Dissolving far-right parties, a risky bet?

“Never again”, “Out with the Nazis”, “Racism is not an alternative”: in Germany, demonstrators march against the far right by hundreds of thousands since mid-January.

At the origin of their anger, the recent revelations of the German investigative media Correctiv.

In November 2023, senior officials from theAlternative for Germany (AfD)neo-Nazis and business leaders, met discreetly in a hotel in Potsdam, near Berlin.

Before them, Martin Sellner, a figure of the Austrian far right, presented his “remigration” project foreigners and Germans of foreign origin to North Africa.

This meeting would have been held a few kilometers from the villa of the “Wannsee Conference“, in which the Nazis had planned the “final solution“, the systematic extermination of the Jews, in 1942.

Also, conservative MP Marco Wanderwitz (CDU) wants to convince the Bundestag to launch a AfD dissolution procedure.

The MP must convince 5% of members of the Bundestag for his bill to be examined. It will then have to be approved by a majority in the Bundestag to be adopted. The text then requires a two-thirds majority at constitutional court of Karlsruhe.

A complicated procedure

“The activities of political parties are everywhere guaranteed by the principle of freedom of association. However, it is possible to sanction political parties that do not respect a certain number of rules through restrictions and sanctions,” explains Alberto Alemanno, professor of European law at HEC Paris.

This decision belongs to a “judicial body”, which tends to be “the Constitutional Court”, because “there cannot be a dissolution of a political party without it having first been declared unconstitutional”, details Alberto Alemanno.

European precedents

Precedents exist in Europe.

Conversely, the AfD is gaining ground in Germany.

The party is galloping in particular at the top of voting intentions in the regional elections which will take place in three Länder in eastern Germany (Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony), according to polls.

More recently, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn was described as“criminal organization” by the Athens Criminal Court in 2020.

However, unlike the AfD, Golden Dawn was a “highly centralized” party around a “strong leader”, explains Cas Mudde.

“The AfD, like the country itself, is federal. An individual branch of the party has a lot of autonomy. Some branches of the AfD are much more extremist than others and monitored by intelligence services. But other branches as well as national leaders are not extremists,” considers Cas Mudde, specialist in the extreme right and populism.

A risky bet

Banning far-right parties in the name of the threat they represent to the democratic order would be a risky gamble and even doomed to failure, according to experts.

Furthermore, dissolving the AfD would amount to “treat symptoms rather than seek a cure” to current problems, believes Claire Burchett.

Another risk would be procedure failure. A case dismissed by the court would be de facto interpreted as a legitimization of the party’s ideas by some, she warns.

Proponents might claim “it’s just the political parties trying to block our way, we are not undemocratic”warns Claire Burchett.

For Cas Mudde, banning a party does not allow “to eliminate or weaken support for one’s ideas”.

Alternative sanctions

Julian Hörner, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, believes that individual sanctions against certain key members are simpler than collective measures targeting an entire party.

In Germany, a petition calls for the abrogation of certain fundamental rights of Björn Höcke, co-president of the AfD in the Land of Thuringia.

There “removal of public funding” of a party can also be considered, explains Claire Burchett.

For his part, Cas Mudde sees no in-between: “either the party is unconstitutional and it is banned, or it is not, and you give it all its rights under the Constitution”.

Also, in the Netherlands, in the 80s, “the government was not prepared to ban radical right parties, but it withdrew the right to demonstrate. It was bad”considers Cas Mudde.

No miracle solution

So, rather than seeking to ban far-right parties, politicians should perhaps instead confront them on the political spectrum by responding to voters’ concerns.

“So the solution is not to cut off the head of the snake. We must attack the fertile ground of these parties”warns Cas Mudde.