Germany today offers the world a disturbing spectacle: a state in its death throes which, under the guise of democratic virtue, is sinking into authoritarianism. The erosion of civil liberties is not occurring through a coup d'état, but by the slow accumulation of administrative, legal and police measures that shape the contours of a dictatorship as implacable as it is convinced of its own virtue.
1. The Classification of the AfD by an Administrative Agency
In the spring of 2025, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV, Germany's domestic intelligence service) classified the political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as a "right-wing extremist" organization. This classification granted the authorities the power to place its members and supporters under police surveillance without prior judicial authorization, including measures such as intercepting private communications or the BfV recruiting informants within the party.
This "judgment" was not delivered by an independent court. It was created by an administrative agency directly under the authority of the Interior Minister. The BfV is not even an administrative court; it is a bureaucratic body, issuing reports and recruiting informants without allowing the parties concerned to present their case. When an individual or party is labeled "fascist" and consequently excluded from Germany, is it not desirable that they at least be granted the right to defend themselves? Well, according to German law in 2025, the answer is nein.
Worse still, the file justifying this classification has never been released. There is therefore a complete absence of adversarial proceedings. The AfD was never consulted, and even after the fact, it has no right to know why, on what grounds, on the basis of what evidence and documents, it was excommunicated from the German "democratic" sphere.
The AfD is therefore reduced to appealing to the courts to challenge this label. How can the AfD effectively contest a classification when the documents remain secret so that it cannot even know what it is contesting? How can it challenge the term "far right" when it is not defined anywhere? Since the early Middle Ages, the tradition of the state based on rule of law — Rechtsstaat in German — has required that convictions be based on precise and strictly defined charges. Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege. No crime, no punishment without prior definition. Is the fact that the AfD defends positions more "right-wing" than other parties sufficient to justify a label? Given that the AfD's program is, on several points such as the right to bear arms, more "left-wing" than the U.S. Republican Party, should one conclude that the current U.S. administration is "super-Nazi"?
This is arbitrariness pure and simple. The issue has never been law, but power: the determination of the ruling caste to cling to authority at any cost, even if it means criminalizing a quarter of the German population. Let us not forget: the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) also claimed to be "democratic."
Since May 2025, tens of thousands of activists, local elected officials and ordinary supporters of the AfD, the leading opposition party, have been subjected to police surveillance without a court order.
In today's Germany, the leading opposition party is not treated as a legitimate actor in the democratic process, but, without any due process, as an enemy within.
2. Repression of Free Speech: The Criminalization of Dissent
This repression not only affects AfD leaders, members and activists. It extends to ordinary citizens. Pensioners, shopkeepers and students are now being prosecuted for criticizing government policy on immigration, climate or healthcare. They are treated as criminals, even as terrorists or arsonists, on charges of "inciting hatred."
In April 2025, for instance, a Bavarian court sentenced David Bendels, editor-in-chief of Deutschland-Kurier, to seven months' suspended imprisonment. His "crime"? Publishing a satirical image showing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser holding a placard reading "I hate freedom of opinion." The court convicted him of "abuse, defamation or slander against persons in political life."
In 2024, a 20-year-old woman appeared before a court for insulting a convicted rapist in a private WhatsApp exchange. She received a harsher sentence than the rapist, who was handed only a suspended sentence.
These repressive measures do not target extremists, but ordinary citizens who dare to contest the ideology favored by the party in power. The Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) reinforces this censorship by forcing internet platforms to delete content under penalty of fines, thereby further eroding the freedom of expression "guaranteed" by Article 5 of the German Constitution.
This climate of fear — the dread of a police raid at dawn over a comment on Facebook, a "like," a retweet — is ruthless in its cruelty and devastating in its effects on public opinion. It is turning Germany into a Potemkin democracy, where only the official monologue is tolerated.
3. The Quarantined Area: Institutionalized Directed Democracy
Since 2015, an unwritten but inflexible rule has governed the federal parliament (Bundestag and Bundesrat) and regional parliaments: no coalition may be formed with the AfD, and no AfD vote will ever be recognized as legitimate. This Brandmauer (firewall) to relegate the AfD into a quarantine, has the direct effect of suspending political competition by freezing the political landscape. Henceforth, Germany lives under the illusion of alternation between Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens on one side and the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) on the other, all united in their refusal to open up the democratic game to its actual winner. With 20% of the vote in the last federal election — soon to be 26%, according to polls, and approaching 50% in former East Germany — the AfD is forcing other parties into unnatural coalitions. Merkel's doctrine reigns supreme: better for the "right" to govern with the far left than with the AfD.
Even as the German establishment insists this situation is "normal," even noble, international observers are mercifully beginning to express concern. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance recently declared:
"Europe's renunciation of its fundamental values, which are also those of the United States, is worrying. In a democracy, it is the voice of the people that matters, and there is no place for cordons sanitaires."
The quarantining of the AfD ensures that the left will remain in power indefinitely, regardless of election outcomes. This amounts to rule by a single "party" and a single ideology — that of the ruling caste. Democratic change through the ballot box in Germany is no longer possible.
4. Towards an Outright Ban on the Opposition
As if this were not enough, government circles are now openly considering banning the AfD altogether, under the fake pretext of "protecting the constitution." Annalena Baerbock, former foreign minister from the far-left Greens party, declared in early 2024: "We must not rule out banning the AfD if evidence of extremism continues to mount."
Saskia Esken, co-chair of the SPD, added: "The AfD is no longer a democratic party. It is the duty of our constitutional state to prevent it from acting."
Even the once-conservative CDU has joined the chorus, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz affirming that "all constitutional instruments must be considered" against the AfD."
Criminalizing 25% of the electorate is like placing dynamite beneath a shared house. To condemn a quarter of the German population to democratic death — denying them any access to power while repressing even the polite expression of their opinions on social media — is to invite desperate and violent reactions. These reactions will inevitably be seized upon by the ruling caste to justify an even tighter grip on power.
The Shadow of the Reichstag Fire
One cannot but recall Germany's Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, set by a Dutch communist, which the Nazi Party instantly used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and consolidate its domination of the German state. The very next day, President Paul von Hindenburg, responding to Hitler's urgent request, signed the "Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State," invoking Article 48 of the Weimar Republic's constitution. The decree suspended fundamental civil liberties — freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and association, privacy of correspondence and communications, protection against arbitrary searches and arrests. On this basis, mass arrests of political opponents were immediately launched. The decree marked a decisive step in the Nazi Party's seizure of totalitarian power, paving the way for the elimination of opposition and the establishment of a dictatorship.
Germany today faces a fatal spiral. Either it accepts true pluralism and freedom of expression — without which democracy cannot exist — or it succumbs to the temptation of eliminating dissent by judicial and police means, silencing the only genuine opposition. If that happens, it will not be the AfD that is destroyed, but German democracy itself.
Any democracy that outlaws its opposition to the ruling party ceases to exist.
A new "Decree for the Protection of the People and the State" — banning the AfD — would signal nothing less than the death of German democracy.
Drieu Godefridi is a jurist (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain), philosopher (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain) and PhD in legal theory (Paris IV-Sorbonne). He is an entrepreneur, CEO of a European private education group and director of PAN Medias Group. He is the author of The Green Reich (2020).
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