Let me say this up front: I am no friend of the so-called “Alternative for Germany”, the AfD party. I have demonstrated as much here and elsewhere, more than once. The party is for the most part backward-looking and populist, not really conservative — which is to say that its politics are oriented toward a very simplified version of the past, and that its analysis of problems and its proposed solutions are too simplistic and therefore not workable. Some of its politicians, moreover, are to be located rather at the extremist end of the spectrum, express themselves in ways that call democracy and European integration into question, and are in part too closely aligned with Putin’s Russia.
And yet: the party is not banned. It exists within the German party spectrum. AfD deputies sit in the Bundestag and in 14 of 16 state parliaments. The party holds one Landrat (district administrator) and seven mayoralties (as of August 2026). In the most recent state elections, the AfD reached double-digit results everywhere except Schleswig-Holstein, North Rhine-Westphalia and the Saarland; in the West highest in Rhineland-Palatinate (19.5%), Baden-Württemberg (18.8%) and Hesse (18.4%); in the East Thuringia (32.8%, 2024), Saxony (30.6%, 2024), Brandenburg (29.2%, 2024) and Saxony-Anhalt (20.8%, 2021).
One response to this runs: ban the party, exclude it, build a firewall. At the moment this appears to be the consensus in established politics: one should not work with such a party; ideally, morality should shape politics.
The same should then presumably apply to the repeatedly renamed SED / SED-PDS / PDS / Die Linke. Am I holding a grudge here? Yes. The party of the socialist dictatorship is, in my view, still answerable for the crimes of the GDR, even if that inheritance seems somewhat diluted by all the new members. This firewall held for a very long time as well, but by now it has unfortunately been breached too often. And yet one can see that — and I say this reluctantly — Die Linke does present itself somewhat more pragmatically, and that presence and participation in the democratic system may perhaps be bearing fruit. Perhaps there is hope after all, even for the former SED.
The strangest of the new parties, the BSW, the “Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht,” appears to be in the process of being dismantled by its own founder. And yet with it — despite its Querfront tendencies — coalitions are made, or have been.
A less drastic example: the Greens / Alternative Liste (in West Berlin) — at first the enfant terrible of West German politics — also changed through being drawn into active politics. Having to co-decide, having to find compromises, having to negotiate realities instead of denying them: all of this helps. Pedosexuality is not children’s liberation (yes, that really was debated back then). Dictators sometimes have to be fought rather than met with nothing but pacifist maximalist opposition. Perhaps it also takes a somewhat more democracy-friendly base, such as the Greens had from the very beginning. That was precisely what was missing as a basic consensus in the SED/Die Linke and in the AfD, which is why the Greens are not to be equated with the others.
So is exclusion perhaps the wrong path after all? Integrative confrontation with reality has, so far, disciplined other groups well enough.
Back to the AfD. Given the massive election results, a ban is unfortunately off the table, unless the more extremist wings prevail. But that did not work with the Republikaner, the NPD or the DVU either. Those parties moved themselves into nothingness through consistent incompetence and, in the end, through the alternative — the AfD.
Can the AfD be “domesticated” through cooperation? So far it does not look good. Former chairmen — the original founder Bernd Lucke, and his successors Frauke Petry and Jörg Meuthen — left the party because it had become too far right for them and no moderation was in sight. Alexander Gauland, one of the few former conservatives in the AfD, was shunted onto a siding with an honorary chairmanship. The Höcke wing continues to distinguish itself through extreme speeches.
But we have to ask ourselves the question: why is this party being voted for? Is democracy not what this is about? Must we then not also listen? We cannot destroy democracy in order to protect it. The AfD exists, it is not banned, and it is being voted for. That is simply how it is, unfortunately.
But why?
To answer that question, one has to ask AfD voters — seriously, and without demonizing them. Since I am not an AfD voter myself, I can only speculate.
First of all: many voters do not simply vote for a party for its own sake. I myself have put my cross next to the CDU, the SPD, the FDP, the Greens and independent local politicians in Germany. In the United States, where my life is currently centered, I have registered as an Independent.
