There are ongoing efforts to ban the party (through constitutional instruments created specifically after 1945 to prevent a second NSDAP or other similar anti-constitutional extremists) and there is an argument to be made that this is strategical assistance for evidence-gathering.
There has been another effort [0] collecting _public_ statements that can be used in a potential future Constitutional Court case. Depending on your stance this leak complements the ban effort or undermines its legitimacy. Note, Germany has no fruit-of-the-poison-tree evidence provisions!
All the state bodies authorized to file such a request – the Bundestag, the Bundesrat, and the Federal Government – each require a simple majority to initiate the proceedings and thus rely on the votes of the CDU.
It is also important to note that this is merely a request for an examination; the final decision rests with the Federal Constitutional Court.
There is a recent comment from a very respected lawyer about the situation, citing Göbbels: https://youtu.be/I87E0cV367I?t=11614 (use the auto-translated subtitles)
The full quote translates to something like:
"It will always remain one of the greatest ironies of democracy that it provided its own mortal enemies with the very means by which it was destroyed. As elected representatives, the persecuted leaders of the NSDAP enjoyed parliamentary immunity, a salary, and free travel passes. This shielded them from police intervention, allowed them greater latitude in what they could say compared to ordinary citizens, and—to top it all off—ensured that their activities were financed by their very enemies. This democratic stupidity could be exploited to great advantage."
Make it illegal to hold and express the view that people should not be allowed to wearing the burqa. If someone is express that they are against same-sex marriage or against circumcision for non-medical reasons, let them sit in jail for a few years. Why allow people to legally hold those view and express them but then forbid them from being political about it?
If the AfD were really as bad as people here pretend they are then they won’t get elected.
Personally, I suspect a lot of the hatred towards AfD is just normal political mudslinging rather than genuine reason for concern.
Using this logic, please explain MAGA in the US. Arguably worse than AfD and currently holding power in all 3 branches of government.
The NSDAP was properly elected.
Looking at historical precedents that tried to undermine this kind of democratic political system (e.g. PIS in Poland, NSDAP in Germany), the political systems were damaged (and are still not repaired) or outright hollowed out.
I think it is important that a dialogue exists in society, Even the radical parties have a chance to exist and represent the political opinion and direction of their voters. However, I think it is even more important than these parties stick to maintaining the very political system that they allows them to exist.
The AFD might not be such a party. In time, democratic state organs might be hollowed out, and an apartheid system might be installed in Germany.
It is worth fighting to maintain a suboptimal free political system than to succumb to madness. At least - in part - we can keep the idiots in check.
If it progresses like it ALWAYS does (EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.), the center-right party copies the far-right messages in hopes of gaining the votes of the far-right voters, then enters a coalition with them as the "voice of reason to reign them in", to ultimately just achieve normalization of those narratives, a hollowed-out democracy, destroyed political discourse and an empowered far-right party.
But one can hope, that THIS time it will be different...
Now imagine you had only a center-right and a far-right party, and you have the U.S. :/
The mainstream left in the USA used to be comparable to the centre-right in most western-European countries but this is no longer the case.
There are no bread lines like the ones created by Socialist policies. America is the land of plenty, the land where the 'poor' are overweight due to the abundance of cheap and rather unhealthy foods. Ask an eastern European with more than a few decades on his name what bread lines look like, or a Cuban, a Venezuelan, a Cambodian, anyone who lived under the end game of the policies professed by the DSA.
Remember, you're here to discuss, not to profess fealty to the movement.
Ultimately, you can’t ban ideas in a democracy, unfortunately even the idea to abolish it. What you can do it make that process harder and slower, so your opponents lose power before they succeed. Or, you know, convince people to drop the idea altogether.
What you can do though, is destroy the foundation of democracy by being tolerant towards discrimination, for the sake of not "banning ideas"
--> "Why not turn people who are not able to work anymore into a nutricious paste for others? It was just a question! You can't silence me, this is a democracy!!"
https://demography-dashboard.eu/en/countries/germany?year=20...
Being opposed to ethnic erasure is quite reasonable for any group of people.
Even just stopping the flow of refugees (who often vacation in the countries they “escaped” from) is somehow considered extreme.
You aren't fooling anyone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_t...
There’s nothing “supremacist” about not wanting to become a minority in your own country. It’s not hateful, it’s a very human desire that every nation shares, including China, Japan, Korea etc.
Is Japan “white supremacist” for implementing an immigration policy that keeps their society homogeneous? No.
Your whataboutisms are weak. Other dominant ethnic groups can be supremacist. Backwards logic is not limited to white peoples.
That's a comparison that could only be made by a right wing shill trying to use an actual tragedy to push an inane talking point.
I'm sure it'll work next time though /s
Ethnic erasure is a crazy concept, we are mixing ethnically for centuries and who cares about color of eye or skin anyway? What we need is cultural preservation and coherence to some degree. So we should improve on refugee laws - which btw the green party had started before they were bullied out of government by the elites.
Valuing a nations culture, values in society, borders, and maintain coherence within society are not far right idea. All political platforms strive more or less for those things, through they do differ on what values they want to focus on and deploy different strategies.
The united states for example, current situation acknowledged, saw a meteoric rise even with, perhaps even because of a rich cultural tapestry that could be in no way described as coherent. Sure there are large blocs of cultural identity across multiple regions, but that's about it, and even then that's been on the decline for some time.
Germans are people having a German passport. They will not be a minority. There is already no single German ethnicity as the history and culture has been diverse regionally.
Stopping legitimate refugees is extreme in my view (against human rights). What you are doing is classic right wing rhetoric mixing legitimate refugees and illegitimate into one pool.
