The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has gained ground in three recent state elections, caused an uproar in the Thuringian parliament and triggering another debate on whether to ban the party outright.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has gained ground in three recent state elections, caused an uproar in the Thuringian parliament and triggering another debate on whether to ban the party outright.
There is a difference between conservatism and being a threat to the democratic order. Germany has conservative parties that are perfectly valid, it’s just that the AfD is not one of them.
Killing the head of a terrorist organization won’t help if you don’t fix the underlying issues.He will be replaced in short order, usually by someone worse. Likewise this kind of political movement.
What the left in Europe (well in my country at least) still doesn’t understand is that they’re not going to fix this by lecturing the populist voters about how all their thoughts and ideas are wrong.
As long as it is a political party it is entitled to double digit millions every year in state party financing.
If it is forbidden, it cannot be refounded with the same people and ideology and their wealth is seized.
It ia not comparable to “terrorist” organizations, that dont need to abide by some rules of the dominant order in order to be active.
The democratic system should not actively finance and aid those who want to destroy it.
Finally the ideology is legitimised every time it can be voted for legally, as it shows the ideology to be considered part of the acceptable political plurality
And yet we don’t allow terrorist organizations to campaign for office, officially and supported by tax money, in our societies.
Valid for democracy, but not valid for the problems we’re facing (i.e. most importantly climate-change)
I’m not sure I agree. More and more it’s started seeming like they’re generally just waiting for a moment to drop their masks; eg. here in Finland now that we have a fully right wing government, our “fiscally conservative” party started their term off by limiting the right to strike, and is now echoing extremist right wing talking points about eg. immigration, LGBT+ people, and the environment. They were OK with an extremist right wing minister leaving us out of Ukraine’s “Alliance for Gender-Responsive and Inclusive Recovery” because the plan mentioned LGBT+ people, and they stood in the way of banning abusive LGBT+ “conversion therapy” even though they claimed to be against it back when they still had to be in a government with leftist parties (sorry, couldn’t find an English source for this but here is one in Finnish. For translation I’d suggest DeepL, it’s vastly superior to eg. Google). They are also blaming the opposition for “besmirching” Finland’s reputation abroad, meaning they don’t want anyone pointing out that we have literal neo-Nazis in the government and parliament.