Germany Banning The AfD Would Be A Dangerous Mistake
Can democracy safeguard itself by banning extremist parties, or does prohibition plant deeper seeds of grievance that erode its own foundations?
Should democracies be able to ban or ostracize political parties with “extremist” or “anti-democratic” positions? While our instinct might be to try to oust such views from society lest they spread, propagate, and undermine democratic institutions, both human rights law and history offer valuable lessons for why this approach backfires.
In 2013, economists and scholars opposed to Germany’s involvement in Eurozone bailouts during the sovereign debt crisis founded the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Since then, the party’s platform has changed dramatically from conservative Euroscepticism to far-right populism characterized by anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, and nationalist rhetoric. Its leadership has repeatedly flirted with ethnonationalism and historical revisionism.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its radical stances, the AfD has experienced rising electoral success. In the 2025 federal elections, the party won approximately 20.8% of the national vote, making it the second-largest political force. This significantly increased from its 10.4% share in the 2021 elections.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, declared the AfD a “confirmed right-wing extremist case.”. This legal classification enabled intensified surveillance, including infiltration. This was provisionally suspended in May 2025 by the intelligence agency, which says it will wait for a court ruling on the matter before redetermining its ‘extremist’ nature.
Amid growing concerns, public and political debates over whether to ban the AfD have intensified. The Interior Minister declared the ban as “clear and unequivocal,” adding that the office has “a clear legal mandate to act against extremism and to protect our democracy.” The incoming Interior Minister suggested that it was unlikely that the party would be banned.
The suspension of the classification of the AfD as extremist is provisional, but the possibility of a ban continues to exist. While ban proponents argue that the party represents a real threat to Germany’s liberal democratic order, we want to make a stark warning that banning it could backfire, fueling narratives of martyrdom and persecution and weakening the legitimacy of democratic pluralism.
As Germany revisits this high-stakes question, it must confront the lessons of both its history and its legal obligations under European human rights law. Can democracy protect itself by silencing opposition? Or does such a move endanger the very freedoms it seeks to preserve?
The European Court of Human Rights and the Banning of Political Parties
The ECtHR has been instrumental in shaping Europe’s legal limits on political pluralism. In 1957, the now-defunct European Commission of Human Rights allowed for the prohibition of the German Communist Party. Many of the cases involving political party prohibitions were brought against Turkey. These included parties such as the Turkish Socialist Party and the Communist Party, where the Court showed an unwillingness to dissolve political parties.
There are thus some cases where ECtHR’s message is clear: democracies must be strong enough to tolerate dissenting, even radical, views, so long as those views are expressed and pursued through democratic means. Political parties are not outlawed for what they believe, but for what they do. In Yazar and Others v Turkey (2002), the ECtHR stressed that democratic functionality requires space for political entities to voice proposals that may diverge from government policy or dominant public sentiment. However, this recognition does not translate into the ECtHR’s granting of unlimited or unregulated participation in democracy.
Despite some good outcomes, the Court has also adopted a stringent, militant democratic approach with no substantial assessment of the real harm that may emanate from dissolving political parties. The landmark case Refah of Partisi (the Welfare Party) v. Turkey (2003) remains one of the Court’s most authoritative statements on this issue.
In that case, the Turkish Constitutional Court had dissolved the country’s largest political party, citing its adherence to Sharia as incompatible with the principles of secular democracy. The ECtHR upheld the ban, emphasizing that democracy does not require tolerating political movements that seek its destruction from within. The Court concluded that
“a political party whose leaders incite recourse to violence or propose a policy which does not comply with one or more of the rules of democracy or is aimed at the destruction of democracy and infringement of the rights and freedoms afforded under democracy cannot lay claim to the protection of the Convention against penalties imposed for those reasons.”
The Court emphasized that “the dissolution of Refah served the legitimate aim of preserving secularism which lies at the heart of democratic order in Turkey.” However, as noted in the dissenting opinion by three judges, the party was dissolved solely due to statements and actions by its members, not because of anything in its official program or statute, which, in fact, recognized the fundamental nature of secularism. As the dissent notes:
“There is nothing in its constitution or programme to indicate that Refah was other than democratic or that it was seeking to achieve its objectives by undemocratic means or that those objectives served to undermine or subvert the democratic and pluralistic political system in Turkey.”
Looking at whether a prohibition is proportional to the aim pursued, the Court noted that only 5 of the party’s members temporarily lost their parliamentary seats and leadership roles; the remaining 152 members continued to serve, indicating that the measure, though significant, was not absolute in its effects.
The above decision reflects that the ECtHR has erred on the side of caution, allowing for preemptive measures with a limited substantial assessment of harm while also disregarding the grave backfiring that the restriction of a political party may bring about. As the ECtHR has underlined in another case:
“a State cannot be required to wait, before intervening, until a political party has seized power and begun to take concrete steps to implement a policy incompatible with the standards of the Convention and democracy, even though the danger of that policy for democracy is sufficiently established and imminent.”