This is exactly the problem, this is genocidal language. To deny the existence of an ethnic group and culture which has existed for thousands of years.
This is a key component in ethnocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocide
There’s nothing hateful about noticing the data showing that Europeans are being ethnically replaced in all of their homeland countries. Also, there are many ways to oppose it peacefully and morally.
Noone is denying the existence of Germans in Germany. Germans are a product of their current culture.
Ethnocide is describing the erasure of culture, not the organic evolution of it.
I don't wear the same clothes as my grandparents did, I don't eat the same food, don't do the same work, don't have the same social life.
This is my culture, I am a product of it, my grandchildren will have a different culture. It is arrogant to assume my culture is the "peak" of my countries' culture (or "ethnicity"), just as it is not the place of my parents or grandparents to claim as such.
What is propagated here is that Germany (or whatever nation) needs to proactively reject the coexistence of other cultures within its borders for the fear of any kind of impact on itself in the future, taking effort to (depending on the age of who you ask) preserve or reverse its current state. THIS is genocidal language.
I don't care at all about ethnicity, but that sentence is part of the problem. Lawfully spoken it's a tautology, but that's not the concern people have. They are concerned that the German culture get erased within a few generations, because to many people with a too different cultural background enter the society. That's a legitimate concern nobody really wants to address.
> concerned that the German culture get erased within a few generations
It seems to me that you do not know what ethnicity means.
> They are concerned that the German culture get erased within a few generations, because to many people with a too different cultural background enter the society
I addressed that by saying there has never been a coherent German culture
Do you think that's true for German in particular or generally for countries? Like, do you think there isn't something like French or Italian culture? I always found it very weird how people think that Germany is somewhat special in that regard that we somehow ended up without having a coherent culture.
This a US centric platform here and so many words in the US come from Germany. I just learned that "Rucksack" (for large hiking backpacks) has become part of the English language in some regions. We totally need to introduce "Döner" as well. It's not random words that join other languages.
By that same logic there has never been “a coherent Chinese culture”, therefore Chinese people do not exist or deserve to have their own country.
What are your requirements for a “coherent culture”? Every country in the entire world has some variability within its culture depending on region.
Whatever your criteria are for a coherent culture, I’m sure China or India would surely fail them. Yet to deny the existence of Chinese culture or Chinese people would not only be extremely offensive, it would be genocidal language.
Denying the existence of cultures and ethnicities is a hallmark of genocide in fact.
>The United Nations and atrocity-prevention frameworks identify the denial of the existence of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as a core risk factor or precursor to mass violence and identity-based conflict.
https://africarenewal.un.org/en/magazine/reject-genocide-den...
The changes are a constant everywhere. Using that as an excuse to hate is political manipulation.
Think about it: 20 years ago you weren't a hateful person, that also changed. Why not get back to an older version of yourself? I'm sure at the time you thought things were amazing, there was already a bunch of frustrated middle aged men hating what you now love and miss.
That's how German culture as it is was created in the first place. And that's how the future German culture will be created, ad infinitum.
The trouble with getting all this is terrible with normal law enforcement is the voters then elect Trumps because they are fed up with it.
People putting those parties into the same category is a significant part of the problem.
CDU/CSU will try to take the same topics the AfD used to enrage its voter-base and will present itself as the "rational, conservative and experienced" alternative to the "concerns of the voter".
This is the process which will cause CDU/CSU to not publicly condemn the AfD and its narratives, will make the CDU/CSU to "sacrifice" themselves as the coalition partner who will "control" the AfD, secretly hoping to convert their voters into CDU/CSU voters while AfD destroys itself due to its lack of skills to actually deliver in government.
In the end the AfD MAY or MAY NOT actually collapse if they are forced to deliver on their unrealistic promises. But it won't matter, because #1 the party will not die because it will present itself as the victim, and #2 the whole exercise will do such a substantial damage to political discourse and democracy that it will take decades to recover from it.
Again, one can hope that THIS TIME it will be different...
For example, they will promise you to kick one billion immigrants, and then when in power they will say that they actually can't do that because of law or economic concerns… and then they will increase the rate of immigration.
That's a fascinating perspective. Do you think they "do whatever the left-wing party does" because
1. they are secretly not right-wing?
2. they rallied on matters which were anyway already worked on by the existing government, and reality is not as simple as they claim it is?
3. they had no clue how to actually achieve anything they promised on the required scale, just said anything to enrage people and get their vote and now have to work in the same system as everyone else?
In any case, the average plain, poor person of the country gets screwed.
A bunch of AfD members self-reported their anti-constitutional statements to Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, an organization that again and again hilariously exposes AfD and their technological (and not only) illiteracy.
Would it be a good thing or bad thing if this was scaled up so email servers and instance messages services was all public if the message involved a member of a political party, without allowing any back channel or ways to avoid the public record?
The reality is that backchannels have always existed. People used to meet discreetly or through emissaries; or had phone calls from secure lines; etc. There is so much that we will never know, even about times that are well-documented.
To be honest, I am not a big fan of "thoughtcrime" being pursued. Let them be racist if they want to; we should make sure the population is smart enough to reject racism on its own. Maintaining a working democracy requires some violence, sure, but if we over-use it it will stop being a democracy.
These types of shenanigans were even named after him, “Rutte doctrine”.
It is definitely an interesting discussion to have in where the lines should be drawn in transparency and public insight into political landscape and behavior inside it. In Sweden, every person, regardless of position, has their income as public information. How much a person pay it taxes is also public information, so in some sense you can guess how much assets a person own and how much they have in the bank based on what they declared.
