> If you want people to vote for other parties then those parties should chagne to serve the people again instead of trying to make the people serve them.
This doesn't work when the party doesn't serve the people in the first place.
There are democratic parties that care about people's economic concerns. Just because they get discredited by extremist trolls doesn't mean they don't exist.
Right wing talking points and moving the goal posts.
The constitution comes first. Popularity is not a shield.
We have to ban them, and ban them fast. Irrelevant what people think, there is a judicial process exactly to avoid this empasse.
The reason this is unpopular is because every coward party politician in power is worried about their own electoral consequences for supporting this process.
Cowards who will go down in history as the vile scum who let it happen again.
If people dont want democracy they should be able to choose so. Its clear that democracy has proven its failure for long term planning and useless bureocracy.
That is not how the German constitution is set up. You can do what you wish in your country, but here the "freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung" is not up for debate. There are also specific clauses in the constitution that cannot be amended or changed, one of them ensures Germany is a democracy.
> If people dont want democracy they should be able to choose so.
Debatable. One of the core ideas of democracy is to protect minorities. Democracy has been built around the concept that a majority cannot restrict basic rights of minorities. Arguably no one should be allowed to create a system which allows the violation of basic human rights of minorities.
If the majority of German voters want "to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany", then is it not their democratic right to do so?
I'm confused, do you seriously think the AfD runs on phrases like "we want to get rid of the democratic system"?
It's actually quite the opposite, they are running on things like a direct democracy[0], with phrases such as "Wir sind überzeugte Demokraten"[1] (eng: We are confident democrats). And they do that for good reason, as running a party that openly wants to abandon the democratic process would be against the constitution.
The rest of the world did object the last time we did that. I'd prefer if we don't try that again, and our constitution is specifically set up to prevent this.
You’re probably thinking about National Socialist German Workers' Party which was a left-wing party, which is obvious not only from its name, but also if you read their party program on Wikipedia
This was satire, right? Not like, an honest belief that people can't name their organization whatever they want and that there is some universal law that requires that name be descriptive of literally anything?
Your snarky argument hinges on Marxism being the only existing socialistic ideology, while all other possible ideas on the planet being "right of center"
A party can be socialist without being Marxist/communist. It’s an older understanding of “left” and the current split between left and right has become a cartoon. But one could say that during the Second World War the Germans and the Russians were fighting in part over a radically different ideological approach to implementing a similar socialist system.
It's been dissected ad nauseam, but at base they're drastically different arrangements of who and what structures are privileged.
In left socialism / communism, equality among all (often extending to internationalism) and a disfavoring of historic capital / hierarchy are core tenants.
In right socialism / nationalism, specific in-groups are privileged (sometimes a national identity, often even more ethnically-specific) and favoring of (certain, usually sympathetic) historic capital / hierarchy are core tenants.
Granted, realpolitik can muddle these over time. To wit, communist bureaucracy inevitably becoming its own de facto privileged class and national socialism destroying specific capital / hierarchy that opposes it.
The exact purpose of a constitution is to protect people from voting their rights away. There is lots of history establishing why successful democracies need strong constitutions.
Because Germany has laws specifically to ban parties that are shown to undermine democratic order, specifically to stop another situation where they gain a majority vote.
That is not the criteria of banning a party. There is the Verfassung or constitution. If you work towards the abolition of the constitution, then you will get punished.
And that AfD is against the best interest of the people, i guess, you can not be serious. It is a populist party that picks up all the things that people are not happy about and are popular, but ignored. It is actually in the very interest of the people who vote for them. But of course scary for the people, who get voted out. Majority wins.
well for example in Romania (EU member state), they canceled the presidential elections (2024) after they were won by a person no one knew anything about.
he posted & advertised heavily nationalistic videos on tiktok and gained huge following.
court said the election had been affected by irregularities, alleged foreign interference, and problems with campaign financing and online campaigning.
Afaik, didn't the Romanian election also feature Russian money literally buying votes?
I.e. people asking at the polling places who was going to pay them the money they'd been promised
[Edit: nope, that was neighboring Moldova in 2024]
It does beg a question of how to run an election as a smaller state when faced with overwhelming propaganda from a much larger one (the US or Russia).
That's never not been true, I suppose, but with large unregulated, privately-controlled social media platforms it feels more pressing.
How does one run a "fair" election if the voters are being irradiated with one-sided messaging sufficient to turn an election? Is the result really the will of the people? And yet, what's the alternative?
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. So that everybody can live their life as they please. The AfD clearly is against all of that. Our constitution offers a way to defend against these forces and it is time that the process is started.
Democracy isn't two wolves and a sheep voting about what's for dinner.
Just ask yourself if you would be ok with the majority of the population voting to abolish private property. Or Islamists voting to end votes. Or men voting to remove the voting rights of women.
Noone decides that, because that's not the metric. The metric is whether the party is antidemocratic. As we know from history, sometimes people do vote for antidemocratic parties. But back in 1946 it was decided that no antidemocratic parties shall be allowed anymore, no matter how much support they gain.
I want to start by saying I think the AfD is detestable so that you don't get the wrong idea from my question:
In other parts of this thread we have people saying that the AfD must be banned because they are a threat to democracy and that the German constitution has provisions which prevent amending it to weaken the guarantee of democracy...
But how do you then reconcile the idea that people must be prevented from voting for the party they wish? Is that not undermining democracy when you only let them vote when they vote "correctly"?
I don't understand how this can be asked in good faith. How does Germany believe that sometimes democratically elected governments can be dangerous? Germany?
You don't understand how they may have a historical election or two that led to some kind of event proving that sometimes the people need to be protected from themselves short-term in order to preserve their constitution and democracy long-term?
>Because who decides when its not in the people best interest? Oh right, not the people since they clearly voted for them for a reason.
In Germany we have laws to ban parties that work against our constitution, exactly because of what happened in Weimar. The AfD is classified as confirmed right-wing extremist in five states. Starting a ban process is more than justified.
The process is not arbitrary. Only the Bundestag, Bundesrat or government can apply, and the Constitutional Court decides after checking if the conditions are met.
Also, just because a majority votes for something doesn’t make it right.
This is correct. They won ~43% of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. It is also worth mentioning that the population in that state is tiny, just 2.1 million people.
I think they are worried by the wrath of AfD voters. Would've been easier if they had done it years ago, I think there has been a lot of evidence that they are unconstitutional in Germany for a long time?
I'm not here to be an AfD apologist. I think a lot of their rhetoric is awful. However, in German constitutional law, there is a very high bar to ban a political party. In defense of the German Constitution, I think it is a good thing that there is a very high bar. If the bar was low, it could easily be abused.
Two important facts:
> Under Article 21, Paragraph 2 of Germany’s Basic Law (Constitution), a party can only be banned if it actively seeks to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or threaten the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany.
> Proving the Whole Party is Extremist: Courts require proof that the entire party—not just individual members or radical factions—is systematically anti-constitutional.
Also, it incredibly rare to ban political parties in Germany.
> In the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court has banned only two political parties:
> Socialist Reich Party (SRP) (Sozialistische Reichspartei): A neo-Nazi and far-right party considered a successor to the Nazi Party, banned in 1952.
> Communist Party of Germany (KPD) (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands): A Stalinist party, banned in 1956.
Whenever I see Alice Weidel, I see a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is pretty genius that AfD selected her as head of the party. She provides a thin veneer of suitability over a horrible underbelly.
Not sure why you get the downvotes. There is indeed a strong barrier towards making a party illegal in Germany.
It is hard to understand how countries work. Whether France, US, Germany or China, these are very different animals. It is also tricky to be well informed regarding the struggle for power in politics, since this is not material that is properly explained in every day press publications.
And do you also include the forced deportation of people with non-German ethnic backgrounds, even if they are citizens of Germany, in these "mildly conservative views"?
Ruined? You mean the continent with the highest life expectancy, highest rate of higer education, lowest infant mortality, and lowest rate of child poverty (and relative poverty in general).
The world is angry, we live in the age of the predators. European youth are also disappointed, just as in north America, that higer education is no longer a highway to a better life than our parents. But ruined? No.
I have grown tired of people not accepting that a party can truly be far right and try to put it off as being a shift in perception of the general public.
Germany has five to six parties (depending on election cycle) in the parliament. Noone calls the SPD far right. You may find people debating whether the SPD or the CDU marks the center, but the AfD is clearly far right.
It's funny how people avoid this term. The far left party in the German parliament ("Die Linke") would never deny they're far left. (Their name literally translates to "The Left".)
I am not informed enough about AfDs platform to judge.
My comment was more about how the US media/english-speaking media describes non-left parties. All the populists on the left side of the spectrum are “left wing”, but their political counterparts are always “far” right.
Well, they aren't running any camps yet, so how can you prove they will actually run camps in the future? You can't, so internet argument rules require you must accept that the opposite is factual.
"Look at the conditions X is in" is a common dog whistle for anti-immigrants and racists. It's a flare sent up to say, "Hey, who else thinks all these X are ruining our country?"
The AfD became relevant precisely because the conservatives (CDU) were not far right enough. They exist to be more right wing than the conservatives. They are as blatently far right as it gets.
If a constitution had a pro slavery clause and a party is trying to change that we would consider them heroes, so why is it such a bad thing to change the system if it is failing to provide for the people?
The entire point of a constitution is to remain unchanged.
The constitution protects people from voting their rights away forever just because they look for a quick solution. This has happened in the past, and to prevent it from happening again, the constitution has been strengthened to the point of banning anticonstitutional parties.
That assumes the constitution isn't tyrannical or hasn't been conceived at a time where everything was different. It's like telling a slave you should follow the law because it's the law.
I don't see how you would look at the German constitution as tyrannical. It guarantees rights, not restrictions. (The German constitution is fairly weak btw, most of its articles are optional.) The only potentially oppressive article is the military draft for men.
What the AfD struggles with is that the constitution enforces democracy. And while this is obviously an instance of the tolerance paradox, prohibiting people from removing democracy is the only way to ensure their rights and freedoms, and most importantly their power to control the government (by voting).
The main problem is that these far-right parties have backing of all billionaires around the western world. They are extremely well funded, they have used propaganda to lie to their citizens and gain adepts, they have loyalists inside institutions that will undermine any attempt to apply the law.
Never let your far-right parties grow. It should be banned, it should have been banned years ago.
By the way, defund billionaires. The Epstein class is behind the funding of these extremist dangerous parties.
Wasn't recently shown that after an attack on a Russian data center, the amount of right-wing supporting tweets went down by a large amount? Which is in my opinion a big supporting factor in your assessment
Nope, not a single proof. The only thing that went down is the number of yandex search engine related automated traffic, aka "bots", which has nothing to do with disinformation "bots"
Europe is divided by design. Not by Troll farms. I'm sick and tired of hearing every thing that went in EU favor is glorious success of EU and every EU failure is the work of evil Russian bot farms.
The trend is unfortunately active a lot further afield than just Europe or the USA. Similar recent spikes in political polarisation are showing up everywhere. Everywhere that there's been free social media for the past ~20 years, that is.
Whether it's Australia : Pauline Hanson, an anti-immigration nationalist widely lampooned as a walking faux-pas for the past two decades, now virtually leads the polls with her One Nation party, which has gone from about 5% support (when the current center-left government was elected mid-2025) to over 25%! today. In the space of 17 months.
New Zealand : From the globally-lauded center-left Jacinda Ardern, at home she was soon all-but-bullied out of politics by a significant and very vocal portion of NZ males angry at her shortcomings - she lives in Australia now - and NZ has since been led by a coalition of three increasingly-right-wing businessmen doing their best to "crack down" on the poorer classes to "balance the books".
Brazil : The big swing from Bolsonaro on the right to Lula on the left.
Japan : Increasingly fragmented, moving rightward and nationalist, centrist rule threatened for the first time since 1955.
Argentina : The populist president Milei, whose strategy-of-least-thought - rip off the whole bandage, right now - proudly sacrifices the hopes of a generation-or-three to gain a form of Economic Satisfaction post-haste.
> Whatever happend to Voltares "I disprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it"?
O tempora, o mores. Back in Voltaire's (sic) days, this would have been an issue between debating gentlemen, not one of massive spreading of hate. It's the fault of media and internet, I know, but that's not so easy to stop.
Voltaire never said that. However I understand your point, the truth is Europe has been on the precipice of far-right rule for decades and the only solution the European democracies found has been to push for banning, cutting funds, censoring the beast.
Anything but address the actual issues that helped catapult them to the top.
> Anything but address the actual issues that helped catapult them to the top.
The goal posts for those issues will always move.
Look at Japan for instance. For decades, its government's stances on immigration were far to the right of anything in Europe, and guess what, that still didn't stop a far-right faction and its sentiments from taking over.
You can always manufacture anxiety over literally anything, see for instance how the US republican party has made a fight over, like, 10 trans athletes a core pillar of their national culture war.
We have to see this through the lens of modern German history, and the corpus of rules (and lessons from history) that allowed the German Federal Republic to become an independent state again. I think this is not about saying things, but about saying things that foreshadow an attack on the constitution, and then perhaps very likely damaging the institutions of a country in the future.
A democratic state is a suboptimal construct. Once the politcal damaged, it is not easily repaired (See: Some countries East of Germany).
Free speech in Germany is limited. Hate speech, nazi slogans, etc... are banned.
And regardless, banning a political party (the process for which is set in Germany's constitution) is not the same as banning its former members from speaking.
History tells us, that only works in shortest of terms. If anything it raises their anti-establishment reputation (see how NDSAP was banned and it did nothing to stop Hitler's rise).
