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BERLIN – Demonstrations against the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party erupted across the country this weekend, increasing calls for the party to be banned after reports that its members discussed plans for mass deportations.
After months of the AfD's rising popularity, the report appears to have acted as a wake-up call for Germans opposed to the AfD and for an estimated 1.4 million people who took to the streets over the weekend.
Rallies in Hamburg and Munich had to be broken up because significantly more people than expected were present. Aerial images from across the country showed crowds of people braving Germany's cold January temperatures and filling the city's squares and avenues. According to police, around 100,000 people gathered on the lawn of the Reichstag, the seat of the German lower house, in Berlin on Sunday.
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Posters at the protests emphasized Germany's special responsibility to confront the far right, given the country's dark history under Nazi rule that led to the Holocaust. “Never again is now” and “Now we can see what we would have done in our grandparents’ place,” read some of the banners.
The protests were triggered by an investigative report in early January that revealed that AfD members met with right-wing extremists in Potsdam in November to discuss a “return plan” if the AfD came to power. According to a report by the nonprofit research institute Correctiv, Martin Sellner, a right-wing extremist and leader of the Austrian “Identitarian Movement,” proposed a “master plan” that would “reverse the settlement of foreigners.” The focus is on asylum seekers, non-Germans with residence rights and “unassimilated” German citizens, the report says.
The idea of sending people to a “model state” in North Africa – similar to a 1940 Nazi plan to deport millions of Jews to Madagascar – was also reportedly discussed.
With less than six months until the Germans' election to the European Parliament, the AfD continues to defend its months-long second place in the nationwide polls. At around 22 percent, the party is only single-digit behind the conservative opposition, the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU).
Meanwhile, the centre-left governing coalition's approval ratings have fallen to record lows due to rising costs of living, a budget crisis and the migration debate.
Last week's protests underscored the urgency among many voters to ban the AfD ahead of regional elections this fall. In September, voters will go to the polls in three eastern states – Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia – where the AfD is currently the strongest party.
When asked last week whether the Interior Ministry was surprised by the Correctiv report, a ministry spokeswoman, Britta Beylage-Haarmann, told reporters: “We cannot comment on intelligence information here.” The country's domestic intelligence service “has these things in mind,” she said.
After the report was published, comparisons were immediately made with the Wannsee Conference of 1942, also in Potsdam, at which high-ranking Nazi officials formulated the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
Leading rights organizations in Germany strongly condemned the extremist plans and warned that the meeting should not become a “second Wannsee conference”.
“It is an attack on the constitution and the free constitutional state,” a group of six organizations, including the German Association of Judges and the German Bar Association, said last week. “The legal legitimacy of such fantasies [of mass deportation] must be prevented by all legal and political means.”
However, Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, urged extreme caution when making comparisons with the Wannsee Conference.
“The industrial mass murder of European Jews is unique in history in its cold-bloodedness and madness,” Schuster told the German Press Agency on Monday. However, he added that “the Potsdam meeting between AfD officials and the Identitarian Movement is undoubtedly evidence of a brutality of thought that goes against the foundations of our democratic society.”
Politicians including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who took part in one of the first protests in his Potsdam constituency, condemned the far-right meeting. Any plan to expel immigrants or citizens alike represents “an attack on our democracy and therefore on all of us,” he said.
In three of 16 federal states, the AfD is classified as “right-wing extremist” by the domestic secret services. But the legal hurdle to actually banning the party is extremely high. The German constitution allows bans on parties that “seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order,” and the country’s constitutional court has only done so twice.
The Socialist Reich Party, a successor party to the NSDAP, was banned in 1952, the Communist Party of Germany in 1956. In 2017, the Constitutional Court ruled that the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) was too insignificant to be banned. although the ideological criteria for a ban are met.
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However, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said last week that she would not “rule out” proceedings to ban the AfD, even though the hurdles to this “constitutional last resort” were high. Such a step would be the “sharpest sword” there is, Faeser told the regional broadcaster SWR. The country's democratic parties should first deal with the content of the AfD, said Faeser.
However, Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann expressed skepticism about a possible ban procedure.
You have to be “100 percent sure that it will be successful” if you want to pursue such an approach, Buschmann told Welt am Sonntag. “If such a procedure were to fail before the Constitutional Court, it would be a major PR victory for the AfD.”
A change in rhetoric can also be observed among leading German CEOs, who have long dodged questions about a rise in support for the AfD. Lars Redeligx, CEO of Düsseldorf Airport, said the results of the Correctiv investigation made it necessary to speak out.
“These thoughts that threaten the constitution are poison for Germany as a business location,” he said. “It threatens our peaceful coexistence, it threatens our prosperity and sends a fatal signal to the world.”
The Potsdam revelations have heightened concerns that Germany's image as an attractive destination for foreign investment and skilled workers could be at risk, while an aging population and a shortage of domestic skilled workers are hampering growth.
The AfD says a ban on the party would be “undemocratic.” After Correctiv's report, attempts were made to downplay the meeting. At a press conference last week, party leader Alice Weidel accused Correctiv employees of infiltrating and spying on the private meeting “using secret service methods with disregard for personal rights.”
Most recently, there were large-scale protests against the AfD in 2017 and 2018 after the party was elected to the Bundestag – the first time in almost six decades that a right-wing extremist party entered parliament. However, turnout was dwarfed by this weekend's numbers.