This would make surveillance laws socially much more acceptable. The politicians will claim:
- "We are surveilled anyway, so we can pass surveillance laws against citizens, too.", or
- "The citizens really ask for surveillance laws against specific groups (in this case: politicians). So, we will, of course, give the citizens what they want and pass surveillance laws against potential terrorists/child abusers/[whatever is currently fashionable]".
If you consider privacy or the right not to be surveilled to be important, this better should hold for the enemy (politicians).
?? The root of the idea is not bi-directional. Politicians have a particular type of job: public service. It’s this “job” that requires the transparency.
And not transparency into their public life. Though, as a public figure if your private life becomes embarrassing, or salacious you’re guaranteed to have news hounds on your trail. Not least because your public service rivals will use whatever they can to discredit you in the court of public opinion.
It’s the same for the work product. All of the material of governance should be the “property” of the people governed.
Can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
This is like: if you engage in anti-social behaviour or plan some crime, you deserve to have hounds (law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies) on your trail because of surveillance data that was gathered about you.
> Can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
This is like the political argument: "If you have nothing to hide, why are you opposed to the new surveillance law?"
Conservatives are vibe haters. They feel something is wrong and will figure out how to justify their feelings. The email server was just one of many excuses to dislike Hillary. But it was never the "main" one. It was just one that gained a lil traction.
Hillary also caught crap for Benghazi, her husband, her aides, her outfits, etc. It never ends with conservatives because how they feel is as important as reality. They'll find anything to justify their vibes.
They did this in the Netherlands and the result is that politicians started sending voice notes...
You also sometimes need to be able to just discuss stuff, privately. Not all phrases uttered in the context of government do well when interpreted by the general public.
Sure, you can make it the law, but technically there are infinite ways to get around it, including ones that are impossible to get rid off, like using the shared folders on systems that are non-publik for safety reasons.
Popularity isn't a limit here, at least not in this direction. If the party were irrelevant, it would prevent the ban since the party would not be able to achieve those anti-constitutional goals anyway.
Does AfD actually do that, though?
>A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic.
Then it was
>fearmongering, calling the current government a "cartel",
And now you're saying
>abolish core concepts of the democracy or constitutionally guaranteed rights
In other words, it went from "afd wants to get rid of democracy" to "afd's policies breaks the constitution". Of course you guys are different people and are entitled to your own opinions, but it's tiring arguing on a slippery topic that keeps on getting redefined.
If you wish to quote me, then do it accordingly: the AfD is blaming the established democratic processes for the current "cartel" situation. As if that's the only thing to blame, and not that the AfD is not willing to collaborate with other democratic parties or even respect the democratic process.
The other option has been tried 100 years ago and didn't go so well.
> If you want people to vote for other parties then those parties should chagne to serve the people again instead of trying to make the people serve them.
This doesn't work when the party doesn't serve the people in the first place.
It doesnt even help most of their voters.
You declared it, so it must be true.
Debatable. One of the core ideas of democracy is to protect minorities. Democracy has been built around the concept that a majority cannot restrict basic rights of minorities. Arguably no one should be allowed to create a system which allows the violation of basic human rights of minorities.
Is that still a minority? I invite you to introspect more. It's not complicated either.
The idea that democracy is synonymous with the current neoliberal order is nonsense.
It's actually quite the opposite, they are running on things like a direct democracy[0], with phrases such as "Wir sind überzeugte Demokraten"[1] (eng: We are confident democrats). And they do that for good reason, as running a party that openly wants to abandon the democratic process would be against the constitution.
[0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_f%C3%BCr_Deutschla...
[1]: https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Programm_AfD_D...
However, it is in our democratic right to fight parties that are anti constitutional. It's in the constitution.
Edit: There is a loophole, though. Article 146 allows the German people to replace the constitution in its entirety.
This was satire, right? Not like, an honest belief that people can't name their organization whatever they want and that there is some universal law that requires that name be descriptive of literally anything?
"I wanted to be the destroyer of Marxism."
- Hitler's closing argument while on trial in 1924 for the Beer Hall Putsch https://famous-trials.com/hitler/2524-the-hitler-beer-hall-p...
Tik, right?
In left socialism / communism, equality among all (often extending to internationalism) and a disfavoring of historic capital / hierarchy are core tenants.
In right socialism / nationalism, specific in-groups are privileged (sometimes a national identity, often even more ethnically-specific) and favoring of (certain, usually sympathetic) historic capital / hierarchy are core tenants.
Granted, realpolitik can muddle these over time. To wit, communist bureaucracy inevitably becoming its own de facto privileged class and national socialism destroying specific capital / hierarchy that opposes it.
And that AfD is against the best interest of the people, i guess, you can not be serious. It is a populist party that picks up all the things that people are not happy about and are popular, but ignored. It is actually in the very interest of the people who vote for them. But of course scary for the people, who get voted out. Majority wins.
The laws don't work like that, otherwise we arguably would not have any parties left.
he posted & advertised heavily nationalistic videos on tiktok and gained huge following.
court said the election had been affected by irregularities, alleged foreign interference, and problems with campaign financing and online campaigning.
I.e. people asking at the polling places who was going to pay them the money they'd been promised
[Edit: nope, that was neighboring Moldova in 2024]
It does beg a question of how to run an election as a smaller state when faced with overwhelming propaganda from a much larger one (the US or Russia).
That's never not been true, I suppose, but with large unregulated, privately-controlled social media platforms it feels more pressing.
How does one run a "fair" election if the voters are being irradiated with one-sided messaging sufficient to turn an election? Is the result really the will of the people? And yet, what's the alternative?