EU and Germany's woes won't go away with banning a party. You can't have a single currency without a joint fiscal policy (aka federal state).
The lesson the US should have taken from that period in Germany is that if a party leader attempts a coup once, you should not let them and their party get elected to finish the job.
What makes you say that? Between being sent to prison for high treason and having his party banned, what part was kid gloves handling? Not shooting him in the head? That's how you make a martyr for someone worse to take power. He was allowed to get close to power because he was less threatening to capitalist interests.
Hitler was sent to a gentlemen's prison (Festungshaft) for high treason with a sentence of five years, but released after eight months. That is completely ridiculous for high treason. The regular sentence was life, the absolute minimum in case of exonerating circumstances (in this case most likely being right-wing, sorry, "wanting the best for his country") was five years. I'm pretty sure that he would have spent life, or at least many years, in prison if he had been a communist.
And it also, kind of worked, from then on Hitler preferred the legal way instead of doing it like Mussolini (i.e. a putsch). It's one part taking the fall for the Ludendorff, one part Bavaria already being sympathetic to him.
Even a tolerant society has to be selectively intolerant to preserve itself. The goal is maximally tolerant, not absolute tolerance.
Hypothetically, should a party running on a platform of ending democracy be allowed to participate in democracy? Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
On 26 February 2026, the Administrative Court of Cologne (Verwaltungsgericht Köln) ordered Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), in interim proceedings, to refrain from classifying and treating the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation” pending the conclusion of the main proceedings at first instance.
The only reason AfD grows in popularity is because the other parties are deaf to what worries their constituents.
Other parties are so indoctrinated and zealous in their beliefs that they fail to see this simple truth and would rather resort to some authoritarian actions than think of changing their ways and try to win the electorate back.
> Hypothetically, should a party running on a platform of ending democracy be allowed to participate in democracy?
I think any party not encouraging others to commit violence should be allowed to run, if majority of all voters don't want democracy, it should be their right to vote for such party, which wants to end democracy. Democracy is here for the people/voters, not vice versa, it should have no self-preservation mechanisms, if it has it's not really an democracy anymore, if opinion of majority of the people is not respected to preserve it.
> Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
Well, look at the Brexit referendum, it's kinda same thing.
The US still generally has freedom of speech and association. We don’t ban political parties from organizing, nor do we tell voters who they cannot vote for.
I wonder what is the longterm plan of those that want to ban the party. We have a situation where (depending on the state) more than 40% of the voters vote AfD. If you ban the party, where would one expect the current voters to go to? I don't think they would vote center-left then...
My personal belief is, that a big share of AfD voters don't know what they vote for. We saw it in the US, where Hispanic people were surprised that they are targeted by ICE. They are manipulated by propaganda. And this can be stopped by destroying the propaganda infrastructure and defund the people behind it.
Probably Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW? Ticks many of the same boxes: anti-immigrants, anti-EU, nationalist and pro-Russia. The primary difference is that they are socialist. So probably the techbros wouldn't be as happy.
It's called wehrhafte Demokratie - not easy to translate, something like fortified democracy. The paradox of tolerance is not the clever counter-argument that you think it is, it's a general problem. An open, permissive system cannot allow a closed system to use its freedoms against it to replace it.
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. The AfD clearly is against hates both, is not democratic and should be banned.
So, by this standard you must agree that Democrat party must be banned, I saw one D senator threatening to go after young people who work with current administration, that's clearly a threat to democracy.
> The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945),[1] where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance. Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. The AfD clearly is against both and thus is not democratic and should be banned.
You are bending a word to mean things it has never in its entire history meant. There is absolutely nothing intrinsic about democracy that protects minorities.
There is nothing intrinsic to democracy that means you need to have a constitution. This should be obvious since many democratic states and organizations have no constitution! The UK has no formal constitution, neither does Israel. Canada also has no single constitution document. There are probably lots of non-democracies out there that have constitutions. It's completely orthogonal to whether or not a place is a democracy.
Ok, there might narrower and wider definitions of Democracy: "Under a narrow definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections, while broader definitions also link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy)
But Germany has a constitution and it allows to ban parties, that act against it. Would you say, that makes Germany not democratic?
Crypto is a political project to weaken the state in favor of markets.
AI is a political project to replace labor with pure capital - with the two major geopolitical players doing it for different reasons.
Freedom of expression and its limits is political.
Regulation and its pros and cons is political.
Markets and their consequences and implications are political.
Technology and its interplay with society is political.
Everything HN talks about is politics, just often with a lack of self-reflection required to recognize so.
What you consider non-political is just a reflection of your own personal politics.
The insistence people stop talking about politics is functionally equivalent to censorship of specific types of politics while leaving others unexamined.
> This site is an index. The complete original emails — full headers, bodies and attachments, with DKIM signatures intact — are in the torrent.
Weird, if the original messages have been published, why do both OP and the EuroNews article linked by the GP say that "Hackers have published 281 GB of AfD emails as AI summaries" and "A website published what it said were summaries of some of the emails but not the original messages"?
>Internal AfD thread reveals party split over expelling a member for antisemitic writings and a plan to use Israeli government contacts to whitewash AfD antisemitism accusations.
The irony. All those parties really have no beliefs or principles, they only desire power and to use it for themselves. One may wonder what got so many people to decide those entities would deserve their vote more than the other establishment.
The email dump seems to show that AFD is indeed far far right wing, and tired to brand itself as something different, or did I misinterpret the content?
You're looking at it from a perspective that's not shared by the population.
The AFD is not extreme right. Not even right wing. The party program itself doesn't even have a single real action plan. They didn't plan to do anything because they know they can just say $whatever and never actually need to deliver on anything because of the stupidity of the established parties.
Consequently, every issue we've had to date can be utilized to prove that they're the only party trying to help the population and only get sabotaged by the establishment that doesn't try to address any of the real issues that people both see and feel in their daily life.
The only thing this stupid dump will tell prospective voters is that there are actual Nazis in the AFD, which doesn't make them unique at all. There are some on CDU and SPD too.
However, most of those message which the AFD will now use themselves over the next weeks is to show how there were taken out of context, and surely bad taste but just sarcasm/humor that was phrased for internal communication.
I feel like I'm explaining the basics of the basics here, do you unironically think this is going to be a hit for the AFDs popularity?
If so I can only tell you that you're so politically captured to have left your common sense behind. Precisely the issue the green/linke also have.
I say this but have voted for Piraten in 2013 Greens 2017 and 2021.
I just couldn't keep voting for them because just how inept they've proven themselves.
Now I'm literally angry, because who can I even vote for at this point? People that have proven themselves both incapable of their jobs and unironically put the CumEx specialist in the highest position in the government?
The FDP which is so inept they don't even realize they're sabotaging themselves with their betrayal of the coalition? CDU, the most corrupt party that has ever existed?
Seriously, nobody's is left. And again they don't even comprehend that their Brandmauer is literally an advertisment for AFD. Im just completely estranged.
look at their fucking program. Is just not. Increasing pensions in Germany, where over fishing 30% of tax revenue already goes is not right wing. And if you think it is you're retarded. They're all over the place. They hold no fucking position whatsoever. They just say whatever they think sounds good because they know they will never have to deliver on anything
To me it seems that a topic that is both popular and a taboo is bound to cause issues, one way or another.
There is little competition for taboo topics in politics, so those who lean into them become a kind of a monopoly for these issues. They don't need to play nice to compete, because they are the sole provider.
In Germany, immigration is the most popular issue and also a taboo. AfD has a complete monopoly on it. They get away with the baggage because for a large share of voters, the alternative just does not exist.
AfD also self-censors. They frame the whole anti-immigration debate as anti-Muslim/asylumseeker, but if you read between the lines they are making arguements that apply to pretty much everyone who isn't German.
So they frame the anti-immigrant debate as if they are fighting to kick out the Syrian asylum seeker who hasn't worked a day since he arrived in 2015. But in truth, they are basically saying, "we don't want too many foreigners, especially ones that don't look German". This applies to pretty much all the legal immigrants in Germany.
I'm not sure restricting immigration or being selective who is especially bad and pretty much every country does it to some extent. It's other stuff associated with that like buddying up with / getting paid by Putin, trying to overthrow democracy and the like that is more of a problem.
Nations are a race to the bottom in 2026. We find more divisions, on purpose, than things to bring us together.
Politicians and capitalism figured out that division is engaging for the loudest people, which is profitable.
Using nationalism, the flag, etc are very very useful tools for politicians, capitalism and bad actors. Nobody wants to be say they aren't a patriot.
Israel, right now, is claiming to be acting in the best interests of its people. Would Palestinians agree? Race to the bottom logic, we will destroy ourselves before we give up our flags, it seems.
As developed nations destroy the environment, where are the people who had no say in that supposed to go? Who bears that responsibility? It certainly won't be the developed nations, which will act in the best interest of their people and deny entry to the climate refuges their citizens created with the latest plastic garbage that became cool on TikTok.
The actual emails can be accessed through the torrent. Although I can't imagine just publishing the emails in their entirety would be more resource/labor intensive than publishing individual AI summaries of each.
> And, for anyone who might have grown confused about claims of antisemitism while it was plastered over the German news media in the weeks following the Berlin election: here you can see what it really looks like.
Oh well, Querfront doing Querfront things. At least they can agree on hating Jews.
"AfD party member email contains antisemitic trope that Israel does the dirty work for us." [0]
The LLM-generated summaries seem a bit overly dramatic at times, making it hard to judge how serious some of the content actually is. Looking forward for a website with the original emails.
I am no fan of the AFD (especially because I live in Poland) but mostly because I don’t like having opinions on political parties in countries where I don’t live and don’t speak the language.
But I think this kind of moral approach is precisely why right wing parties have been winning globally, in the US and elsewhere. For many voters, the overwhelmingly important thing is individual economic security and personal/familial safety. Full stop.
And so if you force them to choose between a morally off putting party that at least claims to care about their problems, and one that is ostensibly morally less bankrupt, but hand waves away those problems – they’re going to hold their nose and vote for the former. Shame and outrage doesn’t work in a society that is uncertain and scared about its future.
It seems like a handful of candidates are beginning to understand this, in the US at least, but for some reason this level of realpolitik is just beyond many center and center-left parties.
The right only cares about wellbeing of the rich, and is usually keen to exploit the demographic majority in the interest of the few (see what is happening in US now). I follow politics of democratic countries closely for few dozen years, but I have yet to find an example of rightist party which improved economic wellbeing of its constituents (except those who are already rich)
Exactly. The establishment doesn’t care about the people and wave them off, so populist parties took the advantage. This happened before and will happen again.
Let's be crystal clear, parties like the AfD don't care either. History is chock full of examples where far-right leaders got into power and broke most of their promises and achieved the polar opposite for most of their followers. For example Trump campaigned on "eggs too expensive" and promptly passed legislation that allowed the farms to price-fix even harder leading to "eggs even more expensive". The same has happened again and again with the "let's make the country secure again" claims, e.g. starting WW2 did not in fact make the average German's life safer.
Their propaganda is that they care so the point is that the other guys don’t care so people flock to someone who says they genuinely care. It’s hard to fix the economy so I don’t think anyone can fix it. And as history shows again and again I think whoever gets the government is going to sleep with the big corps anyway.
I don’t really understand what you’re asking, but I don’t think the AFD is really a unique phenomenon. The popularity of right wing parties is across the entire West and IMO it’s for the exact reasons I just wrote.
Harris lost to Trump in 2024 for what I see as exactly the same reasons.
I think you downplay the role of social media in fanning the flames.
"Careless People" talks about it and how it was the inception of Meta's powerplay into politics by becoming indispensable for politicians to use their platforms to reach voters. The only thing they cared about is engagement and avoiding regulations, both are easily achievable if polarisation becomes the norm, the obliteration of proper political discourse into the form it exists now is a consequence of that.
I don't believe those far-right parties would have this much support if public discourse wasn't mostly focused on online platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, etc., they wouldn't have the reach nor the tools for creating information bubbles as existing right now. Those platforms allow for the formation of entire separate realities that are self-reinforcing.
Sure that’s a factor. But I think it’s pretty obvious in reality that a lot of people are not having a good time in contemporary western society. Social media didn’t invent that.
Hence why I started with "fanning the flames". It means the issues are there, they need to be worked on but with social media we are stuck, solving complex issues require compromises, long-term thinking and planning, nothing that is enabled by social media's knee-jerk reactions, ephemeral messaging, etc.
I think both can be true: there are issues with affordable housing and integration of immigrants. But at the same time parties are poisoning minds with mass-scale disinformation, propaganda, trolling, through social media. These are even more effective when issues already exist.
Sadly, some of the parties that are involved (tech bros, Russia, etc.) are not going to do any good when it comes to these issues. They'll only make the housing issues worse (by accumulating even more wealth and invading your country, respectively). But blaming everything on immigrants and elites has always worked extremely well, in-group vs. out-group is something that our brain needed for survival in the past, so it is very easy to trigger.
The saddest part is that those that push the anti-elite narrative (Trump, Musk, etc.) are often the elites themselves.
That's like saying the establishment would have an easier time controlling the unruly populance if they still had an iron grip on all public communication. True, but doesn't exactly advance the argument that I think you want to.
I don’t see how that goes against what I’ve said. It’s not about right wing parties becoming more inherently popular, it’s about them taking advantage of the unpopularity of the establishment, and voters looking the other way on moral issues because of it.
That doesn’t imply that the candidate must have morally dubious character, just that morally dubious characters are taking advantage of it.
