Cross-party request
The Bundestag will soon vote on the AfD ban procedure
September 29, 2024, 3:25 p.m
Listen to article
This audio version was artificially generated. More info | Send feedback
For months, members of the Bundestag from several factions have been preparing an application for a ban on the AfD. The paper has now been completed and will probably be discussed in Parliament soon. In addition to dissolving the right-wing party, there is a second goal.
According to a media report, the Bundestag will soon vote on a group motion requesting party ban proceedings against the AfD from the Federal Constitutional Court. According to information from the newspaper “Die Welt”, the motion is supported by individual MPs from the SPD, CDU/CSU, the Greens and the Left, but not by the entire parliamentary groups.
It has been prepared for months and was recently finalized, they say. 37 MPs are necessary for a cross-party motion. However, the motion to ban the AfD party is expected to be submitted by significantly more members of the Bundestag: According to “Welt” information, at least ten members of each of the above-mentioned parliamentary groups support it. The initiative for this application came from, among others, the Saxon CDU member of the Bundestag Marco Wanderwitz. The AfD is “right-wing extremist at heart and limb,” he declared over two years ago.
According to the application, the Bundestag is applying to the Federal Constitutional Court to declare that the Alternative for Germany party is unconstitutional in accordance with Article 21 of the Basic Law and Section 43 of the Federal Constitutional Court Act. Alternatively, the Constitutional Court should determine that the AfD is excluded from state funding.
Scholz against AfD ban
In the Bundestag motion, MPs accuse the AfD of wanting to abolish the free-democratic basic order and of taking an “actively combative, aggressive stance” towards this basic order. The group motion accuses the AfD of numerous violations of the Basic Law’s guarantee of human dignity. He mentions, for example, the demand for a “million-fold remigration” of migrants. The application also views numerous statements by federal and state leaders of the AfD as violations of the human dignity of migrants, Muslims and sexual minorities.
At the end of May, Chancellor Olaf Scholz made it clear that banning the AfD party was not an issue for him at the moment. Banning a party is “a very difficult thing in a democracy” for which there are very high hurdles. In 2017, the second ban proceedings against the right-wing extremist NPD before the Federal Constitutional Court failed.
At the beginning of the year, Karlsruhe cut off state party funding for the party, which has renamed itself “Die Heimat”. The ruling was based on an amendment to the Basic Law in 2017, according to which state funding can be withdrawn from a party even if it is not banned. However, the prerequisite is that they or their supporters pursue anti-constitutional goals.