Just ask yourself if you would be ok with the majority of the population voting to abolish private property. Or Islamists voting to end votes. Or men voting to remove the voting rights of women.
Why not?
Damn right it isn't, because for most of them it is against their own interests. They vote out of emotion.
In other parts of this thread we have people saying that the AfD must be banned because they are a threat to democracy and that the German constitution has provisions which prevent amending it to weaken the guarantee of democracy...
But how do you then reconcile the idea that people must be prevented from voting for the party they wish? Is that not undermining democracy when you only let them vote when they vote "correctly"?
In Germany we have laws to ban parties that work against our constitution, exactly because of what happened in Weimar. The AfD is classified as confirmed right-wing extremist in five states. Starting a ban process is more than justified. The process is not arbitrary. Only the Bundestag, Bundesrat or government can apply, and the Constitutional Court decides after checking if the conditions are met. Also, just because a majority votes for something doesn’t make it right.
Two important facts:
> Under Article 21, Paragraph 2 of Germany’s Basic Law (Constitution), a party can only be banned if it actively seeks to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or threaten the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany.
> Proving the Whole Party is Extremist: Courts require proof that the entire party—not just individual members or radical factions—is systematically anti-constitutional.
> In the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court has banned only two political parties:
> Socialist Reich Party (SRP) (Sozialistische Reichspartei): A neo-Nazi and far-right party considered a successor to the Nazi Party, banned in 1952.
> Communist Party of Germany (KPD) (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands): A Stalinist party, banned in 1956.
The world is angry, we live in the age of the predators. European youth are also disappointed, just as in north America, that higer education is no longer a highway to a better life than our parents. But ruined? No.
I think journalists have to realize that crying wolf always stops working when you need it the most.
It's funny how people avoid this term. The far left party in the German parliament ("Die Linke") would never deny they're far left. (Their name literally translates to "The Left".)
My comment was more about how the US media/english-speaking media describes non-left parties. All the populists on the left side of the spectrum are “left wing”, but their political counterparts are always “far” right.
The constitution protects people from voting their rights away forever just because they look for a quick solution. This has happened in the past, and to prevent it from happening again, the constitution has been strengthened to the point of banning anticonstitutional parties.
What the AfD struggles with is that the constitution enforces democracy. And while this is obviously an instance of the tolerance paradox, prohibiting people from removing democracy is the only way to ensure their rights and freedoms, and most importantly their power to control the government (by voting).
Oh dear.
Whatever happend to Voltares "I disprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it"?
EDIT: The irony of this post being downvoted in an attempt to hide it, rather than discuss an opinion you disagree with!
EDIT2: Please understand I have no love for AfD, rather a love of open politics (let everybody hear how crazy they are!).
O tempora, o mores. Back in Voltaire's (sic) days, this would have been an issue between debating gentlemen, not one of massive spreading of hate. It's the fault of media and internet, I know, but that's not so easy to stop.
Anything but address the actual issues that helped catapult them to the top.
And regardless, banning a political party (the process for which is set in Germany's constitution) is not the same as banning its former members from speaking.
Even if the quote was correct, it is about free speech. Being elected and holding political office is beyond that.
Never let your far-right parties grow. It should be banned, it should have been banned years ago.
By the way, defund billionaires. The Epstein class is behind the funding of these extremist dangerous parties.
Whether it's Australia : Pauline Hanson, an anti-immigration nationalist widely lampooned as a walking faux-pas for the past two decades, now virtually leads the polls with her One Nation party, which has gone from about 5% support (when the current center-left government was elected mid-2025) to over 25%! today. In the space of 17 months.
New Zealand : From the globally-lauded center-left Jacinda Ardern, at home she was soon all-but-bullied out of politics by a significant and very vocal portion of NZ males angry at her shortcomings - she lives in Australia now - and NZ has since been led by a coalition of three increasingly-right-wing businessmen doing their best to "crack down" on the poorer classes to "balance the books".
Brazil : The big swing from Bolsonaro on the right to Lula on the left.
Japan : Increasingly fragmented, moving rightward and nationalist, centrist rule threatened for the first time since 1955.
Argentina : The populist president Milei, whose strategy-of-least-thought - rip off the whole bandage, right now - proudly sacrifices the hopes of a generation-or-three to gain a form of Economic Satisfaction post-haste.
I am increasingly aligned to the position that every billionaire is a policy failure.
Wealth inequality of the degree we have today is not sustainable.
EU and Germany's woes won't go away with banning a party. You can't have a single currency without a joint fiscal policy (aka federal state).
Letting bigots and racists continue to express these views is extremely problematic.
And it also, kind of worked, from then on Hitler preferred the legal way instead of doing it like Mussolini (i.e. a putsch). It's one part taking the fall for the Ludendorff, one part Bavaria already being sympathetic to him.
Hypothetically, should a party running on a platform of ending democracy be allowed to participate in democracy? Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
Other parties are so indoctrinated and zealous in their beliefs that they fail to see this simple truth and would rather resort to some authoritarian actions than think of changing their ways and try to win the electorate back.
https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilung...
There are several ex high ranking afd official who left the party because of nepotism, internal authoritarianism, etc.
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/afd-niedersachs...
https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/inside-afd-...
You're leaving this out?
On 26 February 2026, the Administrative Court of Cologne (Verwaltungsgericht Köln) ordered Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), in interim proceedings, to refrain from classifying and treating the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation” pending the conclusion of the main proceedings at first instance.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/afd-einstufung...