> I don’t like having opinions on political parties in countries where
and then proceeds with extreme opinions on that parties.
Far-right parties have increased their presence thanks to inequality created by conservative parties and well funded campaigns by billionaries.
Let's not pretend that this is the will of the people when so much money is put into moving the blame of the current state of the economy from billionaires and monopolies towards working class people of foreign origin. (Like if it was working class people the ones hoarding money and power)
It's a little condescending to treat millions of people as puppets of billionaires. Are there not billions behind the media you consume? (ycombinator...)
A lot of 'extreme views' being bandied around are not really any different to what was spoken about in the 90s, tbh. Even Tony Blair was making comments on topics like immigration which would make today's audience blush.
We've had decades of centrist governments all throughout Europe. Do they not shoulder any blame for the rise of the far-right? Or is it only the "billionaires" who have agency?
I agree somewhat. However, the fault of mainstream politics is one of failure. The fault of extraterritorial actors is one of action.
I think that mainstream governments in the rounds haven't done enough for hoi polloi in the past few decades, but also that perceptions of what they could have fine may often be unrealistic. There are many prophets - some shallow thinkers might say "just read [ Das Kapital | Friedman ] and do that", but i don't agree that ideology delivers the benefits it promises.
It was a tall order to expect the past few decades of governing parties to satisfy the people enough that they don't turn to AfD shit.
Mainstream politicians' capital comes from votes, an expensive and limited resource. Extraterritorial actors do not have this constraint.
Where i end up is: yes, we should blame tired neoliberal parties for failing the people and driving then to charlatans. But that blame should be tempered by an understanding that government is a game that never leaves everybody satisfied. But extraterritorial actors? They are somewhere between philosophically vacant and hostile, and they are fucking with us just because they can. The blame is categorically greater.
The Nazis became popular during The Great Depression (which affected Germany) and we are seeing history repeat itself. Someone is now going to tell me we aren't in a recession because "number go up!" while everything around us tells us a different story.
The great depression was just as much a wealth concentration at the cost of the 95% as is happening now, history will repeat itself. Speculation followed by wealth inequality followed by tarifs followed by reduced international trade. Sounds familiar.
I agree with much of what you are saying. Personally, I have a distaste for far-right and far-left parties, to put it mildly. However, I think it's really telling that the term "populism" has been so vilified. Here is the definition of populism according to Merriam-Webster:
> 1. a political philosophy or movement that represents or is claimed to represent the interests of ordinary people especially against the Establishment
> 2. general concern for ordinary people
In US politics, both Bernie Sanders and Trump were put in the same bucket and derided as populists by the media, even though their policies could not be more different.
One thing I would add is that we have the most concentrated control of media/influence since pre-Gutenberg times. This is a huge issue, as a very small number of people have control of our politics and emotions, and use that to further their own increasingly weirdo interests.
I have different hypothesis. How I see it democracy have 2 very good feedback loops.
Fast one - the one that used journalism (so called 4th branch of government) that enjoyed public trust and more or less was factual which in turn kept public opinion more or less in one shared and factual reality. This in turn put pressure on actual government in between elections.
And there is second one - slower - public could change government in elections based on the lived experience of last N years.
The monopolies broke 1st loop completely. And the 2nd was hindered. Now ppl cannot choose directionally in slow loop (elections) what is good for their self interest bcs they do not have factual picture of reality. So they can choose based on vibes which in turn is as good as "random move away form current status quo".
IMHO still way better then autocracy.
Case in point - ppl voted for Trump among other things bcs of gasoline prices. How it turned out...
And why right wing - bcs said monopolies put thumb on the scale - as their are capital after all. And they do have more self awareness what is best for their interest. If democracy survives next will move will be ditching current right wing for whatever else and then even monopolies thumb on scale probably will not help current regimes.
The economic platform of the AfD doesn't even pretend to care about normal people. Neither does the Republican platform and Trump in particular in the US.
This argument has been repeated for decades, but I just don't see it.
Most people, at least in the US, have no clue wtf is going on.
I'd seriously wager maybe 20% of the US population even understands the basics of how their state government functions. Less than 10% probably understand their local government or could name more than 1 local politician.
This isn't hyperbole. A shocking number of Americans are PROUD to not be engaged in politics in any way. Especially for young folks, politics and understanding the government are just not cool.
> the AfD doesn't even pretend to care about normal people.
It explicitly cares about people who identify as traditional Germans, who in their own eyes are "the normal people".
On the economic side, Gemini tells me that they favour deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy for small and medium-sized enterprises (Mittelstand). They also want to increase family support payments to incentivise having children. These are all economic policies that make sense to conservative-minded "normal people".
Deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy aren't conservative values. Any conservative that believes that has been duped into libertarian capitalism.
> Deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy aren't conservative values.
They're fiscally conservative values, as you likely already know. Social and fiscal conservatism are correlated, as you likely also already know.
In order for you to make this statement, you had to take a word ("conservative") that can be interpreted in one of two well-known ways ("social conservative", "fiscal conservative"), and pretend that when I used that word, I must have meant the way that doesn't make sense, instead of the way that obviously does.
Sure, fair enough, but in my defense, "conservative" used to mean fiscal conservativism is a very American concept. I wouldn't say 'conservative-minded "normal people"' in a discussion about the AfD necessarily or obviously invokes the idea of fiscal conservativism.
Well, this is exactly how people voted for Hitler, and I would have assumed people know from history how it ended when "moral approach" was thrown away.
> But I think this kind of moral approach is precisely why right wing parties have been winning globally
No, right wing parties have been winning globally because they are vastly more resourced both financially and media-space-ly than the opposition. If you can constantly flood the zone with bullshit, it becomes impossible for the opposition to correct the disinformation before the next flood arrives.
the summary is: "AfD member Matthias Funk writes and forwards racist dehumanizing incitement: Neger, Muselmanen, Hinterwäldler, dreckige Monster Merkel, Pest, calls patriots to rise against Verbrecher."
I'm not sure about the actual email, but am certain that there are a lot of "left coded" agents that would find any discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants "dehumanizing". Also considering the WWE style of modern politics calling one of the leaders of your opposition "dreckige Monster Merkel" is not something strange.
> would find any discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants "dehumanizing"
You think the term "muselmanen" could reasonably be used in a civilized "discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants"? You do know "muselmanen" has a very specific link to WWII concentration camps, right?
Let me tell you a secret, most people even more so none Europeans use derogatory terms of that level daily in their private conversations. Considering the rape rates in the EU you can't begrudge some Germans having low opinion of Muslims.
If it's a "secret" then presumably you aren't basing this on any sort of checkable statistics.
So, er, I think your argument comes down to "sure, they're bigots, but most of the people I know are bigots too so stop complaining". I don't find this a very convincing argument.
(And "the filthy foreigners are coming for our women" is, like, the oldest accusation in the book. Don't forget to add that they also kill children to use their blood in their blasphemous religious rituals.)
Re your last sentence: US politics is "WWE style", certainly. Is German politics like that? Or are they more... European or something, where there's still decorum?
The EU is a little bit more tame than the US, but not by much, also those are private emails, not public statements. My point is using such language is (unfortunately) not something "scandalous".
People vote for them because the media has spent decades learning that the easiest way to gain ad revenue is by spreading outrage. And now it's coming back to bite many countries
It's fair that you disagree with AFD, even disagree a lot. But could we please rethink the use of "far", when they have 20% of the seats in parliament?
Their views, are the views of 1/5 people you'll meet in Germany, on average.
If we mirrored this logic, the SPD should be "far-left", Grüne should be "far-left pro" and Links should be "ultra far-left pro max".
This use of language waters out the meaning. Just like calling everyone commies and nazis... also I think it'll have the opposite effect you hope.
By some measures... yes? Take slavery, which would be considered even more right wing than whatever the current US "far right" is, but was more or less tolerated before abolition. Does that make all parties of the time far right?
I think you didn't get the point GP was making, so let me rephrase:
A popularity in election results doesn't define a parties position on the political spectrum. A lot of people are voting for change to occur, but that doesn't mean that that change already happened just by counting the votes.
What? Slavery wasn't tolerated. It was celebrated(still is) in a large amount of the country. It was considered a right by many white people in the US. Something they were entitled to(entitlement is a big theme with American conservatives) and still are.
Let's not forget, or maybe let's try to learn, that racism was the united states original social/cultural export. Back in the day Americans were seen as the most racist people on the planet and they were proud of it. Americans minstrel shows were big business and a very early one in the countries history.
Let's not forget that well after slavery was outlawed, Americans were still firebombing black/indigenous neighborhoods, towns, and lynching people. Americans still kill native Americans to this day, lookup native American women going missing.
Let's not forget that Kanye, just a few years ago, said that slaves had it good and should have been thankful. While that was absolutely the ramblings of a mentally unwell person, he was simply restating what is prevalent in many circles in America today. Kanye was just repeating what was said around him and is repeated in "private" across much of the country.
Lol wtf ya think ICE actually is? It's just a government force meant to remove the blacks/browns/foreigners who take all the good jerbs from the hard working whites.
Well they are definitely far right especially if you compare them to other right wing parties in Europe. AfD is monitored by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and their former youth organizations have been designated as confirmed right-wing extremist by them. They talk about mass deportations of citizens termed as "remigration" and leading party figures intentionally used the banned Nazi SA paramilitary slogan "Alles für Deutschland" ("Everything for Germany") at campaign events.
I don't think being hacked by an anonymous entity grants much political advantage? If anything the downside is shifting the overtone window by dumping all the far right takes on the broad public and making them a bit more familiar.
Just claim that the anonymous entity wasn't anonymous. Claim it was your enemy.
"Look, the Antifa hacked us. We need to ban them just like the US did"
Or blow it up bigger. "Look, the system itself is corrupt and 'the left/the altparteien/whoever' stopped using democratic measures to compete against us. That is because they cannot win on their own merit. Meaning that the system and its safeguards are meaningless."
Something like that. Given more time, one could flesh out this back-of-the-napkin thing into a likely working strategy.
___
Fascism fundamentally isn't data-driven but narrative-driven. So data alone is not going to work against it (though it is a valuable pillar).
I think part of the advantage is providing public evidence in favor of a Verbotsverfahren, e.g. the process of banning a political party for being counter to the principles of the German constitution and with that, pressure towards the state organs to stop ignoring the threat and finally do their job.
Yeah that's also what I thought the idea is behind that, but I'm afraid that at this point, a Verbotsverfahren will not work out the way people hope it will.
If you look at the numbers of votes they're getting, you see a group of people that is so large, it will be self-sustaining, instead of fizzling out. Or so is my prediction.
Idk. I just don't see this ending up in the way we want things to end up.
It's not going to affect me personally all that much, because I can be "passing" so to speak, but that's not exactly what one should strive for tbh. Keeping your head down and not caring as long as you're fine, I mean.
I think the ideal moment to ban them was years ago. The next best one is right now.
And I agree, now that we've waited so long (gee, I wonder if the far-right Verfassungsschutz leader had anything to do with that?), banning them will be ugly and lead to civil unrest. I think realistically, we will need some major state repression of these Neonazis and good luck with that given the political leanings of police.
But I don't think there's a way around that at this point, we still have to try.
"Wehret den Anfängen" and "Never Again" and all that.
Maybe, but otoh, action bias alone is a terrible advisor.
"You gotta do something" is correct, but not every something is suited.
But I think at this point we're entering the circular stage, so.
Idk. I don't want to live in this world we see developing, but what I want seems to be not all that relevant to said world.
If "popular ideas" == Neonazis trying to overthrow the German constitutional order, then yes, that is the appropriate response.
There's no awards to be won for coddling fascists. The protections of a free society cannot be extended by those trying to extinguish it.
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
And I understand that this might seem like hyperbole to the less-informed American reading this.
It is for their benefit I have translated a few quotes from leading AfD members so they can paint their own picture what those "ideas I don't like" are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536747
You don't need more evidence for a Verbotsverfahren. That's not the reason one wasn't already started. It's the unwillingness of the parliament to initiate one
That they are rabidly pro-Israel while simultaneously glorifying Hitler and indulging in conspiracy theories of Jewish domination certainly lends credence to the idea that anti-Zionism ≠ antisemitism
One can be an anti-Semite ("Jew hater") and pro-Zionist ("Israel supporter") at the same time: "I hate them so much that I want them out of my country and into their own country".
I think it is even simpler than that. Populist parties need to have a simple message that their supporters can easily understand. Having two quite different enemies at the same time would make things harder.
If there were 0 muslims in Germany today, their politics would be 100% about Jews controlling the world and all that stuff.
I'm convinced that many right wingers pretend to support Israel while being secretly delighted to see the country heading deeper into trouble. It serves as a convenient disguise for their antisemitism.
There is no confusion: Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein famously denounced the right-wing tendencies of Israel in 1948 in a letter to the New York Times:
"Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine."
The leader of that party was Menachem Begin, later prime minister of Israel and founder of Likud, Netanyahu's party.
Because Israel is their wet dream: an ethno-suprematist country, with right to self-determination only for the majority group, that seeks for lebensraum and shoots anyone who opposes it.
Frankly, I think their supposed "antisemitism" is a joke compared to their anti-Arab and anti-muslim attitude. Those are their real enemies now.
Many French would have you believe women wearing Hijab should be banned lest it destroy their "western culture" when even the most Islamophobic Americans don't care
A 5% Muslim population in UK is supposedly threatening to send them back to the dark ages when Singapore is at 15% with codified multicultural guarantees and somehow annihilates them in every measure of modernity and development
I think they don't know much about history but think they do, and believe that the Crusades were the West heroically coming to help oppressed people because Arabs. 'They started first', basically.
