The messiness of party bans became crystal clear in Ludwigshafen’s mayoral election. When citizens of the German industrial town went to vote, they discovered their choice had been sanitized—the AfD candidate banned by the city council just weeks before polling day.
The democratic cost was stark: voter turnout plummeted to 29.3%, an all-time low in modern Germany. Over 9% of those who bothered to vote cast invalid ballots, many reportedly scrawling the banned candidate’s name onto their papers. The eventual winner will govern with the approval of barely 12% of the population.
Ludwigshafen offers a preview of what awaits Germany if the AfD is banned nationwide. Yet this hasn’t deterred the ban’s advocates. The governing SPD—polling at a dismal 15%—has confirmed its resolve to eliminate the AfD, which leads polls at 24%.
The pro-ban lobby invokes Germany’s “defensive democracy” doctrine, claiming parties threatening democracy must be stopped preemptively. They cite the 1952 banning of the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party (SRP) as precedent—one of only two parties banned since 1945, alongside the Stalinist KPD in 1956.
But this comparison collapses under scrutiny. The SRP and AfD represent entirely different phenomena, banned for fundamentally different reasons.
The SRP vs. the AfD
The SRP emerged from the literal ruins of Nazism, founded by unrepentant Nazi diehards just four years after Germany’s defeat. Its membership consisted of former NSDAP members, led by figures like Wehrmacht General Remer—who had helped crush the July 1944 plot against Hitler and later engaged in Holocaust denial.
This was no populist uprising but the death rattle of a thoroughly discredited ideology. Germans had just lived through actual Nazism—not the imagined version that sees Trump as Hitler incarnate, but the real thing: torture cellars, concentration camps the size of cities, and six million murdered Jews.
The SRP’s support base clustered in Lower Saxony, a former NSDAP stronghold swollen with many eastern refugees. At its peak, it managed 11% in the regional Lower Saxony state elections—a shocking result, but hardly a democratic threat in a nation rebuilding from totalitarian devastation.
The AfD’s origins tell a radically different story. Born as a protest movement by citizens disillusioned with what they saw as suffocating consensus politics, it emerged not from ideological extremism but from democratic frustration.
Its founders and supporters weren’t nostalgic for discredited regimes but angry at being systematically ignored. On every major issue—EU debt mutualization, energy transition, mass migration—they found the same policies regardless of which party governed. No matter where these citizens turned, they encountered identical positions pursuing a fundamental direction they increasingly rejected.
This wasn’t extremism seeking power but democracy demanding choice.
The SRP ban responded primarily to external pressures. Chancellor Adenauer, focused on rehabilitating Germany’s international image, faced Allied demands and international embarrassment. American High Commissioner John Jay McCloy’s threat to intervene posed real consequences. The ban served Germany’s diplomatic needs, much more than domestic political calculation.
Today’s AfD ban represents something unprecedented: a governing elite attempting to eliminate its primary opposition to preserve its own power. This targets not foreign perception but German voters themselves.
Strength vs. weakness
The parties that banned the SRP governed from a point of relative strength. Adenauer’s CDU won 31% in 1949—a result today’s CDU would celebrate—rising to 45% by 1953. Combined with the SPD, mainstream parties commanded over 74% support. For decades to come, these parties would dominate the political debate and win the trust of large sectors of the voters, who felt well-represented by them.
But this has changed. Today’s ban advocates govern from profound weakness. The SPD limps along losing ever more voters, and the CDU struggles to keep up with the AfD (which is heading current polls). Both survive only through increasingly unstable coalitions. They’ve lost not just elections but societal roots, unable to win the trust of the public, or even genuine majorities.
Ludwigshafen reveals the ban’s true consequence: not the preservation of democracy but its hollowing out. A city governed by someone representing 12% of citizens isn’t democracy—it’s technocratic rule—and not even disguised as popular will.
Many of the SRP’s voters, mainly eastern refugees, eventually found a home in Adenauer’s CDU, which successfully neutralised their concerns (helped by post-war Germany’s economic miracle). The CDU’s motto was explicit: no legitimate party should exist to its right.
Seventy years later, the CDU has abandoned this integrative mission entirely. Having lost the capacity to address legitimate grievances, it now seeks to criminalize them instead.
Those expecting AfD voters to quietly disappear like SRP supporters are profoundly mistaken. The SRP represented a discredited past; populism on the other hand is here to stay.
If mainstream parties follow Ludwigshafen’s path, governing without even attempting to represent majorities, they will face not quiet acquiescence but sustained upheaval. Democracy denied at the ballot box finds other expressions.
The choice facing Germany is stark: revitalize democratic competition or watch democracy itself become the casualty of elite self-preservation.
When Democracy Turns Against Voters: The Fatal Difference Between 1952 and Today
Supporters wave German flags and cheer for Alice Weidel, co-leader of Alternative for Germany, as she addresses an election campaign rally in Halle, eastern Germany on January 25, 2025.
