How is banning political parties as they become popular 'protecting democracy'? I don't agree with most of their politics, but am more afraid of draconian control of the political process 'for our own good', than some biased actors who should already be constrained by the rule of law.
There was a panic ~2016 about populist leaders ignoring democratic norms and imposing their own rules in spite of constitutions and other controls. And there had been some limited forays into that - Orban for example.<p>It feels to me now that the retaliation was way worse than the initial concern, ie the populist strongmen largely stayed within norms but we've since had authoritarian pushes from their political opponents, like this one, that are completely undemocratic but "justified" because they belive they're on the side of good. It won't end well.
AfD is garbage, but banning it might be counter-productive.<p>A democracy should have institutions that would ensure it's survival even if the biggest idiots take over - because one day they will.
Sorry, but why would the graph of the voting intention have completely wrong colors for the parties (except CDU)?<p>This was very confusing, as it looked like that AFD (normally blue) has the lowest voting intention meanwhile blue in the graph is "Left" which I think is the party "Die Linke" which is normally red.
We need to ban our political opposition for the sake of democracy<p>This reminds me of Justin Trudeau shutting down the bank account of the Trucker protestors. We need to lock out our opposition from accessing their bank accounts or from being able to pay their cellphone bill because democracy
What a shortsighted, dangerous and all around undemocratic concept. It's scary that Germany of all places would willingly play such a dangerous and disingenuous game.
Seems to me that this article does not actually debate or discuss any points made by this party, the goal is just to describe them as "Hitler-esque" (their words) and paint them as evil. Obviously a lot of people in this party feel a certain way and demonizing them is not going to make them just disappear.
Very democratic to ban political parties as they rise in the polls. You have to ban AfD, because they seem like the types that would try to ban opposition parties; paradox of tolerance and all that.