There's a general issue with immigrants coming from different cultures and whose values and traditions don't align with our, often in ways that go against the principles of our societies. It's something that needs to be addressed seriously, and the failure of political parties to do so has fuelled the growth of a right that profits from the issue and tries to paint it bigger than it is.
That of course has nothing to do with the fact that extreme-right parties look at Israel, with its ethnic suprematism, as an example. The only connection I see is backwards: Israel is undoubtedly doing its best to fuel racism against muslims because it wants us to believe we have a common enemy.
It's misdirection to the point of conspiracy theory to assume that Germany is incapable of organically producing a hateful far-right movement like AFD without it being manufactured by Russia
Honestly, I hate to tell you this, but the Germans have a whole track record of this fascism malarkey. I'm sure Vlad is pleased as punch, and definitely nudging it along, but if the influence was quite so impactive it would also be a lot more visible.
Never said they were installed by Russia.
Putain only has to find the proper bad seeds and water them.
That is clearly what is happening here. This is well known in Germany, and they are even kinda fighting internally over how much display of sympathy for Russia is proper to show publicly.
> there are jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots, discussions of whether refugees should be shot at the border, a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”.
> The AfD party is currently polling at 29% nationally – even while they fight a designation by the Verfassungsschutz as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party in court.
There are parties like this in every European Country.
E.g. RN in France, FPÖ in Austria, Fidesz in Hungary, PVV in Netherlands and so on.
These populist parties get a lot of votes, mainly because the parties that have been in charge for the past 10-30 years have failing to address issues of voters.
Doesn't mean that these ones are any better - they arent.
The only advantage most of these parties have is not having been in a position of power to demonstrate they are at least as incompetent as other parties that have, if not significantly more so.
The PVV in The Netherlands twice (once as a coalition supporter, once as part of a coalition). Both times were a disaster. People just go to the next populist right-wing party (e.g. FvD, which is more extreme right than the PVV, pretty similar to the AfD) and then after a few years they come back.
I guess the upside is that in countries with a multi-party system (happens more frequently without first-past-the-post), they virtually always have to form a coalition, which typically ends up in infighting within a party or between parties. E.g. in The Netherlands you typically need four parties nowadays to form a coalition.
The people funding the Nazis won't let the moderate parties do anything useful for the common person, they protect their own wealth while they force the politicians to implement austerity that drives people to support Nazis.
I leave it to the reader to decide if I'm talking about now or the 1930s.
A vast archive of hacked emails from the AfD was published online on Monday: 281 GB containing 421,179 internal party emails. And, for anyone who might have grown confused about claims of antisemitism while it was plastered over the German news media in the weeks following the Berlin election: here you can see what it really looks like.
In email after email, party supporters use racist slurs and share antisemitic theories of Jewish world domination; there are jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots, discussions of whether refugees should be shot at the border, a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”.
The entire archive is available online – though it may be a criminal offence in Germany to torrent the material or distribute it online. Yet the journalists who’ve been able to examine parts of the hack consider it authentic. The methodology behind the leak is also quite interesting: the vast archive has not been published directly on the site. Instead, it is available via a series of AI summaries, which have been filtered according to severity (CRITICAL, HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW) and type, with categories including “racism_xenophobia”, “corruption_money”, “leadership_feud”, “conspiracy”, “violence_threats” and “antisemitism_extremism”.
The party itself has confirmed the hack to Bild: “In September 2026, a hacker attack targeted one of our party’s hosting service providers, during which portions of a few email accounts – most of which had not been used for years – were apparently illicitly copied.”
Many of the summaries are the party’s own internal disciplinary proceedings, with emails sent to party boards to decide whether to open expulsion proceedings against members. Here, what is shocking (though perhaps not surprising) is the depth and breadth of racist feeling from party members: slurs, fantasies of violence, and antisemitic statements appear commonplace. One email from 2016 appears to show Weidel forwarding a member’s antisemitic material to the federal board as the party weighed his expulsion, while including a warning to her colleagues that the Verfassungsschutz – Germany’s domestic intelligence service – might be reading.
There are some cases which do not appear to have drawn the ire of the party, including one Bavarian official urging party leaders to chant “Merkel croak” every day, or another thread in which staff at the party’s federal office apparently discuss luring a photographer to a party event and removing him by force.
The anonymous hackers claimed their motive behind the leak was to show the “degeneracy and hypocrisy” of the AfD. Among the countless acts of hate speech, there are also allegations of embezzlement and financial misconduct, according to DDoSecrets, a transparency collective which republished the archive: the site’s software flagged 34 documents for misuse of funds, 23 for off-the-books payments, 14 for undisclosed donations and seven for embezzlement.
The AfD party is currently polling at 29% nationally – even while they fight a designation by the Verfassungsschutz as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party in court. That designation has already been made by state intelligence offices for some state branches, such as Sachsen-Anhalt — though it did not seem to hurt their electoral success. The party achieved 43.8% of the vote there in September.
Politics <--------- Left ------ Center ------ Right ---------->
| | Neoliberalism |
Economics | Anti-capitalism | Capitalism |
US | DSA Democrats Republicans |
Germany | SPD CDU/CSU AfD |
UK | Greens Labor Tories Reform |
France | LFI Renaissance RN |
There are some general observations one can make:
1. The far-right parties are linked and coordinated and generally funded by very wealthy people;
2. The rise of far right parties is a direct result of declining material conditions;
3. Far right parties get to blame immigration and trans people because, in general, there is no counterbalance to that narrative blaming the actual cause: capitalism and ever-increasing income and wealth inequality;
4. The "moderate" (which really means centrist or center-right parties) will predictably and routinely ally with far-right parties to crush any leftist momentum. As an aside, the term "moderate" is intentionally conflated by pollsters, politicians and the media and really means nothing;
5. The topic of economics is typically avoided in most Western countries because the economics are indefensible. Instead you have manufactured wedge issues to divide people such as immigraiton, gay rights and the existence of a handful of trans people. This suits both major parties in most countries because they're both neoliberal, which is to say that they are uniparty on defending capitalism;
6. People will defend capitalism and attack socialism without knowing what either of those things are. Ask someone what capitalism is and you'll usually get a hand-wavy claim about "free markets" or even just "markets", which isn't true at all. No markets are free and markets exist in every economic system. Some of our earliest writings from 4000+ years ago are about market transactions.
So when you see things like protests in France, the rise of Reform in the UK and the rise of AfD (as well as others such as in Italy) know that it's all related and has the same root cause.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis. We saw how that worked out in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. In the US, FDR was forced to make concessions to the working class to stave off the perceived threat of communism. In Germany we got Hitler. And after WW2, the US went on an imperialism frenzy, imperialism being the highest form of capitalism.
All of this is only going to get worse until we address the core issue, which is capitalism.
I understand under the horrors of their post WWI economy, but we're nowhere near this kind situation right now... people can eat, they have a good social security net. And the people under that protections are the ones voting against it ?! Sorry /rant
I started writing a long rant as a response but I'm not going to because I think it's the wrong forum. Let's just let this post disappear, it's even slightly Off Topic. People seem to think hacker news has to do with security, when it's more about venture capital and startups.
Well it's pretty simple, the current situation we're in, is the consequence of decades of leadership by those. That's how bad they are. People any a change, any change from those failures.
> there are jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots, discussions of whether refugees should be shot at the border, a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”.
Obviously all very moderate and centrist behaviour.
Yes people who have no right to be in the country are sent to detention centers until they can be deported. That's how it works in every country, not just the US.
Where did anyone say they would bring back the Third Reich? That's a strawman. And you seem to have moved the goalposts too about calling them "far right."
People have a very reasonable worry that voting for people who talk about executing refugees (note the term "refugee" and not "economic migrant") might actually enact the policies they speak of.
Any association with the Third Reich reasonably comes from their use of Nazi symbolism and use of Nazi slogans.
Insisting on calling economic migrants "refugees" is part of a long list of reasons why support for AfD and similar parties is growing. So good job on doing their campaigning for them.
I'm quoting them directly, not insisting on anything. They're talking about shooting these people and turning them into fashion accessories; I don't care what you call them, s an abhorrent way to talk about any group of people and I would urge you to reflect on what you're seemingly defending.
The parallels are striking. Now the outgroup is immigrants instead of jews.
Give angry people an outgroup to vent their anger and hate, one can become the ruler of the nation. US did not get a great economy by incarcerating or throwing those few thousand immigrants out. Its economy is currently getting messed up by stupid policies. But people need an outgroup to hate and it is enough for the right wings to get to power.
> This idea that somehow it just starts with small things, and then before you know it, the Third Reich is back. Come on. It's 2026.
And in 2026 we see the state of US going exactly in that direction. Humans are pretty predictable and something similar to Third Reich will happen before you know it. "This time will be different" is hope. Not a given.
> In email after email, party supporters use racist slurs and share antisemitic theories of Jewish world domination; there are jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots, discussions of whether refugees should be shot at the border, a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”.
Yes this "so-called far right" is totally sane and normal.
Why tell blatant lies? The BSW is a moderate left leaning party with social capitalist and very conservative ideas about immigration. They‘re also Russia friendly, who are imperialist invasors. Nothing about them is left.
It‘s the opposite, all the traditional middle class types left „Die Linke“, who are now the clear far left candidate. They are the only candidate that propose a socialist economic reform, open borders and a stop to and and all deportations.
I'm sure BSW have equally disgusting mail conversations (But perhaps more Russia connectoins than just rabid racism and antisemitism). If you can find them, please publish. But don't do whataboutism.
Those meme and humor are the comment section on any social media platform today. If you think the far left are beyond these types of comments (except targeting the opposite groups of people) in their internal chats, you're clueless about the real world.
Just read the unhinged comments they make in public. What do you think they say in private.
>If you can find them, please publish.
Why don't they publish themselves if they're saints and got nothing to be assumed of?
> If you think the far left are beyond these types of comments
Who mentioned the far left? And why would it matter what other extremists do?
This sounds like "yes but what about..", and I see it in several comments here but I don't understand it. How does that matter? There could be a similar dump from another party or organization and people would (rightfully) be equally upset.
Of course if a party - even internally - emails really crude racism and antisemitism then people should know. Their "core" voters don't care. But for a party to get 20-25-30% of the vote, it needs a _lot_ of votes from people who are repulsed by this.
Whataboutism at its finest. I guarantee you nobody wants to make handbags out of billionarse, as much as you would like to take "eat the rich" literally.
This comes after a campaign that has been going on for weeks claiming that Die Linke is antisemitic (the left-wing party that got the most votes in Berlin's most recent election). CDU (the current national governing party) has been pushing the narrative that Die Linke is comparable to AfD, because they call for human rights in Gaza and to stop the unconditional support for Israel by the German government.
It is not "mildly conservative" to call for deportation of citizens with middle-eastern roots, removing disabled children from normal schools and glorifying Hitler while taking money from Russia
I mean if 1/3rd of the people have that view then by definition it’s not “far” anything, no matter what the view is. It’s okay to just say you disagree with them
Surely you must realize how absurd your line of thinking is. Far left and far right are not labels based on popularity! Communism is still far left ideology if you live in communist country, same with fascism being far right.
There are ongoing efforts to ban the party (through constitutional instruments created specifically after 1945 to prevent a second NSDAP or other similar anti-constitutional extremists) and there is an argument to be made that this is strategical assistance for evidence-gathering.
There has been another effort [0] collecting _public_ statements that can be used in a potential future Constitutional Court case. Depending on your stance this leak complements the ban effort or undermines its legitimacy. Note, Germany has no fruit-of-the-poison-tree evidence provisions!
[0] https://afd-gutachten.de/
All the state bodies authorized to file such a request – the Bundestag, the Bundesrat, and the Federal Government – each require a simple majority to initiate the proceedings and thus rely on the votes of the CDU.
It is also important to note that this is merely a request for an examination; the final decision rests with the Federal Constitutional Court.
There is a recent comment from a very respected lawyer about the situation, citing Göbbels: https://youtu.be/I87E0cV367I?t=11614 (use the auto-translated subtitles)
The full quote translates to something like:
"It will always remain one of the greatest ironies of democracy that it provided its own mortal enemies with the very means by which it was destroyed. As elected representatives, the persecuted leaders of the NSDAP enjoyed parliamentary immunity, a salary, and free travel passes. This shielded them from police intervention, allowed them greater latitude in what they could say compared to ordinary citizens, and—to top it all off—ensured that their activities were financed by their very enemies. This democratic stupidity could be exploited to great advantage."
While this might be true, it's at least half a lie – SPD, Grüne and SED could have initiated proceedings anytime targeting one of AfD's state chapters in Saarland, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower-Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg, or Berlin (2016-2023). They didn't. You should explain why their reasons to not do it have been valid, while not being valid reasons for non-leftist parties. Also, SPD isn't even trying to convince CDU/CSU right now... they benefit from the Brandmauer, because without AfD, there would be a clear majority for non-left parties and no one would need a coalition with the SPD.
> note that this is merely a request for an examination; the final decision rests with the Federal Constitutional Court.
Again, true, but also half a lie. It's not merely a request in the sense that there's no risk associated with it. The backlash of a failure to ban the AfD would be ginormous - the situation would be much worse than it is right now. That - and the fact that SPD and Green benefit from the Brandmauer - is the reason why even center left parties don't really move forward with a ban.
