SPD party conference (archive), via dts news agency
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Berlin (dts news agency) – The SPD party executive board is scheduled to discuss possible ban proceedings against the AfD next Monday. The party’s working group for migration and diversity submitted a corresponding application on Friday, which the “Tagesspiegel” (Saturday edition) reported on.
“The half-hearted discussion about banning the AfD acts as an accelerant,” it says in the application. The party should therefore call on “the social democratic members of the federal government” to tackle a ban procedure “courageously and consistently”.
Aziz Bozkurt, chairman of the working group and state secretary for social affairs in Berlin, told the newspaper that Germany has a history that requires clear anti-fascism. “It’s not too late yet.” The constitution therefore explicitly provides for party bans, said Bozkurt. “The parties in the democratic spectrum must recognize that their previous dealings with the right-wing extremist AfD have been anything but successful,” they write. Adopting “the positions of the radical right” did not lead to the hoped-for calming of the situation, but rather acted as a catalyst.
The background to the application is, among other things, research by the non-profit online medium “Correctiv”. According to them, influential AfD politicians are said to have discussed a plan at a meeting with activists from the “Identitarian Movement”, which the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has classified as right-wing extremist, in order to deport millions of people from Germany according to racist criteria in the event of a seizure of power.
In Germany, a party can only be banned by the Federal Constitutional Court. However, it does not act on its own initiative, but only in response to a request from the Bundestag, Bundesrat or Federal Government. In the previous attempt to ban the NPD, the federal government was the first to submit the ban proceedings in Karlsruhe under the leadership of the then Federal Interior Minister Otto Schily (SPD). The process ultimately failed because of the party’s irrelevance. However, the court expressly confirmed that the NPD pursues a political concept aimed at eliminating the existing free democratic basic order and wants to replace the existing constitutional order with an authoritarian nation state oriented towards the ethnically defined “national community”. According to the constitutional judges, their political concept disregards human dignity and is incompatible with the principle of democracy.
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