Every election is a choice. If you now feel in Germany that every one of the existing parties has disappointed you politically, and perhaps personally as well, what are you supposed to vote for? Micro-parties with no chance of shaping anything? Can you make the compromise of voting for what is, for you, the lesser evil? Or do you want, for once, to really let the so-called “establishment” have it? And what is it you want to show them? Dissatisfaction with the state of things.
Now one could say that this alone is hardly enough to vote for a party that has no functioning answers either and merely wallows in an understandable but nonetheless impractical nostalgia. Yes, of course, much was different before, and much was better, too. But change is the state of the world, and there is no simply going back. And yet: how are you supposed to show “those up there,” as the unlovely phrase has it, that you do not agree with the politics on offer?
The best option would be: do it yourself. Go into politics. Act instead of complain. That is not easy, and it can cost you your sanity, especially in local politics. I tried it myself, three years in the CDU, then I had had enough and concentrated on my studies. I am either in or out, and party loyalty is not for me. My work for democracy lies elsewhere: in teaching, in writing, in finding dialogue.
Today everything is harder still. So-called “social media” unfortunately lead to dumbing down, to the formation of filter bubbles, to the narrowing of perspectives, and to more violence. The attacks on local politicians — verbal and physical — do not help either. Many of those attacks, incidentally, are directed at the AfD as well.
It must be possible to talk about everything. In local politics there is no way around engaging with your neighbors and fellow citizens. There you have to accept other opinions and cooperate anyway, in order to be able to solve concrete problems. Firewalls do not help there, because in that context they do not exclude parties and ideology, but other people.
I do not have to agree with everything. In a democracy, though, one has to be able to endure other opinions. Those who think differently can certainly be opponents in a political sense, but they should not be seen as personal enemies. Respect in how we deal with one another, even where we differ, is the necessary foundation of any free and democratic order. One can and must be able to say and to think: “I do not agree with your opinion, but I still see you as a human being.” We have to be able to exchange arguments on the merits, without polemics, and to solve problems without ideological blinders.
Everything should be open to discussion, everyone should be listened to, every opinion should be allowed — and then one should still support a politics that is pragmatic as well as humane, and economically and ecologically sound.
Populists and extremists, whatever their origin, cannot simply be defeated by bans or exclusions. Here I have perhaps become too American in my socialization by now: free speech is absolute as far as I am concerned, because only in a genuinely open society can democracy truly be alive. Democracy means that all people have a voice, and that this voice also deserves to be heard. After that, it is a matter of finding majorities. But, to borrow freely from Terence, nothing human should be foreign to democracy. What is repressed always returns. One has to face the arguments and solve the problems. Then there will not be such great demand for pseudo-solutions and for contempt of democracy.
The AfD has no workable solutions. It can, however, do real damage. Why is it so popular in the East? Former inhabitants of the GDR (one cannot speak of citizens under a dictatorship) do have a sense of fairness, and they are highly skeptical of anything that can be read as left-wing extremism. Socialism always leads to dictatorship; history has shown that. Prohibitions on thought and speech trigger defensive reflexes in the East — for good reason, and even when they go in an uncomfortable direction.
The AfD, unfortunately, keeps signaling in the direction of the other German dictatorship. But National Socialism did not work either — on the cruel contrary. The SPD was traditionally weak in the East ever since its destruction by the SED; the Greens are new; the CDU was part of the GDR (as the Ost-CDU and the Bauernpartei), as was the FDP (as the LDPD). There was already an NDPD in the GDR, just as there had been, in the German Reich and with the DNVP in the Weimar Republic, a German-national party alongside the NSDAP. Perhaps this spectrum, once it is no longer represented by the CDU/CSU, simply has to find a place for itself in the German party system, whether one likes it or not.
So what is the conclusion? Bans do not appear to work, exclusion produces defensive reflexes, and the firewall is absurd in local politics. Moderation through integration? I am skeptical of that — but what is the alternative? Presumably nothing remains for us but the well-known insight of Max Weber: “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards, with passion and a sense of proportion at the same time.”
(Translated with Claude A.I. from the original German)