Make it illegal to hold and express the view that people should not be allowed to wearing the burqa. If someone is express that they are against same-sex marriage or against circumcision for non-medical reasons, let them sit in jail for a few years. Why allow people to legally hold those view and express them but then forbid them from being political about it?
refresher course on reality: you want these views out in public so you can publicly ridicule the people expressing them. You send them to jail they learn from the real criminals how to be really criminal with their views and come out worse than before. That these views are taking hold more and more now tells you there is a legitimate problem not being addressed and either the view is some shade of correct or, more likely, the view is an incorrect solution to the actual problem that won't work. Either way you have to figure it out and fix it. Repressing the view just makes the eventual result more violent without solving the underlying issue causing the view
As far as jailing people because they think or say the wrong thing? omfg no thank you! Saudi Arabia almost just beheader someone for that kind of WrongThink.
The German constitution allow the legal system to limit the fundamental rights of individuals who are found to be undermining the constitutional order. It can punish people as well as preventing people to form political parties. If the political views are so bad that they are seen as undermining the constitutional order, allowing people to hold those views and express them but not to form parties seems odd and counter-intuitive. If the views are that bad they should not be expressed regardless if its done with or without a party hat.
Up until then, certain politicians wouldn't explicitly support, but also wouldn't condemn Basque-independence-related terrorism when asked. Thankfully we're now past this! The terror group was dissolved.
Probably the law was a good thing? The danger being 'who decides what terrorism is', but I suppose the definition in the law is fairly clear (haven't read it nor plan to).
It's classically liberal to allow anyone to follow their religion, it's not classically liberal to restrict freedom of speech for the sake of religion, much less for the sake of a foreign religion.
The NSDAP was properly elected.
Using this logic, please explain MAGA in the US. Arguably worse than AfD and currently holding power in all 3 branches of government.
“The iron hand crush'd the Tyrant's head And became a Tyrant in his stead.” -- William Blake
However, arguing that a political party isn't evil because it was elected is absurd. The idea is neither supported by history nor current events.
"Both sides" has become a pretty transparent tactic to deflect the magnitude of the difference.
Looking at historical precedents that tried to undermine this kind of democratic political system (e.g. PIS in Poland, NSDAP in Germany), the political systems were damaged (and are still not repaired) or outright hollowed out.
I think it is important that a dialogue exists in society, Even the radical parties have a chance to exist and represent the political opinion and direction of their voters. However, I think it is even more important than these parties stick to maintaining the very political system that they allows them to exist.
The AFD might not be such a party. In time, democratic state organs might be hollowed out, and an apartheid system might be installed in Germany.
It is worth fighting to maintain a suboptimal free political system than to succumb to madness. At least - in part - we can keep the idiots in check.
If it progresses like it ALWAYS does (EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.), the center-right party copies the far-right messages in hopes of gaining the votes of the far-right voters, then enters a coalition with them as the "voice of reason to reign them in", to ultimately just achieve normalization of those narratives, a hollowed-out democracy, destroyed political discourse and an empowered far-right party.
But one can hope, that THIS time it will be different...
Now imagine you had only a center-right and a far-right party, and you have the U.S. :/
The mainstream left in the USA used to be comparable to the centre-right in most western-European countries but this is no longer the case.
There are no bread lines like the ones created by Socialist policies. America is the land of plenty, the land where the 'poor' are overweight due to the abundance of cheap and rather unhealthy foods. Ask an eastern European with more than a few decades on his name what bread lines look like, or a Cuban, a Venezuelan, a Cambodian, anyone who lived under the end game of the policies professed by the DSA.
Ultimately, you can’t ban ideas in a democracy, unfortunately even the idea to abolish it. What you can do it make that process harder and slower, so your opponents lose power before they succeed. Or, you know, convince people to drop the idea altogether.
What you can do though, is destroy the foundation of democracy by being tolerant towards discrimination, for the sake of not "banning ideas"
--> "Why not turn people who are not able to work anymore into a nutricious paste for others? It was just a question! You can't silence me, this is a democracy!!"
https://demography-dashboard.eu/en/countries/germany?year=20...
Being opposed to ethnic erasure is quite reasonable for any group of people.
Even just stopping the flow of refugees (who often vacation in the countries they “escaped” from) is somehow considered extreme.
You aren't fooling anyone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_t...
There’s nothing “supremacist” about not wanting to become a minority in your own country. It’s not hateful, it’s a very human desire that every nation shares, including China, Japan, Korea etc.
Is Japan “white supremacist” for implementing an immigration policy that keeps their society homogeneous? No.
Your whataboutisms are weak. Other dominant ethnic groups can be supremacist. Backwards logic is not limited to white peoples.
Don’t you think that a nation should have a conversation about how they want their own people to evolve? This is a group of people which has existed for thousands of years and this idea of open borders and pretending like race doesn’t exist is a very new idea.
Something as momentous and irreversible as ethnically replacing your own population should at least warrant a national conversation/debate about the topic.
Trying to shut down discussion by labeling it a conspiracy theory without actually engaging with the facts of the topic is just a tactic to force your worldview onto your fellow countrymen.
>Backwards logic is not limited to white peoples.
Okay well it’s good you clarified that, most normal people would not think about how Japanese people are “supremacists”. They are known for being extremely nice and welcoming to strangers. They are not “fascist” and don’t even have a military. Yet they have preserved their country and people in the way it has existed for millennia, and there are many benefits to it (high social trust etc).
Globally speaking, your worldview is in the minority and would be regarded as extreme or “backward” to many people.
Which group of people have existed for thousands of years? Be specific, then I'll point out the multiple times in history that they've intermingled with other cultures and societies to form new ones.
Ethnically replacing a population isn't happening and is a false premise that I'm not going to continue debating as if it has any merit.
My 'worldview' is not an opinion. It's a historical observation of humans and their physical and cultural migration patterns.
Whether it’s concerted or not doesn’t matter at all, I’ve never made the argument once that it is concerted. It seems you want to attach that to my argument so that you can help to associate my argument with a conspiracy theory Wikipedia page so it’s easier to dismiss without having to engage with the data.
The data unequivocally show that Germans will be a minority soon in their own homeland. That’s what matters; it’s happening and it’s provable. There’s nothing false about that premise. Nations do control their own borders, it’s a conscious choice to allow migration at these levels.
>I'll point out the multiple times in history that they've intermingled with other cultures
Chinese people have done this too, same with Indians. Yet to say that Chinese people don’t exist as an ethnicity is just obviously not true. Go to China and try to explain to a Chinese person how their people don’t really exist and how they are just a product of intermingling cultures over the course of history. Tell them that an African who moves to their country is just as Chinese as an ethnic Han Beijing resident who’s family has been there for thousands of years. They would laugh you out of the room. That’s the crux of what makes your worldview nonsensical. You are saying something doesn’t exist which everyone knows intuitively and innately from childhood does exist.
Similar data has been shown about WASP identity in the U.S. to which I say, the only people who care are not serious or intelligent people. Like you're so afraid and incapable of coping with change that you have to enact mass violence against immigrants to preserve some perverted since of identity.
Your example proves my point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese_subgroups
I won't be responding to any more of your comments. Feel free to have the last word.
That's a comparison that could only be made by a right wing shill trying to use an actual tragedy to push an inane talking point.
> Linking to that Wikipedia article doesn’t change the fact that the data obviously show Europeans will become a minority in almost all of their homeland countries within the next 50 years. It’s irrefutable.
Where do my quarter-Mexican, quarter-Italian, quarter-Croatian children fall in that census? Are they white? Are they a minority, or not? Does it matter how Mestizo their grandmother was? What if she was indigenous?
Hopefully the next generation ignores retards that hold on to ideas of ethnicity like they’re some sacred line in the fight between good and evil and just fucks like all their ancestors did and life moves on.
> it’s a very human desire that every nation shares
Nations are a very recent construct in the history of the world. Your appeal to nature is audaciously ignorant.
It works very well where I come from. India.
What is called multiculturalism in India is a mix of indigenous sub-cultures who share many similarities, which the different cultures of EU/Europe can be considered to be following as well.
India has one of the world's largest muslim population. Pakistan separated due to religion and not culture. In fact Pakistani has Punjabis that are quite similar to Indian Punjab and Bangladesh & Indian West Bengal has quite similar cultures.
> What is called multiculturalism in India is a mix of indigenous sub-cultures who share many similarities
Are you claiming that Assam, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Bengal cultures are the same? They dont even share the same scripts (and in case of Tamil it is even a different root language)! They may be sharing same religion for majority of people, but that does not make it a subculture.
I think you are conflating religion with culture.
I'm sure it'll work next time though /s
The obvious solution to this fake “ohhh everyone is immigrating to XYZ!” panic is obviously just making citizenship easier to achieve.
It’s the same in the US. Too many people are undocumented? Okay, so document them, problem solved. But the right won’t do that, because they are lying to you. They don’t care about documentation or illegal immigration, they care about skin color and white purity.
Ethnic erasure is a crazy concept, we are mixing ethnically for centuries and who cares about color of eye or skin anyway? What we need is cultural preservation and coherence to some degree. So we should improve on refugee laws - which btw the green party had started before they were bullied out of government by the elites.
Valuing a nations culture, values in society, borders, and maintain coherence within society are not far right idea. All political platforms strive more or less for those things, through they do differ on what values they want to focus on and deploy different strategies.
The united states for example, current situation acknowledged, saw a meteoric rise even with, perhaps even because of a rich cultural tapestry that could be in no way described as coherent. Sure there are large blocs of cultural identity across multiple regions, but that's about it, and even then that's been on the decline for some time.
Germans are people having a German passport. They will not be a minority. There is already no single German ethnicity as the history and culture has been diverse regionally.
Stopping legitimate refugees is extreme in my view (against human rights). What you are doing is classic right wing rhetoric mixing legitimate refugees and illegitimate into one pool.
This is exactly the problem, this is genocidal language. To deny the existence of an ethnic group and culture which has existed for thousands of years.
This is a key component in ethnocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocide
There’s nothing hateful about noticing the data showing that Europeans are being ethnically replaced in all of their homeland countries. Also, there are many ways to oppose it peacefully and morally.
Noone is denying the existence of Germans in Germany. Germans are a product of their current culture.
Ethnocide is describing the erasure of culture, not the organic evolution of it.
I don't wear the same clothes as my grandparents did, I don't eat the same food, don't do the same work, don't have the same social life.
This is my culture, I am a product of it, my grandchildren will have a different culture. It is arrogant to assume my culture is the "peak" of my countries' culture (or "ethnicity"), just as it is not the place of my parents or grandparents to claim as such.
What is propagated here is that Germany (or whatever nation) needs to proactively reject the coexistence of other cultures within its borders for the fear of any kind of impact on itself in the future, taking effort to (depending on the age of who you ask) preserve or reverse its current state. THIS is genocidal language.
I don't care at all about ethnicity, but that sentence is part of the problem. Lawfully spoken it's a tautology, but that's not the concern people have. They are concerned that the German culture get erased within a few generations, because to many people with a too different cultural background enter the society. That's a legitimate concern nobody really wants to address.
> concerned that the German culture get erased within a few generations
It seems to me that you do not know what ethnicity means.
> They are concerned that the German culture get erased within a few generations, because to many people with a too different cultural background enter the society
I addressed that by saying there has never been a coherent German culture
Do you think that's true for German in particular or generally for countries? Like, do you think there isn't something like French or Italian culture? I always found it very weird how people think that Germany is somewhat special in that regard that we somehow ended up without having a coherent culture.
This a US centric platform here and so many words in the US come from Germany. I just learned that "Rucksack" (for large hiking backpacks) has become part of the English language in some regions. We totally need to introduce "Döner" as well. It's not random words that join other languages.
By that same logic there has never been “a coherent Chinese culture”, therefore Chinese people do not exist or deserve to have their own country.
What are your requirements for a “coherent culture”? Every country in the entire world has some variability within its culture depending on region.
Whatever your criteria are for a coherent culture, I’m sure China or India would surely fail them. Yet to deny the existence of Chinese culture or Chinese people would not only be extremely offensive, it would be genocidal language.
Denying the existence of cultures and ethnicities is a hallmark of genocide in fact.
>The United Nations and atrocity-prevention frameworks identify the denial of the existence of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as a core risk factor or precursor to mass violence and identity-based conflict.
https://africarenewal.un.org/en/magazine/reject-genocide-den...
The changes are a constant everywhere. Using that as an excuse to hate is political manipulation.
Think about it: 20 years ago you weren't a hateful person, that also changed. Why not get back to an older version of yourself? I'm sure at the time you thought things were amazing, there was already a bunch of frustrated middle aged men hating what you now love and miss.
That's how German culture as it is was created in the first place. And that's how the future German culture will be created, ad infinitum.
However, violence, intimidation and human rights violations during immigration and customs enforcement in order to pump hateful and jingoistic populist support is a rightwing idea. The steelman for it is that it “intimidates” would-be immigrants, but the counterargument is that it’s senseless strongman violence enacted on desperate people[1] running from terrible situations that ironically the US have had a direct hand in manufacturing.
This is quite common to far-right rhetoric:
Edit: [1] and once you’ve built your apparatus for violence against migrants, and you’ve successfully dissuaded the migrants who are marginally less desperate, you’re now committing heinous crimes against the most desperate migrants, in a vicious feedback loop of unimaginable suffering. Like forcing a woman and her child who were fleeing sex trafficking into a camp under fluorescent lights where the woman will be raped, her child taken away from her, and both ending up with substandard care for infectious diseases that they catch.'I don't like who they let in' is an entirely different criticism from 'They let anyone in!'
It's dishonest to pretend that the latter is happening.