What happened after Refah? The New Welfare Party was created in 2018 by the son of the late chairperson of Refah Partisi. In the 2023 general elections, it received only a small number of votes and won just five seats in parliament in a group of 600. Still, the party has been reactivated, and earlier this year, its leader announced he will run in the 2028 presidential elections.
Censorship Didn’t Stop the Nazis. It Helped Them.
While some ECtHR cases have reflected a more cautious stance to the banning of political parties, others embraced a rigid militant democracy approach, without a meaningful evaluation of the actual harm posed by the party (or in some cases, association) in question. Yet history cautions against relying too heavily on repression to safeguard democracy.
Germany, of all countries, is acutely aware of the dangers of political complacency in the face of extremism. But it also knows that censorship and repression can backfire. As history shows, militant democracy can become its own enemy if deployed recklessly. A ban on the AfD would test the limits of democratic self-confidence and risk transforming a political opponent into a martyr.
One of the most persistent myths in political discourse is that the Nazis rose to power because Weimar Germany tolerated too much speech. This is the so-called “Weimar fallacy”: the belief that too much freedom paved the way for fascism. Yet the historical record tells a different story.
During the Weimar Republic, Germany adopted draconian emergency laws to protect democracy against both communists and fascists. However, this did not stop Hitler, but it did drastically affect press freedom. Jacob Mchangama writes that the “constant attempts” to silence Hitler and the Nazis “often helped to increase interest in, and sympathy for, the Nazis.”
When the Nazis took power, they abused the Weimar emergency laws to “strangle the very democracy the laws were supposed to protect” and turned them against their political enemies, trade unionists, communists, Jews, journalists and the clergy. The lesson is stark. Censorship can reinforce the movements it seeks to dismantle, and the tools used to suppress hate can be used, in turn, to enforce it.
Germany has already attempted to ban an extremist party in the modern era. The National Democratic Party (NPD), widely regarded as a neo-Nazi successor organization, was the subject of two attempted bans. The most recent attempt, ruled by the Federal Constitutional Court in 2017, concluded that while the party sought to undermine democratic order, it lacked the capacity to do so. Therefore, a ban was disproportionate.
The NPD later brought its case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), arguing that it had faced a de facto ban through discrimination and surveillance. While the ECtHR ultimately found the complaint inadmissible, it acknowledged the seriousness of the NPD’s grievances, such as exclusion from public venues, lack of banking services, and suppression of demonstrations, not that it made any difference to the actual result. In short, the NPD was politically ostracized without ever being formally dissolved — a cautionary tale of what happens when democratic systems engage in piecemeal repression without formal justification.
An important example of how restrictive laws play out in practice is the case of Björn Höcke, the controversial head of the AfD in Thuringia. Despite being twice convicted for using Nazi slogans, Björn Höcke's AfD came in first in his state, winning just over 38% of the vote—twice as much as the Christian Democrats.
The AfD, unlike the NPD, is no marginal force. Its potential to reshape the German political landscape is real, and thus the temptation to ban it could be stronger. But the risks are also exponentially higher.
On the other hand, there’s a real possibility that Germany will not opt for an outright ban of the AfD, but instead continue down the more ambiguous, and arguably just as troubling, path of limiting its activities through intensified surveillance and infiltration. Labelling the party as “extremist” reinstates this strategy, one that imposes significant constraints without triggering the legal and political fallout of a formal prohibition.
Banning the AfD might be constitutionally possible, but that does not make it prudent. The party already trades in narratives of elite betrayal, censorship, and persecution. A ban would not silence these claims; it would validate them.
Democracies cannot be defended by imitating the tactics of their enemies. They must show confidence in their values, be that openness, pluralism, and the power of persuasion over prohibition.
Conclusion
While the ECtHR has developed a well-defined framework of proportionality, imminence, and necessity, it frequently treats party dissolution as a manageable disruption rather than a constitutional trauma. There is little evidence in its case law of serious engagement with what banning a major democratic actor actually entails, such as possible cultural rupture, political destabilization, and the legitimization of illiberal instincts within liberal democracies.
With proposals to further marginalize the AfD, Germany faces a volatile situation. This is not the NDP. It commands nearly a fifth of the national vote. An outright ban or an aggressive quasi-ban would not only silence a movement but also destabilize the polity.
History teaches us that censorship in the Weimar Republic did not stop fascism. Instead, as Nadine Strossen has pointed out, its laws fueled Nazi propaganda, casted them as victims, and gave them the tools to silence dissent once in power.
Today, the lesson is the same: rather than fear the democratic process, Europe’s institutions and courts must learn to trust it. The best answer to dangerous ideas is their suppression, exposure, challenge, and ultimate defeat in the public square.
Natalie Alkiviadou is a Senior Research Fellow at The Future of Free Speech. Her research interests lie in the freedom of expression, the far-right, hate speech, hate crime, and non-discrimination.
Justin Hayes is the Director of Communications at The Future of Free Speech and the Managing Editor of The Bedrock Principle.