I think any party not encouraging others to commit violence should be allowed to run, if majority of all voters don't want democracy, it should be their right to vote for such party, which wants to end democracy. Democracy is here for the people/voters, not vice versa, it should have no self-preservation mechanisms, if it has it's not really an democracy anymore, if opinion of majority of the people is not respected to preserve it.
> Should they be allowed to end it for all future and current citizens?
Well, look at the Brexit referendum, it's kinda same thing.
AfD leaders want to bring back the German nationalism of the 30s/40s, fullstop.
Can we please stop pretending this isn't the case? It's so tiring.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/23/afd-na...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/11/afd-mps-scruti...
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.thetime...
And about a million others if you search them up. They are the neo-Nazi party. The leaked emails this article is about speak volumes.
> The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945),[1] where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance. Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.
There is nothing wrong with being intolerant to something. But claiming you are still tolerant is wrong.
There is nothing intrinsic to democracy that means you need to have a constitution. This should be obvious since many democratic states and organizations have no constitution! The UK has no formal constitution, neither does Israel. Canada also has no single constitution document. There are probably lots of non-democracies out there that have constitutions. It's completely orthogonal to whether or not a place is a democracy.
But Germany has a constitution and it allows to ban parties, that act against it. Would you say, that makes Germany not democratic?
HN doesn't like political discussion that doesn't align with what they would like to see become the prevailing ideology.
What is considered political and what isn't is a political decision in itself.
Judging by your profile, you’re an overtly politics-focused person that’s been reading HN for 7 months.
I wouldn’t ascribe broad political opinions to HN, other than the general cultural dislike of political discussion, in the most broad sense.
Crypto is a political project to weaken the state in favor of markets.
AI is a political project to replace labor with pure capital - with the two major geopolitical players doing it for different reasons.
Freedom of expression and its limits is political.
Regulation and its pros and cons is political.
Markets and their consequences and implications are political.
Technology and its interplay with society is political.
Everything HN talks about is politics, just often with a lack of self-reflection required to recognize so.
What you consider non-political is just a reflection of your own personal politics.
The insistence people stop talking about politics is functionally equivalent to censorship of specific types of politics while leaving others unexamined.
Weird, if the original messages have been published, why do both OP and the EuroNews article linked by the GP say that "Hackers have published 281 GB of AfD emails as AI summaries" and "A website published what it said were summaries of some of the emails but not the original messages"?
The irony. All those parties really have no beliefs or principles, they only desire power and to use it for themselves. One may wonder what got so many people to decide those entities would deserve their vote more than the other establishment.
The AFD is not extreme right. Not even right wing. The party program itself doesn't even have a single real action plan. They didn't plan to do anything because they know they can just say $whatever and never actually need to deliver on anything because of the stupidity of the established parties.
Consequently, every issue we've had to date can be utilized to prove that they're the only party trying to help the population and only get sabotaged by the establishment that doesn't try to address any of the real issues that people both see and feel in their daily life.
The only thing this stupid dump will tell prospective voters is that there are actual Nazis in the AFD, which doesn't make them unique at all. There are some on CDU and SPD too. However, most of those message which the AFD will now use themselves over the next weeks is to show how there were taken out of context, and surely bad taste but just sarcasm/humor that was phrased for internal communication.
I feel like I'm explaining the basics of the basics here, do you unironically think this is going to be a hit for the AFDs popularity?
If so I can only tell you that you're so politically captured to have left your common sense behind. Precisely the issue the green/linke also have.
I say this but have voted for Piraten in 2013 Greens 2017 and 2021.
I just couldn't keep voting for them because just how inept they've proven themselves.
Now I'm literally angry, because who can I even vote for at this point? People that have proven themselves both incapable of their jobs and unironically put the CumEx specialist in the highest position in the government? The FDP which is so inept they don't even realize they're sabotaging themselves with their betrayal of the coalition? CDU, the most corrupt party that has ever existed? Seriously, nobody's is left. And again they don't even comprehend that their Brandmauer is literally an advertisment for AFD. Im just completely estranged.
There is little competition for taboo topics in politics, so those who lean into them become a kind of a monopoly for these issues. They don't need to play nice to compete, because they are the sole provider.
In Germany, immigration is the most popular issue and also a taboo. AfD has a complete monopoly on it. They get away with the baggage because for a large share of voters, the alternative just does not exist.
So they frame the anti-immigrant debate as if they are fighting to kick out the Syrian asylum seeker who hasn't worked a day since he arrived in 2015. But in truth, they are basically saying, "we don't want too many foreigners, especially ones that don't look German". This applies to pretty much all the legal immigrants in Germany.
Why not publish the actual emails? Why do they need to be summarised, perhaps incorrectly?
Propaganda works like this; they know most people won't dig any further than the headline and summaries.
The LLM-generated summaries seem a bit overly dramatic at times, making it hard to judge how serious some of the content actually is. Looking forward for a website with the original emails.
[0] https://www.hexane.cc/detail/?uid=9DF63C5C-F244-4763-BF2A-90...
the summary is: "AfD member Matthias Funk writes and forwards racist dehumanizing incitement: Neger, Muselmanen, Hinterwäldler, dreckige Monster Merkel, Pest, calls patriots to rise against Verbrecher."
I'm not sure about the actual email, but am certain that there are a lot of "left coded" agents that would find any discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants "dehumanizing". Also considering the WWE style of modern politics calling one of the leaders of your opposition "dreckige Monster Merkel" is not something strange.
You think the term "muselmanen" could reasonably be used in a civilized "discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants"? You do know "muselmanen" has a very specific link to WWII concentration camps, right?