The trouble with getting all this is terrible with normal law enforcement is the voters then elect Trumps because they are fed up with it.
Nothing, but you have to be sure when they say "we want to get rid of the illegal immigrants" they don't really mean "we want to make all immigration from shithole countries illegal and get rid of people from those places", because they like to play those word games. This is what happened in the US.
People married to immigrants, who love immigrants, who work with immigrants, and even immigrants themselves heard Trump say "We want to deport criminal immigrants" and voted for that.
Next thing you know they're deporting your wife. Then they start chasing away foreign students, and companies who want to work with and hire foreigners are put on shit lists. Then they start narrowing pathways to legal immigration to create more strain on the system. Then they remove protected status from legal immigrants creating a population overnight who are illegal. Then they start looking at modifying the Constitution to change what makes someone a citizen in the first place, and whether they can retroactively strip people of that right. Then they start looking at naturalized citizens to denaturalize them.
Eventually they start going after political opponents who are immigrants, raiding their homes and threatening to deport them and their families.
These are not hypotheticals, it's where the US went in fewer than 2 years since giving the "just no illegal immigration, what's wrong with that?" crowd free reign to do whatever they want. And we specifically got here by taking the reasonable idea that illegal immigration is undesirable and running with it until the anti-immigration problem is far worse than the illegal immigration problem.
So if you think 200k to house an immigrant is bad, if your country is anything like the US (it is) soon enough you're paying billions upon billions for an unaccountable domestic paramilitary force that deports people to foreign torture prisons and executes citizens in the streets. Then you have a real problem.
For example, they will promise you to kick one billion immigrants, and then when in power they will say that they actually can't do that because of law or economic concerns… and then they will increase the rate of immigration.
That's a fascinating perspective. Do you think they "do whatever the left-wing party does" because
1. they are secretly not right-wing?
2. they rallied on matters which were anyway already worked on by the existing government, and reality is not as simple as they claim it is?
3. they had no clue how to actually achieve anything they promised on the required scale, just said anything to enrage people and get their vote and now have to work in the same system as everyone else?
In any case, the average plain, poor person of the country gets screwed.
People putting those parties into the same category is a significant part of the problem.
CDU/CSU will try to take the same topics the AfD used to enrage its voter-base and will present itself as the "rational, conservative and experienced" alternative to the "concerns of the voter".
This is the process which will cause CDU/CSU to not publicly condemn the AfD and its narratives, will make the CDU/CSU to "sacrifice" themselves as the coalition partner who will "control" the AfD, secretly hoping to convert their voters into CDU/CSU voters while AfD destroys itself due to its lack of skills to actually deliver in government.
In the end the AfD MAY or MAY NOT actually collapse if they are forced to deliver on their unrealistic promises. But it won't matter, because #1 the party will not die because it will present itself as the victim, and #2 the whole exercise will do such a substantial damage to political discourse and democracy that it will take decades to recover from it.
Again, one can hope that THIS TIME it will be different...
A bunch of AfD members self-reported their anti-constitutional statements to Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, an organization that again and again hilariously exposes AfD and their technological (and not only) illiteracy.
A better way to deal with extremism is to spread the wealth. The Elites just want us fighting amoungst ourselves.
https://x.com/GeriPerna/status/2111988611943989382
Would it be a good thing or bad thing if this was scaled up so email servers and instance messages services was all public if the message involved a member of a political party, without allowing any back channel or ways to avoid the public record?
The reality is that backchannels have always existed. People used to meet discreetly or through emissaries; or had phone calls from secure lines; etc. There is so much that we will never know, even about times that are well-documented.
To be honest, I am not a big fan of "thoughtcrime" being pursued. Let them be racist if they want to; we should make sure the population is smart enough to reject racism on its own. Maintaining a working democracy requires some violence, sure, but if we over-use it it will stop being a democracy.
These types of shenanigans were even named after him, “Rutte doctrine”.
It is definitely an interesting discussion to have in where the lines should be drawn in transparency and public insight into political landscape and behavior inside it. In Sweden, every person, regardless of position, has their income as public information. How much a person pay it taxes is also public information, so in some sense you can guess how much assets a person own and how much they have in the bank based on what they declared.
This would make surveillance laws socially much more acceptable. The politicians will claim:
- "We are surveilled anyway, so we can pass surveillance laws against citizens, too.", or
- "The citizens really ask for surveillance laws against specific groups (in this case: politicians). So, we will, of course, give the citizens what they want and pass surveillance laws against potential terrorists/child abusers/[whatever is currently fashionable]".
If you consider privacy or the right not to be surveilled to be important, this better should hold for the enemy (politicians).
?? The root of the idea is not bi-directional. Politicians have a particular type of job: public service. It’s this “job” that requires the transparency.
And not transparency into their public life. Though, as a public figure if your private life becomes embarrassing, or salacious you’re guaranteed to have news hounds on your trail. Not least because your public service rivals will use whatever they can to discredit you in the court of public opinion.
It’s the same for the work product. All of the material of governance should be the “property” of the people governed.
Can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
This is like: if you engage in anti-social behaviour or plan some crime, you deserve to have hounds (law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies) on your trail because of surveillance data that was gathered about you.
> Can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
This is like the political argument: "If you have nothing to hide, why are you opposed to the new surveillance law?"
Conservatives are vibe haters. They feel something is wrong and will figure out how to justify their feelings. The email server was just one of many excuses to dislike Hillary. But it was never the "main" one. It was just one that gained a lil traction.
Hillary also caught crap for Benghazi, her husband, her aides, her outfits, etc. It never ends with conservatives because how they feel is as important as reality. They'll find anything to justify their vibes.
They did this in the Netherlands and the result is that politicians started sending voice notes...
You also sometimes need to be able to just discuss stuff, privately. Not all phrases uttered in the context of government do well when interpreted by the general public.
Sure, you can make it the law, but technically there are infinite ways to get around it, including ones that are impossible to get rid off, like using the shared folders on systems that are non-publik for safety reasons.
Popularity isn't a limit here, at least not in this direction. If the party were irrelevant, it would prevent the ban since the party would not be able to achieve those anti-constitutional goals anyway.
Does AfD actually do that, though?
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bverfgg/__1.html
>A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic.
Then it was
>fearmongering, calling the current government a "cartel",
And now you're saying
>abolish core concepts of the democracy or constitutionally guaranteed rights
In other words, it went from "afd wants to get rid of democracy" to "afd's policies breaks the constitution". Of course you guys are different people and are entitled to your own opinions, but it's tiring arguing on a slippery topic that keeps on getting redefined.
If you wish to quote me, then do it accordingly: the AfD is blaming the established democratic processes for the current "cartel" situation. As if that's the only thing to blame, and not that the AfD is not willing to collaborate with other democratic parties or even respect the democratic process.
The other option has been tried 100 years ago and didn't go so well.
> If you want people to vote for other parties then those parties should chagne to serve the people again instead of trying to make the people serve them.
This doesn't work when the party doesn't serve the people in the first place.
It doesnt even help most of their voters.
You declared it, so it must be true.
Debatable. One of the core ideas of democracy is to protect minorities. Democracy has been built around the concept that a majority cannot restrict basic rights of minorities. Arguably no one should be allowed to create a system which allows the violation of basic human rights of minorities.
The idea that democracy is synonymous with the current neoliberal order is nonsense.
Is that still a minority? I invite you to introspect more. It's not complicated either.
A voting minority cannot by itself gain power in a democratic election.
A population minority may vote with, against, or mixed versus the eventual majority. It is not the same as active participation in voting.
It's actually quite the opposite, they are running on things like a direct democracy[0], with phrases such as "Wir sind überzeugte Demokraten"[1] (eng: We are confident democrats). And they do that for good reason, as running a party that openly wants to abandon the democratic process would be against the constitution.
[0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_f%C3%BCr_Deutschla...
[1]: https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Programm_AfD_D...
However, it is in our democratic right to fight parties that are anti constitutional. It's in the constitution.
Edit: There is a loophole, though. Article 146 allows the German people to replace the constitution in its entirety.
This was satire, right? Not like, an honest belief that people can't name their organization whatever they want and that there is some universal law that requires that name be descriptive of literally anything?
"I wanted to be the destroyer of Marxism."
- Hitler's closing argument while on trial in 1924 for the Beer Hall Putsch https://famous-trials.com/hitler/2524-the-hitler-beer-hall-p...
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50165055
Tik, right?
In left socialism / communism, equality among all (often extending to internationalism) and a disfavoring of historic capital / hierarchy are core tenants.
In right socialism / nationalism, specific in-groups are privileged (sometimes a national identity, often even more ethnically-specific) and favoring of (certain, usually sympathetic) historic capital / hierarchy are core tenants.
Granted, realpolitik can muddle these over time. To wit, communist bureaucracy inevitably becoming its own de facto privileged class and national socialism destroying specific capital / hierarchy that opposes it.
And that AfD is against the best interest of the people, i guess, you can not be serious. It is a populist party that picks up all the things that people are not happy about and are popular, but ignored. It is actually in the very interest of the people who vote for them. But of course scary for the people, who get voted out. Majority wins.
The laws don't work like that, otherwise we arguably would not have any parties left.
he posted & advertised heavily nationalistic videos on tiktok and gained huge following.
court said the election had been affected by irregularities, alleged foreign interference, and problems with campaign financing and online campaigning.
I.e. people asking at the polling places who was going to pay them the money they'd been promised
[Edit: nope, that was neighboring Moldova in 2024]
It does beg a question of how to run an election as a smaller state when faced with overwhelming propaganda from a much larger one (the US or Russia).
That's never not been true, I suppose, but with large unregulated, privately-controlled social media platforms it feels more pressing.
How does one run a "fair" election if the voters are being irradiated with one-sided messaging sufficient to turn an election? Is the result really the will of the people? And yet, what's the alternative?
Democracy's definition contains no such safeguards, just as pure capitalism doesn't prevent monopolies.
Pretty much everyone agrees that "50.01% of us agreed to slaughter the rest" is not a good decision, but it is technically a democratic one.
Just ask yourself if you would be ok with the majority of the population voting to abolish private property. Or Islamists voting to end votes. Or men voting to remove the voting rights of women.
"Democracy" is not synonymous with "good".
Why not?
Damn right it isn't, because for most of them it is against their own interests. They vote out of emotion.
In other parts of this thread we have people saying that the AfD must be banned because they are a threat to democracy and that the German constitution has provisions which prevent amending it to weaken the guarantee of democracy...
But how do you then reconcile the idea that people must be prevented from voting for the party they wish? Is that not undermining democracy when you only let them vote when they vote "correctly"?
You don't understand how they may have a historical election or two that led to some kind of event proving that sometimes the people need to be protected from themselves short-term in order to preserve their constitution and democracy long-term?
In Germany we have laws to ban parties that work against our constitution, exactly because of what happened in Weimar. The AfD is classified as confirmed right-wing extremist in five states. Starting a ban process is more than justified. The process is not arbitrary. Only the Bundestag, Bundesrat or government can apply, and the Constitutional Court decides after checking if the conditions are met. Also, just because a majority votes for something doesn’t make it right.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/
Two important facts:
Also, it incredibly rare to ban political parties in Germany. Whenever I see Alice Weidel, I see a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is pretty genius that AfD selected her as head of the party. She provides a thin veneer of suitability over a horrible underbelly.It is hard to understand how countries work. Whether France, US, Germany or China, these are very different animals. It is also tricky to be well informed regarding the struggle for power in politics, since this is not material that is properly explained in every day press publications.
The world is angry, we live in the age of the predators. European youth are also disappointed, just as in north America, that higer education is no longer a highway to a better life than our parents. But ruined? No.
I think journalists have to realize that crying wolf always stops working when you need it the most.
It's funny how people avoid this term. The far left party in the German parliament ("Die Linke") would never deny they're far left. (Their name literally translates to "The Left".)
My comment was more about how the US media/english-speaking media describes non-left parties. All the populists on the left side of the spectrum are “left wing”, but their political counterparts are always “far” right.
"Look at the conditions X is in" is a common dog whistle for anti-immigrants and racists. It's a flare sent up to say, "Hey, who else thinks all these X are ruining our country?"
The constitution protects people from voting their rights away forever just because they look for a quick solution. This has happened in the past, and to prevent it from happening again, the constitution has been strengthened to the point of banning anticonstitutional parties.
What the AfD struggles with is that the constitution enforces democracy. And while this is obviously an instance of the tolerance paradox, prohibiting people from removing democracy is the only way to ensure their rights and freedoms, and most importantly their power to control the government (by voting).
Never let your far-right parties grow. It should be banned, it should have been banned years ago.
By the way, defund billionaires. The Epstein class is behind the funding of these extremist dangerous parties.
Whether it's Australia : Pauline Hanson, an anti-immigration nationalist widely lampooned as a walking faux-pas for the past two decades, now virtually leads the polls with her One Nation party, which has gone from about 5% support (when the current center-left government was elected mid-2025) to over 25%! today. In the space of 17 months.
New Zealand : From the globally-lauded center-left Jacinda Ardern, at home she was soon all-but-bullied out of politics by a significant and very vocal portion of NZ males angry at her shortcomings - she lives in Australia now - and NZ has since been led by a coalition of three increasingly-right-wing businessmen doing their best to "crack down" on the poorer classes to "balance the books".
Brazil : The big swing from Bolsonaro on the right to Lula on the left.
Japan : Increasingly fragmented, moving rightward and nationalist, centrist rule threatened for the first time since 1955.
Argentina : The populist president Milei, whose strategy-of-least-thought - rip off the whole bandage, right now - proudly sacrifices the hopes of a generation-or-three to gain a form of Economic Satisfaction post-haste.
