Members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), part of the ruling coalition, unanimously voted at a party conference in Berlin on Sunday to begin proceedings to ban the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party through the Federal Constitutional Court.
The delegates supported the party leadership’s initiative entitled “Defending democracy means taking action: prepare the process to ban the AfD – and bring people back.” It characterises the AfD as “clearly far-right.” In this regard, the Social Democrats plan to set up a working group at the federal state level to gather the necessary materials that could serve as grounds for banning the party if its unconstitutionality is proven.
In 2023, German counterintelligence recognised AfD branches in a number of regions as right-wing extremist. At the federal level, the party had until recently been under suspicion of extremism.
Earlier, the German Institute for Human Rights published a report stating that there were grounds for banning the AfD. The party itself accuses the authorities of political persecution and suppression of freedom of speech.
In 2025, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the AfD as a right-wing extremist party throughout Germany, which expands the possibilities for surveillance of the organisation. The co-chairs of the AfD called the decision a blow to democracy. The AfD filed a lawsuit.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, commenting on the prospect of banning the AfD, noted that it is impossible to ban all 10 million of its supporters and stressed the importance of analysing the decision to recognise the party as right-wing extremist. The AfD, founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant force, has strengthened its position in recent years, especially in eastern Germany.
In the 2024 state elections in Thuringia and Saxony, the party came first, winning 32.8% and 30.6% of the vote respectively, causing concern for the ruling coalition. The procedure for banning a party in Germany is a complex and rare process.
According to Article 21 of the German Constitution, a party can be banned if its goals or actions threaten the free democratic order. The last time the Constitutional Court considered such a case was in 2017, when it refused to ban the neo-Nazi NPD because of its “marginal influence.”
However, as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung notes, the popularity of the AfD, especially among young people (up to 30% support in the eastern states), makes it a more serious threat. The SPD, supported by the Greens and part of the CDU, insists that the AfD undermines the foundations of democracy, including freedom of speech and equality.
Europe’s contradictory struggle
Europe has come up with a way to respond to the pan-European political crisis, in which right-wing Eurosceptics, opponents of NATO and the like are gaining popularity: “wrong” parties will simply be banned, removed from elections and so on.
A similar situation occurred earlier in Romania, where elections whose results did not suit the authorities were simply cancelled on the basis of falsified documents, and the winner, Călin Georgescu, was banned from running again.
In France, the leader of the opposition National Rally was given a suspended sentence, thereby blocking her candidacy.
Greece was the first country in Europe to not only ban the ruling Golden Dawn party, which had hundreds of thousands of voters, but also to convict all of its leaders to maximum prison terms in violation of all norms and laws, sentenced its entire leadership to maximum prison terms, placing 16 party leaders, current members of parliament and the European Parliament in strict regime prisons. Thus, repression against political opponents in Europe and, in essence, their physical destruction (long terms in strict regime prisons rarely leave no consequences for health, especially for the elderly) are becoming a completely systemic phenomenon. This, of course, will not prevent Europe from continuing to teach the rest of the world about democracy.