So, er, I think your argument comes down to "sure, they're bigots, but most of the people I know are bigots too so stop complaining". I don't find this a very convincing argument.
(And "the filthy foreigners are coming for our women" is, like, the oldest accusation in the book. Don't forget to add that they also kill children to use their blood in their blasphemous religious rituals.)
But I think this kind of moral approach is precisely why right wing parties have been winning globally, in the US and elsewhere. For many voters, the overwhelmingly important thing is individual economic security and personal/familial safety. Full stop.
And so if you force them to choose between a morally off putting party that at least claims to care about their problems, and one that is ostensibly morally less bankrupt, but hand waves away those problems – they’re going to hold their nose and vote for the former. Shame and outrage doesn’t work in a society that is uncertain and scared about its future.
It seems like a handful of candidates are beginning to understand this, in the US at least, but for some reason this level of realpolitik is just beyond many center and center-left parties.
Harris lost to Trump in 2024 for what I see as exactly the same reasons.
"Careless People" talks about it and how it was the inception of Meta's powerplay into politics by becoming indispensable for politicians to use their platforms to reach voters. The only thing they cared about is engagement and avoiding regulations, both are easily achievable if polarisation becomes the norm, the obliteration of proper political discourse into the form it exists now is a consequence of that.
I don't believe those far-right parties would have this much support if public discourse wasn't mostly focused on online platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, etc., they wouldn't have the reach nor the tools for creating information bubbles as existing right now. Those platforms allow for the formation of entire separate realities that are self-reinforcing.
Hence why I started with "fanning the flames". It means the issues are there, they need to be worked on but with social media we are stuck, solving complex issues require compromises, long-term thinking and planning, nothing that is enabled by social media's knee-jerk reactions, ephemeral messaging, etc.
Sadly, some of the parties that are involved (tech bros, Russia, etc.) are not going to do any good when it comes to these issues. They'll only make the housing issues worse (by accumulating even more wealth and invading your country, respectively). But blaming everything on immigrants and elites has always worked extremely well, in-group vs. out-group is something that our brain needed for survival in the past, so it is very easy to trigger.
The saddest part is that those that push the anti-elite narrative (Trump, Musk, etc.) are often the elites themselves.
That doesn’t imply that the candidate must have morally dubious character, just that morally dubious characters are taking advantage of it.
and then proceeds with extreme opinions on that parties.
Far-right parties have increased their presence thanks to inequality created by conservative parties and well funded campaigns by billionaries.
Let's not pretend that this is the will of the people when so much money is put into moving the blame of the current state of the economy from billionaires and monopolies towards working class people of foreign origin. (Like if it was working class people the ones hoarding money and power)
A lot of 'extreme views' being bandied around are not really any different to what was spoken about in the 90s, tbh. Even Tony Blair was making comments on topics like immigration which would make today's audience blush.
We've had decades of centrist governments all throughout Europe. Do they not shoulder any blame for the rise of the far-right? Or is it only the "billionaires" who have agency?
I agree somewhat. However, the fault of mainstream politics is one of failure. The fault of extraterritorial actors is one of action.
I think that mainstream governments in the rounds haven't done enough for hoi polloi in the past few decades, but also that perceptions of what they could have fine may often be unrealistic. There are many prophets - some shallow thinkers might say "just read [ Das Kapital | Friedman ] and do that", but i don't agree that ideology delivers the benefits it promises.
It was a tall order to expect the past few decades of governing parties to satisfy the people enough that they don't turn to AfD shit.
Mainstream politicians' capital comes from votes, an expensive and limited resource. Extraterritorial actors do not have this constraint.
Where i end up is: yes, we should blame tired neoliberal parties for failing the people and driving then to charlatans. But that blame should be tempered by an understanding that government is a game that never leaves everybody satisfied. But extraterritorial actors? They are somewhere between philosophically vacant and hostile, and they are fucking with us just because they can. The blame is categorically greater.
> 1. a political philosophy or movement that represents or is claimed to represent the interests of ordinary people especially against the Establishment
> 2. general concern for ordinary people
In US politics, both Bernie Sanders and Trump were put in the same bucket and derided as populists by the media, even though their policies could not be more different.
One thing I would add is that we have the most concentrated control of media/influence since pre-Gutenberg times. This is a huge issue, as a very small number of people have control of our politics and emotions, and use that to further their own increasingly weirdo interests.
Fast one - the one that used journalism (so called 4th branch of government) that enjoyed public trust and more or less was factual which in turn kept public opinion more or less in one shared and factual reality. This in turn put pressure on actual government in between elections.
And there is second one - slower - public could change government in elections based on the lived experience of last N years.
The monopolies broke 1st loop completely. And the 2nd was hindered. Now ppl cannot choose directionally in slow loop (elections) what is good for their self interest bcs they do not have factual picture of reality. So they can choose based on vibes which in turn is as good as "random move away form current status quo".
IMHO still way better then autocracy.
Case in point - ppl voted for Trump among other things bcs of gasoline prices. How it turned out...
And why right wing - bcs said monopolies put thumb on the scale - as their are capital after all. And they do have more self awareness what is best for their interest. If democracy survives next will move will be ditching current right wing for whatever else and then even monopolies thumb on scale probably will not help current regimes.
This argument has been repeated for decades, but I just don't see it.
It explicitly cares about people who identify as traditional Germans, who in their own eyes are "the normal people".
On the economic side, Gemini tells me that they favour deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy for small and medium-sized enterprises (Mittelstand). They also want to increase family support payments to incentivise having children. These are all economic policies that make sense to conservative-minded "normal people".