I am increasingly aligned to the position that every billionaire is a policy failure.
Wealth inequality of the degree we have today is not sustainable.
Oh dear.
Whatever happend to Voltares "I disprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it"?
EDIT: The irony of this post being downvoted in an attempt to hide it, rather than discuss an opinion you disagree with!
EDIT2: Please understand I have no love for AfD, rather a love of open politics (let everybody hear how crazy they are!).
O tempora, o mores. Back in Voltaire's (sic) days, this would have been an issue between debating gentlemen, not one of massive spreading of hate. It's the fault of media and internet, I know, but that's not so easy to stop.
Anything but address the actual issues that helped catapult them to the top.
The goal posts for those issues will always move.
Look at Japan for instance. For decades, its government's stances on immigration were far to the right of anything in Europe, and guess what, that still didn't stop a far-right faction and its sentiments from taking over.
You can always manufacture anxiety over literally anything, see for instance how the US republican party has made a fight over, like, 10 trans athletes a core pillar of their national culture war.
We have to see this through the lens of modern German history, and the corpus of rules (and lessons from history) that allowed the German Federal Republic to become an independent state again. I think this is not about saying things, but about saying things that foreshadow an attack on the constitution, and then perhaps very likely damaging the institutions of a country in the future.
A democratic state is a suboptimal construct. Once the politcal damaged, it is not easily repaired (See: Some countries East of Germany).
And regardless, banning a political party (the process for which is set in Germany's constitution) is not the same as banning its former members from speaking.
Even if the quote was correct, it is about free speech. Being elected and holding political office is beyond that.
EU and Germany's woes won't go away with banning a party. You can't have a single currency without a joint fiscal policy (aka federal state).
Letting bigots and racists continue to express these views is extremely problematic.
And it also, kind of worked, from then on Hitler preferred the legal way instead of doing it like Mussolini (i.e. a putsch). It's one part taking the fall for the Ludendorff, one part Bavaria already being sympathetic to him.
Hypothetically, should a party running on a platform of ending democracy be allowed to participate in democracy? Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilung...
There are several ex high ranking afd official who left the party because of nepotism, internal authoritarianism, etc.
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/afd-niedersachs...
https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/inside-afd-...
https://amp.dw.com/en/inside-the-afd/a-78193248
You're leaving this out?
On 26 February 2026, the Administrative Court of Cologne (Verwaltungsgericht Köln) ordered Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), in interim proceedings, to refrain from classifying and treating the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation” pending the conclusion of the main proceedings at first instance.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/afd-einstufung...
Other parties are so indoctrinated and zealous in their beliefs that they fail to see this simple truth and would rather resort to some authoritarian actions than think of changing their ways and try to win the electorate back.
I think any party not encouraging others to commit violence should be allowed to run, if majority of all voters don't want democracy, it should be their right to vote for such party, which wants to end democracy. Democracy is here for the people/voters, not vice versa, it should have no self-preservation mechanisms, if it has it's not really an democracy anymore, if opinion of majority of the people is not respected to preserve it.
> Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
Well, look at the Brexit referendum, it's kinda same thing.
A sitting US member of the house had their house and offices raided just the other day.
He is also very directly going after journalists.
Freedom is speech is very much not guaranteed in the US.
AfD leaders want to bring back the German nationalism of the 30s/40s, fullstop.
Can we please stop pretending this isn't the case? It's so tiring.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/23/afd-na...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/11/afd-mps-scruti...
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.thetime...
And about a million others if you search them up. They are the neo-Nazi party. The leaked emails this article is about speak volumes.
There is nothing wrong with being intolerant to something. But claiming you are still tolerant is wrong.
There is nothing intrinsic to democracy that means you need to have a constitution. This should be obvious since many democratic states and organizations have no constitution! The UK has no formal constitution, neither does Israel. Canada also has no single constitution document. There are probably lots of non-democracies out there that have constitutions. It's completely orthogonal to whether or not a place is a democracy.
But Germany has a constitution and it allows to ban parties, that act against it. Would you say, that makes Germany not democratic?
I’ve been here since 2010, and there has always been a general snobby dislike of contemporary political topics.
HN doesn't like political discussion that doesn't align with what they would like to see become the prevailing ideology.
What is considered political and what isn't is a political decision in itself.
Judging by your profile, you’re an overtly politics-focused person that’s been reading HN for 7 months.
I wouldn’t ascribe broad political opinions to HN, other than the general cultural dislike of political discussion, in the most broad sense.
Crypto is a political project to weaken the state in favor of markets.
AI is a political project to replace labor with pure capital - with the two major geopolitical players doing it for different reasons.
Freedom of expression and its limits is political.
Regulation and its pros and cons is political.
Markets and their consequences and implications are political.
Technology and its interplay with society is political.
Everything HN talks about is politics, just often with a lack of self-reflection required to recognize so.
What you consider non-political is just a reflection of your own personal politics.
The insistence people stop talking about politics is functionally equivalent to censorship of specific types of politics while leaving others unexamined.
Weird, if the original messages have been published, why do both OP and the EuroNews article linked by the GP say that "Hackers have published 281 GB of AfD emails as AI summaries" and "A website published what it said were summaries of some of the emails but not the original messages"?
I have yet to see any actual data of this leak, even though it's all over the news.
The irony. All those parties really have no beliefs or principles, they only desire power and to use it for themselves. One may wonder what got so many people to decide those entities would deserve their vote more than the other establishment.
The AFD is not extreme right. Not even right wing. The party program itself doesn't even have a single real action plan. They didn't plan to do anything because they know they can just say $whatever and never actually need to deliver on anything because of the stupidity of the established parties.
Consequently, every issue we've had to date can be utilized to prove that they're the only party trying to help the population and only get sabotaged by the establishment that doesn't try to address any of the real issues that people both see and feel in their daily life.
The only thing this stupid dump will tell prospective voters is that there are actual Nazis in the AFD, which doesn't make them unique at all. There are some on CDU and SPD too. However, most of those message which the AFD will now use themselves over the next weeks is to show how there were taken out of context, and surely bad taste but just sarcasm/humor that was phrased for internal communication.
I feel like I'm explaining the basics of the basics here, do you unironically think this is going to be a hit for the AFDs popularity?
If so I can only tell you that you're so politically captured to have left your common sense behind. Precisely the issue the green/linke also have.
I say this but have voted for Piraten in 2013 Greens 2017 and 2021.
I just couldn't keep voting for them because just how inept they've proven themselves.
Now I'm literally angry, because who can I even vote for at this point? People that have proven themselves both incapable of their jobs and unironically put the CumEx specialist in the highest position in the government? The FDP which is so inept they don't even realize they're sabotaging themselves with their betrayal of the coalition? CDU, the most corrupt party that has ever existed? Seriously, nobody's is left. And again they don't even comprehend that their Brandmauer is literally an advertisment for AFD. Im just completely estranged.
What?
How can this be beyond your mental capacity?
There is little competition for taboo topics in politics, so those who lean into them become a kind of a monopoly for these issues. They don't need to play nice to compete, because they are the sole provider.
In Germany, immigration is the most popular issue and also a taboo. AfD has a complete monopoly on it. They get away with the baggage because for a large share of voters, the alternative just does not exist.
So they frame the anti-immigrant debate as if they are fighting to kick out the Syrian asylum seeker who hasn't worked a day since he arrived in 2015. But in truth, they are basically saying, "we don't want too many foreigners, especially ones that don't look German". This applies to pretty much all the legal immigrants in Germany.
Nations are a race to the bottom in 2026. We find more divisions, on purpose, than things to bring us together.
Politicians and capitalism figured out that division is engaging for the loudest people, which is profitable.
Using nationalism, the flag, etc are very very useful tools for politicians, capitalism and bad actors. Nobody wants to be say they aren't a patriot.
Israel, right now, is claiming to be acting in the best interests of its people. Would Palestinians agree? Race to the bottom logic, we will destroy ourselves before we give up our flags, it seems.
As developed nations destroy the environment, where are the people who had no say in that supposed to go? Who bears that responsibility? It certainly won't be the developed nations, which will act in the best interest of their people and deny entry to the climate refuges their citizens created with the latest plastic garbage that became cool on TikTok.
Do you think that the leadership in Gaza acted in the best interests of its people?
If they had, Gaza would’ve looked very differently today.
Why not publish the actual emails? Why do they need to be summarised, perhaps incorrectly?
Propaganda works like this; they know most people won't dig any further than the headline and summaries.
Oh well, Querfront doing Querfront things. At least they can agree on hating Jews.
The LLM-generated summaries seem a bit overly dramatic at times, making it hard to judge how serious some of the content actually is. Looking forward for a website with the original emails.
[0] https://www.hexane.cc/detail/?uid=9DF63C5C-F244-4763-BF2A-90...
But I think this kind of moral approach is precisely why right wing parties have been winning globally, in the US and elsewhere. For many voters, the overwhelmingly important thing is individual economic security and personal/familial safety. Full stop.
And so if you force them to choose between a morally off putting party that at least claims to care about their problems, and one that is ostensibly morally less bankrupt, but hand waves away those problems – they’re going to hold their nose and vote for the former. Shame and outrage doesn’t work in a society that is uncertain and scared about its future.
It seems like a handful of candidates are beginning to understand this, in the US at least, but for some reason this level of realpolitik is just beyond many center and center-left parties.
Harris lost to Trump in 2024 for what I see as exactly the same reasons.
"Careless People" talks about it and how it was the inception of Meta's powerplay into politics by becoming indispensable for politicians to use their platforms to reach voters. The only thing they cared about is engagement and avoiding regulations, both are easily achievable if polarisation becomes the norm, the obliteration of proper political discourse into the form it exists now is a consequence of that.
I don't believe those far-right parties would have this much support if public discourse wasn't mostly focused on online platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, etc., they wouldn't have the reach nor the tools for creating information bubbles as existing right now. Those platforms allow for the formation of entire separate realities that are self-reinforcing.
Hence why I started with "fanning the flames". It means the issues are there, they need to be worked on but with social media we are stuck, solving complex issues require compromises, long-term thinking and planning, nothing that is enabled by social media's knee-jerk reactions, ephemeral messaging, etc.
Sadly, some of the parties that are involved (tech bros, Russia, etc.) are not going to do any good when it comes to these issues. They'll only make the housing issues worse (by accumulating even more wealth and invading your country, respectively). But blaming everything on immigrants and elites has always worked extremely well, in-group vs. out-group is something that our brain needed for survival in the past, so it is very easy to trigger.
The saddest part is that those that push the anti-elite narrative (Trump, Musk, etc.) are often the elites themselves.
That doesn’t imply that the candidate must have morally dubious character, just that morally dubious characters are taking advantage of it.
and then proceeds with extreme opinions on that parties.
Far-right parties have increased their presence thanks to inequality created by conservative parties and well funded campaigns by billionaries.
Let's not pretend that this is the will of the people when so much money is put into moving the blame of the current state of the economy from billionaires and monopolies towards working class people of foreign origin. (Like if it was working class people the ones hoarding money and power)
A lot of 'extreme views' being bandied around are not really any different to what was spoken about in the 90s, tbh. Even Tony Blair was making comments on topics like immigration which would make today's audience blush.
We've had decades of centrist governments all throughout Europe. Do they not shoulder any blame for the rise of the far-right? Or is it only the "billionaires" who have agency?
I agree somewhat. However, the fault of mainstream politics is one of failure. The fault of extraterritorial actors is one of action.
I think that mainstream governments in the rounds haven't done enough for hoi polloi in the past few decades, but also that perceptions of what they could have fine may often be unrealistic. There are many prophets - some shallow thinkers might say "just read [ Das Kapital | Friedman ] and do that", but i don't agree that ideology delivers the benefits it promises.
It was a tall order to expect the past few decades of governing parties to satisfy the people enough that they don't turn to AfD shit.
Mainstream politicians' capital comes from votes, an expensive and limited resource. Extraterritorial actors do not have this constraint.
Where i end up is: yes, we should blame tired neoliberal parties for failing the people and driving then to charlatans. But that blame should be tempered by an understanding that government is a game that never leaves everybody satisfied. But extraterritorial actors? They are somewhere between philosophically vacant and hostile, and they are fucking with us just because they can. The blame is categorically greater.
> 1. a political philosophy or movement that represents or is claimed to represent the interests of ordinary people especially against the Establishment
> 2. general concern for ordinary people
In US politics, both Bernie Sanders and Trump were put in the same bucket and derided as populists by the media, even though their policies could not be more different.
One thing I would add is that we have the most concentrated control of media/influence since pre-Gutenberg times. This is a huge issue, as a very small number of people have control of our politics and emotions, and use that to further their own increasingly weirdo interests.
Fast one - the one that used journalism (so called 4th branch of government) that enjoyed public trust and more or less was factual which in turn kept public opinion more or less in one shared and factual reality. This in turn put pressure on actual government in between elections.
And there is second one - slower - public could change government in elections based on the lived experience of last N years.
The monopolies broke 1st loop completely. And the 2nd was hindered. Now ppl cannot choose directionally in slow loop (elections) what is good for their self interest bcs they do not have factual picture of reality. So they can choose based on vibes which in turn is as good as "random move away form current status quo".
IMHO still way better then autocracy.
Case in point - ppl voted for Trump among other things bcs of gasoline prices. How it turned out...
And why right wing - bcs said monopolies put thumb on the scale - as their are capital after all. And they do have more self awareness what is best for their interest. If democracy survives next will move will be ditching current right wing for whatever else and then even monopolies thumb on scale probably will not help current regimes.
