Bavarian Minister-President and CSU chief Markus Söder has voiced opposition to a ban on the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, joining other right-liberal establishment leaders like CDU leader Friedrich Merz who also rejected the idea earlier this year.
Despite his rejection of a ban on the party, Söder did make sure to signal his alignment with the old right and left-liberal parties. He expressed support for a nationwide classification of the AfD, the second most popular political force in the country, as “certainly right-wing extremist.”
Parroting the words of those in Germany’s globalist political class—that have had little to no effect on the AfD’s standing with the public—Söder told the newspapers of the Funke media group that the party “despises democracy,” and claimed it “would massively damage” the country’s security and prosperity.
“It would help if the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution [LfV] classifies the AfD as definitely right-wing extremist at the national level,” Söder insisted, ignoring that such an LfV classification of the AfD in the eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Saxony-Anhalt has also had no effect on the party’s popularity.
AfD leaders assert the state spy agencies’ classifications are little more than a circuitous attempt to stigmatize and destroy the party.
In calling for the classification of AfD as ‘extremist,’ the CSU leader is advocating for the implementation of comprehensive and far-reaching state surveillance of the party.
Presently, the AfD is the strongest political force in each of these states, commanding the support of roughly a third of the population. For the AfD’s co-leader Alice Weidel, it is “absolutely realistic” that the party can rule in eastern Germany next year.
The free democratic order has “never been in such great danger in the history of the Federal Republic as it is now,” Söder claimed. “Destructive forces like the AfD and the Wagenknecht Group are gaining ground. The incumbent government shows little ability to act.”
Instead of a ban, which he said would “fail just as much as the attempt to ban the [neo-Nazi] NPD,” Söder advocated for the establishment to “fight the AfD politically and name and expose” what he called their “absurd views.”
Despite his statements calling for free and open debate, however, Söders’s push for the intervention of state power, in the form of the country’s spy agencies, to combat AfD’s rise calls into question his authenticity.