They're fiscally conservative values, as you likely already know. Social and fiscal conservatism are correlated, as you likely also already know.
In order for you to make this statement, you had to take a word ("conservative") that can be interpreted in one of two well-known ways ("social conservative", "fiscal conservative"), and pretend that when I used that word, I must have meant the way that doesn't make sense, instead of the way that obviously does.
Correct, everyone is paying more except the top 1% under Trump.
Apparently, everyone forgot already.
No, right wing parties have been winning globally because they are vastly more resourced both financially and media-space-ly than the opposition. If you can constantly flood the zone with bullshit, it becomes impossible for the opposition to correct the disinformation before the next flood arrives.
Their views, are the views of 1/5 people you'll meet in Germany, on average. If we mirrored this logic, the SPD should be "far-left", Grüne should be "far-left pro" and Links should be "ultra far-left pro max".
This use of language waters out the meaning. Just like calling everyone commies and nazis... also I think it'll have the opposite effect you hope.
A popularity in election results doesn't define a parties position on the political spectrum. A lot of people are voting for change to occur, but that doesn't mean that that change already happened just by counting the votes.
no thanks
They're right-wing extremists. We know that for a fact and have known that without commiting cybercrimes. So what is there to learn?
Maybe embezzlement or similar, but.
We have to keep in mind that they have in fact become the victim of a crime, which they (best case) will spin to their advantage.
Worst case they will use it as a justification to commit such and other crimes themselves.
Just claim that the anonymous entity wasn't anonymous. Claim it was your enemy. "Look, the Antifa hacked us. We need to ban them just like the US did"
Or blow it up bigger. "Look, the system itself is corrupt and 'the left/the altparteien/whoever' stopped using democratic measures to compete against us. That is because they cannot win on their own merit. Meaning that the system and its safeguards are meaningless."
Something like that. Given more time, one could flesh out this back-of-the-napkin thing into a likely working strategy.
___
Fascism fundamentally isn't data-driven but narrative-driven. So data alone is not going to work against it (though it is a valuable pillar).
If you look at the numbers of votes they're getting, you see a group of people that is so large, it will be self-sustaining, instead of fizzling out. Or so is my prediction.
Idk. I just don't see this ending up in the way we want things to end up. It's not going to affect me personally all that much, because I can be "passing" so to speak, but that's not exactly what one should strive for tbh. Keeping your head down and not caring as long as you're fine, I mean.
And I agree, now that we've waited so long (gee, I wonder if the far-right Verfassungsschutz leader had anything to do with that?), banning them will be ugly and lead to civil unrest. I think realistically, we will need some major state repression of these Neonazis and good luck with that given the political leanings of police.
But I don't think there's a way around that at this point, we still have to try.
"Wehret den Anfängen" and "Never Again" and all that.
"You gotta do something" is correct, but not every something is suited.
But I think at this point we're entering the circular stage, so. Idk. I don't want to live in this world we see developing, but what I want seems to be not all that relevant to said world.
Sometimes you gotta, if you want to keep a free society free
There's no awards to be won for coddling fascists. The protections of a free society cannot be extended by those trying to extinguish it.
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935
This however speaks nothing of anti-Zionism.
They hate Jews
They really hate muslims
It's hilarious watching old European neonazis allying themselves with Israel today.
The confusion is palpable.
If there were 0 muslims in Germany today, their politics would be 100% about Jews controlling the world and all that stuff.
"Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine."
The leader of that party was Menachem Begin, later prime minister of Israel and founder of Likud, Netanyahu's party.
Frankly, I think their supposed "antisemitism" is a joke compared to their anti-Arab and anti-muslim attitude. Those are their real enemies now.
Many French would have you believe women wearing Hijab should be banned lest it destroy their "western culture" when even the most Islamophobic Americans don't care
A 5% Muslim population in UK is supposedly threatening to send them back to the dark ages when Singapore is at 15% with codified multicultural guarantees and somehow annihilates them in every measure of modernity and development
That of course has nothing to do with the fact that extreme-right parties look at Israel, with its ethnic suprematism, as an example. The only connection I see is backwards: Israel is undoubtedly doing its best to fuel racism against muslims because it wants us to believe we have a common enemy.
> The AfD party is currently polling at 29% nationally – even while they fight a designation by the Verfassungsschutz as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party in court.
The system is working
I guess the upside is that in countries with a multi-party system (happens more frequently without first-past-the-post), they virtually always have to form a coalition, which typically ends up in infighting within a party or between parties. E.g. in The Netherlands you typically need four parties nowadays to form a coalition.
I leave it to the reader to decide if I'm talking about now or the 1930s.
A vast archive of hacked emails from the AfD was published online on Monday: 281 GB containing 421,179 internal party emails. And, for anyone who might have grown confused about claims of antisemitism while it was plastered over the German news media in the weeks following the Berlin election: here you can see what it really looks like.
In email after email, party supporters use racist slurs and share antisemitic theories of Jewish world domination; there are jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots, discussions of whether refugees should be shot at the border, a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”.
The entire archive is available online – though it may be a criminal offence in Germany to torrent the material or distribute it online. Yet the journalists who’ve been able to examine parts of the hack consider it authentic. The methodology behind the leak is also quite interesting: the vast archive has not been published directly on the site. Instead, it is available via a series of AI summaries, which have been filtered according to severity (CRITICAL, HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW) and type, with categories including “racism_xenophobia”, “corruption_money”, “leadership_feud”, “conspiracy”, “violence_threats” and “antisemitism_extremism”.