This argument has been repeated for decades, but I just don't see it.
I'd seriously wager maybe 20% of the US population even understands the basics of how their state government functions. Less than 10% probably understand their local government or could name more than 1 local politician.
This isn't hyperbole. A shocking number of Americans are PROUD to not be engaged in politics in any way. Especially for young folks, politics and understanding the government are just not cool.
It explicitly cares about people who identify as traditional Germans, who in their own eyes are "the normal people".
On the economic side, Gemini tells me that they favour deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy for small and medium-sized enterprises (Mittelstand). They also want to increase family support payments to incentivise having children. These are all economic policies that make sense to conservative-minded "normal people".
They're fiscally conservative values, as you likely already know. Social and fiscal conservatism are correlated, as you likely also already know.
In order for you to make this statement, you had to take a word ("conservative") that can be interpreted in one of two well-known ways ("social conservative", "fiscal conservative"), and pretend that when I used that word, I must have meant the way that doesn't make sense, instead of the way that obviously does.
Correct, everyone is paying more except the top 1% under Trump.
Apparently, everyone forgot already.
No, right wing parties have been winning globally because they are vastly more resourced both financially and media-space-ly than the opposition. If you can constantly flood the zone with bullshit, it becomes impossible for the opposition to correct the disinformation before the next flood arrives.
the summary is: "AfD member Matthias Funk writes and forwards racist dehumanizing incitement: Neger, Muselmanen, Hinterwäldler, dreckige Monster Merkel, Pest, calls patriots to rise against Verbrecher."
I'm not sure about the actual email, but am certain that there are a lot of "left coded" agents that would find any discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants "dehumanizing". Also considering the WWE style of modern politics calling one of the leaders of your opposition "dreckige Monster Merkel" is not something strange.
You think the term "muselmanen" could reasonably be used in a civilized "discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants"? You do know "muselmanen" has a very specific link to WWII concentration camps, right?
So, er, I think your argument comes down to "sure, they're bigots, but most of the people I know are bigots too so stop complaining". I don't find this a very convincing argument.
(And "the filthy foreigners are coming for our women" is, like, the oldest accusation in the book. Don't forget to add that they also kill children to use their blood in their blasphemous religious rituals.)
And you reply with sensationalism.
You fell for it. Congrats. You played yourself.
When we engage with such tactics we harm ourselves and the people around us. We become stooges for politicians. We repeat their nonsense. Cmon.
Their views, are the views of 1/5 people you'll meet in Germany, on average. If we mirrored this logic, the SPD should be "far-left", Grüne should be "far-left pro" and Links should be "ultra far-left pro max".
This use of language waters out the meaning. Just like calling everyone commies and nazis... also I think it'll have the opposite effect you hope.
A popularity in election results doesn't define a parties position on the political spectrum. A lot of people are voting for change to occur, but that doesn't mean that that change already happened just by counting the votes.
What? Slavery wasn't tolerated. It was celebrated(still is) in a large amount of the country. It was considered a right by many white people in the US. Something they were entitled to(entitlement is a big theme with American conservatives) and still are.
Let's not forget, or maybe let's try to learn, that racism was the united states original social/cultural export. Back in the day Americans were seen as the most racist people on the planet and they were proud of it. Americans minstrel shows were big business and a very early one in the countries history.
Let's not forget that well after slavery was outlawed, Americans were still firebombing black/indigenous neighborhoods, towns, and lynching people. Americans still kill native Americans to this day, lookup native American women going missing.
Let's not forget that Kanye, just a few years ago, said that slaves had it good and should have been thankful. While that was absolutely the ramblings of a mentally unwell person, he was simply restating what is prevalent in many circles in America today. Kanye was just repeating what was said around him and is repeated in "private" across much of the country.
Lol wtf ya think ICE actually is? It's just a government force meant to remove the blacks/browns/foreigners who take all the good jerbs from the hard working whites.
no thanks
They're right-wing extremists. We know that for a fact and have known that without commiting cybercrimes. So what is there to learn?
Maybe embezzlement or similar, but.
We have to keep in mind that they have in fact become the victim of a crime, which they (best case) will spin to their advantage.
Worst case they will use it as a justification to commit such and other crimes themselves.
Just claim that the anonymous entity wasn't anonymous. Claim it was your enemy. "Look, the Antifa hacked us. We need to ban them just like the US did"
Or blow it up bigger. "Look, the system itself is corrupt and 'the left/the altparteien/whoever' stopped using democratic measures to compete against us. That is because they cannot win on their own merit. Meaning that the system and its safeguards are meaningless."
Something like that. Given more time, one could flesh out this back-of-the-napkin thing into a likely working strategy.
___
Fascism fundamentally isn't data-driven but narrative-driven. So data alone is not going to work against it (though it is a valuable pillar).
If you look at the numbers of votes they're getting, you see a group of people that is so large, it will be self-sustaining, instead of fizzling out. Or so is my prediction.
Idk. I just don't see this ending up in the way we want things to end up. It's not going to affect me personally all that much, because I can be "passing" so to speak, but that's not exactly what one should strive for tbh. Keeping your head down and not caring as long as you're fine, I mean.
And I agree, now that we've waited so long (gee, I wonder if the far-right Verfassungsschutz leader had anything to do with that?), banning them will be ugly and lead to civil unrest. I think realistically, we will need some major state repression of these Neonazis and good luck with that given the political leanings of police.
But I don't think there's a way around that at this point, we still have to try.
"Wehret den Anfängen" and "Never Again" and all that.
"You gotta do something" is correct, but not every something is suited.
But I think at this point we're entering the circular stage, so. Idk. I don't want to live in this world we see developing, but what I want seems to be not all that relevant to said world.
Sometimes you gotta, if you want to keep a free society free
There's no awards to be won for coddling fascists. The protections of a free society cannot be extended by those trying to extinguish it.
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935
It is for their benefit I have translated a few quotes from leading AfD members so they can paint their own picture what those "ideas I don't like" are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536747
This however speaks nothing of anti-Zionism.
They hate Jews
They really hate muslims
It's hilarious watching old European neonazis allying themselves with Israel today.
The confusion is palpable.
If there were 0 muslims in Germany today, their politics would be 100% about Jews controlling the world and all that stuff.
"Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine."
The leader of that party was Menachem Begin, later prime minister of Israel and founder of Likud, Netanyahu's party.
Frankly, I think their supposed "antisemitism" is a joke compared to their anti-Arab and anti-muslim attitude. Those are their real enemies now.
Many French would have you believe women wearing Hijab should be banned lest it destroy their "western culture" when even the most Islamophobic Americans don't care
A 5% Muslim population in UK is supposedly threatening to send them back to the dark ages when Singapore is at 15% with codified multicultural guarantees and somehow annihilates them in every measure of modernity and development
That of course has nothing to do with the fact that extreme-right parties look at Israel, with its ethnic suprematism, as an example. The only connection I see is backwards: Israel is undoubtedly doing its best to fuel racism against muslims because it wants us to believe we have a common enemy.
> The AfD party is currently polling at 29% nationally – even while they fight a designation by the Verfassungsschutz as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party in court.
The system is working
I guess the upside is that in countries with a multi-party system (happens more frequently without first-past-the-post), they virtually always have to form a coalition, which typically ends up in infighting within a party or between parties. E.g. in The Netherlands you typically need four parties nowadays to form a coalition.
I leave it to the reader to decide if I'm talking about now or the 1930s.
A vast archive of hacked emails from the AfD was published online on Monday: 281 GB containing 421,179 internal party emails. And, for anyone who might have grown confused about claims of antisemitism while it was plastered over the German news media in the weeks following the Berlin election: here you can see what it really looks like.
In email after email, party supporters use racist slurs and share antisemitic theories of Jewish world domination; there are jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots, discussions of whether refugees should be shot at the border, a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”.
The entire archive is available online – though it may be a criminal offence in Germany to torrent the material or distribute it online. Yet the journalists who’ve been able to examine parts of the hack consider it authentic. The methodology behind the leak is also quite interesting: the vast archive has not been published directly on the site. Instead, it is available via a series of AI summaries, which have been filtered according to severity (CRITICAL, HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW) and type, with categories including “racism_xenophobia”, “corruption_money”, “leadership_feud”, “conspiracy”, “violence_threats” and “antisemitism_extremism”.
The party itself has confirmed the hack to Bild: “In September 2026, a hacker attack targeted one of our party’s hosting service providers, during which portions of a few email accounts – most of which had not been used for years – were apparently illicitly copied.”
Many of the summaries are the party’s own internal disciplinary proceedings, with emails sent to party boards to decide whether to open expulsion proceedings against members. Here, what is shocking (though perhaps not surprising) is the depth and breadth of racist feeling from party members: slurs, fantasies of violence, and antisemitic statements appear commonplace. One email from 2016 appears to show Weidel forwarding a member’s antisemitic material to the federal board as the party weighed his expulsion, while including a warning to her colleagues that the Verfassungsschutz – Germany’s domestic intelligence service – might be reading.
There are some cases which do not appear to have drawn the ire of the party, including one Bavarian official urging party leaders to chant “Merkel croak” every day, or another thread in which staff at the party’s federal office apparently discuss luring a photographer to a party event and removing him by force.
The anonymous hackers claimed their motive behind the leak was to show the “degeneracy and hypocrisy” of the AfD. Among the countless acts of hate speech, there are also allegations of embezzlement and financial misconduct, according to DDoSecrets, a transparency collective which republished the archive: the site’s software flagged 34 documents for misuse of funds, 23 for off-the-books payments, 14 for undisclosed donations and seven for embezzlement.
The AfD party is currently polling at 29% nationally – even while they fight a designation by the Verfassungsschutz as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party in court. That designation has already been made by state intelligence offices for some state branches, such as Sachsen-Anhalt — though it did not seem to hurt their electoral success. The party achieved 43.8% of the vote there in September.
1. The far-right parties are linked and coordinated and generally funded by very wealthy people;
2. The rise of far right parties is a direct result of declining material conditions;
3. Far right parties get to blame immigration and trans people because, in general, there is no counterbalance to that narrative blaming the actual cause: capitalism and ever-increasing income and wealth inequality;
4. The "moderate" (which really means centrist or center-right parties) will predictably and routinely ally with far-right parties to crush any leftist momentum. As an aside, the term "moderate" is intentionally conflated by pollsters, politicians and the media and really means nothing;
5. The topic of economics is typically avoided in most Western countries because the economics are indefensible. Instead you have manufactured wedge issues to divide people such as immigraiton, gay rights and the existence of a handful of trans people. This suits both major parties in most countries because they're both neoliberal, which is to say that they are uniparty on defending capitalism;
6. People will defend capitalism and attack socialism without knowing what either of those things are. Ask someone what capitalism is and you'll usually get a hand-wavy claim about "free markets" or even just "markets", which isn't true at all. No markets are free and markets exist in every economic system. Some of our earliest writings from 4000+ years ago are about market transactions.
So when you see things like protests in France, the rise of Reform in the UK and the rise of AfD (as well as others such as in Italy) know that it's all related and has the same root cause.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis. We saw how that worked out in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. In the US, FDR was forced to make concessions to the working class to stave off the perceived threat of communism. In Germany we got Hitler. And after WW2, the US went on an imperialism frenzy, imperialism being the highest form of capitalism.
All of this is only going to get worse until we address the core issue, which is capitalism.
Obviously all very moderate and centrist behaviour.
This idea that somehow it just starts with small things, and then before you know it, the Third Reich is back. Come on. It's 2026.
Today simply waving the flag of your own nation is almost a crime in some countries. We've completely lost it.
People have a very reasonable worry that voting for people who talk about executing refugees (note the term "refugee" and not "economic migrant") might actually enact the policies they speak of.
Any association with the Third Reich reasonably comes from their use of Nazi symbolism and use of Nazi slogans.
Give angry people an outgroup to vent their anger and hate, one can become the ruler of the nation. US did not get a great economy by incarcerating or throwing those few thousand immigrants out. Its economy is currently getting messed up by stupid policies. But people need an outgroup to hate and it is enough for the right wings to get to power.
> This idea that somehow it just starts with small things, and then before you know it, the Third Reich is back. Come on. It's 2026.
And in 2026 we see the state of US going exactly in that direction. Humans are pretty predictable and something similar to Third Reich will happen before you know it. "This time will be different" is hope. Not a given.
Yes this "so-called far right" is totally sane and normal.
So, they got a bit of a clean-up.
It‘s the opposite, all the traditional middle class types left „Die Linke“, who are now the clear far left candidate. They are the only candidate that propose a socialist economic reform, open borders and a stop to and and all deportations.
But yeah, on paper they don't sound too bad (ignoring their pro-russia sentiments)
Those meme and humor are the comment section on any social media platform today. If you think the far left are beyond these types of comments (except targeting the opposite groups of people) in their internal chats, you're clueless about the real world.
Just read the unhinged comments they make in public. What do you think they say in private.
>If you can find them, please publish.
Why don't they publish themselves if they're saints and got nothing to be assumed of?
Who mentioned the far left? And why would it matter what other extremists do?
This sounds like "yes but what about..", and I see it in several comments here but I don't understand it. How does that matter? There could be a similar dump from another party or organization and people would (rightfully) be equally upset.
Of course if a party - even internally - emails really crude racism and antisemitism then people should know. Their "core" voters don't care. But for a party to get 20-25-30% of the vote, it needs a _lot_ of votes from people who are repulsed by this.
Ahh, old good mild conservatism.