AFP
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The messiness of party bans became crystal clear in Ludwigshafen’s mayoral election. When citizens of the German industrial town went to vote, they discovered their choice had been sanitized—the AfD candidate banned by the city council just weeks before polling day.
The democratic cost was stark: voter turnout plummeted to 29.3%, an all-time low in modern Germany. Over 9% of those who bothered to vote cast invalid ballots, many reportedly scrawling the banned candidate’s name onto their papers. The eventual winner will govern with the approval of barely 12% of the population.
Ludwigshafen offers a preview of what awaits Germany if the AfD is banned nationwide. Yet this hasn’t deterred the ban’s advocates. The governing SPD—polling at a dismal 15%—has confirmed its resolve to eliminate the AfD, which leads polls at 24%.
The pro-ban lobby invokes Germany’s “defensive democracy” doctrine, claiming parties threatening democracy must be stopped preemptively. They cite the 1952 banning of the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party (SRP) as precedent—one of only two parties banned since 1945, alongside the Stalinist KPD in 1956.
But this comparison collapses under scrutiny. The SRP and AfD represent entirely different phenomena, banned for fundamentally different reasons.
The SRP vs. the AfD
The SRP emerged from the literal ruins of Nazism, founded by unrepentant Nazi diehards just four years after Germany’s defeat. Its membership consisted of former NSDAP members, led by figures like Wehrmacht General Remer—who had helped crush the July 1944 plot against Hitler and later engaged in Holocaust denial.
This was no populist uprising but the death rattle of a thoroughly discredited ideology. Germans had just lived through actual Nazism—not the imagined version that sees Trump as Hitler incarnate, but the real thing: torture cellars, concentration camps the size of cities, and six million murdered Jews.
The SRP’s support base clustered in Lower Saxony, a former NSDAP stronghold swollen with many eastern refugees. At its peak, it managed 11% in the regional Lower Saxony state elections—a shocking result, but hardly a democratic threat in a nation rebuilding from totalitarian devastation.
The AfD’s origins tell a radically different story. Born as a protest movement by citizens disillusioned with what they saw as suffocating consensus politics, it emerged not from ideological extremism but from democratic frustration.
Its founders and supporters weren’t nostalgic for discredited regimes but angry at being systematically ignored. On every major issue—EU debt mutualization, energy transition, mass migration—they found the same policies regardless of which party governed. No matter where these citizens turned, they encountered identical positions pursuing a fundamental direction they increasingly rejected.
This wasn’t extremism seeking power but democracy demanding choice.
The SRP ban responded primarily to external pressures. Chancellor Adenauer, focused on rehabilitating Germany’s international image, faced Allied demands and international embarrassment. American High Commissioner John Jay McCloy’s threat to intervene posed real consequences. The ban served Germany’s diplomatic needs, much more than domestic political calculation.
Today’s AfD ban represents something unprecedented: a governing elite attempting to eliminate its primary opposition to preserve its own power. This targets not foreign perception but German voters themselves.
Strength vs. weakness
The parties that banned the SRP governed from a point of relative strength. Adenauer’s CDU won 31% in 1949—a result today’s CDU would celebrate—rising to 45% by 1953. Combined with the SPD, mainstream parties commanded over 74% support. For decades to come, these parties would dominate the political debate and win the trust of large sectors of the voters, who felt well-represented by them.
But this has changed. Today’s ban advocates govern from profound weakness. The SPD limps along losing ever more voters, and the CDU struggles to keep up with the AfD (which is heading current polls). Both survive only through increasingly unstable coalitions. They’ve lost not just elections but societal roots, unable to win the trust of the public, or even genuine majorities.
Ludwigshafen reveals the ban’s true consequence: not the preservation of democracy but its hollowing out. A city governed by someone representing 12% of citizens isn’t democracy—it’s technocratic rule—and not even disguised as popular will.
Many of the SRP’s voters, mainly eastern refugees, eventually found a home in Adenauer’s CDU, which successfully neutralised their concerns (helped by post-war Germany’s economic miracle). The CDU’s motto was explicit: no legitimate party should exist to its right.
Seventy years later, the CDU has abandoned this integrative mission entirely. Having lost the capacity to address legitimate grievances, it now seeks to criminalize them instead.
Those expecting AfD voters to quietly disappear like SRP supporters are profoundly mistaken. The SRP represented a discredited past; populism on the other hand is here to stay.
If mainstream parties follow Ludwigshafen’s path, governing without even attempting to represent majorities, they will face not quiet acquiescence but sustained upheaval. Democracy denied at the ballot box finds other expressions.
The choice facing Germany is stark: revitalize democratic competition or watch democracy itself become the casualty of elite self-preservation.
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