The party itself has confirmed the hack to Bild: “In September 2026, a hacker attack targeted one of our party’s hosting service providers, during which portions of a few email accounts – most of which had not been used for years – were apparently illicitly copied.”
Many of the summaries are the party’s own internal disciplinary proceedings, with emails sent to party boards to decide whether to open expulsion proceedings against members. Here, what is shocking (though perhaps not surprising) is the depth and breadth of racist feeling from party members: slurs, fantasies of violence, and antisemitic statements appear commonplace. One email from 2016 appears to show Weidel forwarding a member’s antisemitic material to the federal board as the party weighed his expulsion, while including a warning to her colleagues that the Verfassungsschutz – Germany’s domestic intelligence service – might be reading.
There are some cases which do not appear to have drawn the ire of the party, including one Bavarian official urging party leaders to chant “Merkel croak” every day, or another thread in which staff at the party’s federal office apparently discuss luring a photographer to a party event and removing him by force.
The anonymous hackers claimed their motive behind the leak was to show the “degeneracy and hypocrisy” of the AfD. Among the countless acts of hate speech, there are also allegations of embezzlement and financial misconduct, according to DDoSecrets, a transparency collective which republished the archive: the site’s software flagged 34 documents for misuse of funds, 23 for off-the-books payments, 14 for undisclosed donations and seven for embezzlement.
The AfD party is currently polling at 29% nationally – even while they fight a designation by the Verfassungsschutz as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party in court. That designation has already been made by state intelligence offices for some state branches, such as Sachsen-Anhalt — though it did not seem to hurt their electoral success. The party achieved 43.8% of the vote there in September.
Politics <--------- Left ------ Center ------ Right ---------->
| | Neoliberalism |
Economics | Anti-capitalism | Capitalism |
US | DSA Democrats Republicans |
Germany | SPD CDU/CSU AfD |
UK | Greens Labor Tories Reform |
France | LFI Renaissance RN |
1. The far-right parties are linked and coordinated and generally funded by very wealthy people;
2. The rise of far right parties is a direct result of declining material conditions;
3. Far right parties get to blame immigration and trans people because, in general, there is no counterbalance to that narrative blaming the actual cause: capitalism and ever-increasing income and wealth inequality;
4. The "moderate" (which really means centrist or center-right parties) will predictably and routinely ally with far-right parties to crush any leftist momentum. As an aside, the term "moderate" is intentionally conflated by pollsters, politicians and the media and really means nothing;
5. The topic of economics is typically avoided in most Western countries because the economics are indefensible. Instead you have manufactured wedge issues to divide people such as immigraiton, gay rights and the existence of a handful of trans people. This suits both major parties in most countries because they're both neoliberal, which is to say that they are uniparty on defending capitalism;
6. People will defend capitalism and attack socialism without knowing what either of those things are. Ask someone what capitalism is and you'll usually get a hand-wavy claim about "free markets" or even just "markets", which isn't true at all. No markets are free and markets exist in every economic system. Some of our earliest writings from 4000+ years ago are about market transactions.
So when you see things like protests in France, the rise of Reform in the UK and the rise of AfD (as well as others such as in Italy) know that it's all related and has the same root cause.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis. We saw how that worked out in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. In the US, FDR was forced to make concessions to the working class to stave off the perceived threat of communism. In Germany we got Hitler. And after WW2, the US went on an imperialism frenzy, imperialism being the highest form of capitalism.
All of this is only going to get worse until we address the core issue, which is capitalism.
Obviously all very moderate and centrist behaviour.
This idea that somehow it just starts with small things, and then before you know it, the Third Reich is back. Come on. It's 2026.
Today simply waving the flag of your own nation is almost a crime in some countries. We've completely lost it.
People have a very reasonable worry that voting for people who talk about executing refugees (note the term "refugee" and not "economic migrant") might actually enact the policies they speak of.
Any association with the Third Reich reasonably comes from their use of Nazi symbolism and use of Nazi slogans.
Give angry people an outgroup to vent their anger and hate, one can become the ruler of the nation. US did not get a great economy by incarcerating or throwing those few thousand immigrants out. Its economy is currently getting messed up by stupid policies. But people need an outgroup to hate and it is enough for the right wings to get to power.
> This idea that somehow it just starts with small things, and then before you know it, the Third Reich is back. Come on. It's 2026.
And in 2026 we see the state of US going exactly in that direction. Humans are pretty predictable and something similar to Third Reich will happen before you know it. "This time will be different" is hope. Not a given.
Yes this "so-called far right" is totally sane and normal.
So, they got a bit of a clean-up.
It‘s the opposite, all the traditional middle class types left „Die Linke“, who are now the clear far left candidate. They are the only candidate that propose a socialist economic reform, open borders and a stop to and and all deportations.
But yeah, on paper they don't sound too bad (ignoring their pro-russia sentiments)
Those meme and humor are the comment section on any social media platform today. If you think the far left are beyond these types of comments (except targeting the opposite groups of people) in their internal chats, you're clueless about the real world.
Just read the unhinged comments they make in public. What do you think they say in private.
>If you can find them, please publish.
Why don't they publish themselves if they're saints and got nothing to be assumed of?
Who mentioned the far left? And why would it matter what other extremists do?
This sounds like "yes but what about..", and I see it in several comments here but I don't understand it. How does that matter? There could be a similar dump from another party or organization and people would (rightfully) be equally upset.
Of course if a party - even internally - emails really crude racism and antisemitism then people should know. Their "core" voters don't care. But for a party to get 20-25-30% of the vote, it needs a _lot_ of votes from people who are repulsed by this.
Ahh, old good mild conservatism.
And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?