Heather Mac Donald The Blatant Lie of Germany’s Elite Parties opposed to the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) continue to block it from exercising its rights—all in the name of stopping “fascism.”
Germany’s self-proclaimed democracy defenders are at it again: blocking a law-abiding party from exercising its rights—all in the name of protecting democracy.
The Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), a pro-free market, anti-EU, anti-mass migration party, placed second in Germany’s recent parliamentary elections, earning nearly 21 percent of the vote to the top vote-getter’s, the Christian Democratic Union’s, 28 percent. The AfD placed well ahead of the once-dominant Social Democratic Party (16 percent) and the Greens (11 percent).
By longstanding tradition, the AfD should have been allotted committee chairmanships and vice chairmanships based on its February vote share. Doing so would have meant that the powerful budget, interior, and finance committees, along with three other committees, would have been under AfD direction, giving it the possibility of shaping legislation. But in a reversal of what is normally an automatic affirmation, on Wednesday, May 21, the other parties in Parliament voted down the AfD chairmanships and put those six committees in the control of other, often less popular, parties. The far-left Die Linke (the Left) party, which had garnered just 9 percent of the parliamentary vote, was awarded two chairs.
The rationale given for this anti-democratic coup is a recent designation of the AfD as a right-wing extremist party. On May 2, 2025, four days before parliamentary power was to change hands, outgoing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser from the Social Democratic Party announced that Germany’s domestic spy agency (the BfV) had slapped that label on the AfD, based on a 1,000-page secret dossier. According to press leaks, the dossier appeared to consist of public statements by AfD leaders, many already chewed over endlessly by the party’s opponents, relating to Germany’s mass migration problem.
AfD representatives have asserted, for example, that Germans have a cultural history tied to their ethnic and national identity; that this history and identity deserve protection; and that unchecked illegal migration threatens national cohesion.
The dossier also contained statements “implying,” as a scandalized Reuters put it, that “immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals.” Actually, those AfD statements didn’t “imply” that immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals; they asserted that fact outright, because that is what government crime statistics overwhelmingly show.
After Faeser’s announcement, the AfD accused the outgoing government of orchestrating the release to inflict maximum damage on the party in the next Parliament. The AfD’s charge then seemed speculative. Now, it looks prescient. Before the “right-wing extremist” designation had come out, a high-ranking member of the Christian Democratic Union had suggested that the AfD should be treated “in parliamentary procedures and processes like any other opposition party.” Now, however, CDU chancellor Friedrich Merz says that it would be “unthinkable” to allow the AfD any of its parliamentary rights in light of the secret dossier, because, you know, democracy.
Never mind that the “extremist” designation has been suspended pending resolution of a lawsuit filed by the AfD for violation of its free speech rights. In a desperate attempt at justifying the CDU’s exploitation of the now-suspended “extremist” proclamation, the party’s parliamentary whip, Steffan Bilger, told public broadcaster ZDF on May 21 that he and his fellow elected officials had observed the AfD’s radical and extremist nature in Parliament of late. What this accusation referred to was left unexplained. In truth, nothing has changed in the AfD’s political positions or the lawful comportment of members.
In any case, the “right extremist” designation was a mere pretext for shutting the AfD out of power. Half a year before Nancy Faeser revealed the existence of the secret dossier, the establishment parties had pulled the same trick in the state government of Thüringen. They denied the AfD its earned state committee chairmanships through novel parliamentary maneuvers, even though the AfD had been the biggest vote-getter in the state election.
In mid-April, the AfD was also as usual denied a vice president position in the Bundestag. Vice presidents, ordinarily one from each party, oversee parliamentary rules and issue calls to order. The AfD’s lack of representation allows the establishment parties to rebuke it on specious grounds without check.
It is amusing to see who fervently supports democracy against the alleged incursions of the AfD. A representative of Die Linke, Clara Buenger, told ZDF that the AfD must never be “normalized,” because it seeks to “infiltrate and eliminate democracy.” Die Linke, by its own admission, seeks to “overcome capitalism.” On May 24, 2025, hundreds of masked anti-fascists showed up in Bielefeld to counter a memorial for the victims of another stabbing by a failed asylum seeker. The counterdemonstrators waved red hammer and sickle flags.
Contrary to “eliminating democracy,” the AfD has acceded to every power grab that strips it of its rights, while trying to overturn those decisions through lawful means. To add insult to injury, the Social Democratic Pary (SPD) has refused to give up the spacious caucus room that it occupied when it ran the last government, despite much diminished numbers. Having lost 86 seats in the last election, the SPD now holds a mere 120 out of 630 parliamentary seats, while the AfD, having gained 69 seats in the last election, counts 152 MPs. Even a reporter from a mainstream media outlet acknowledges that the AfD’s assigned caucus room is too small.
The reason for stiffing the AfD on real estate is the usual threat of fascism. The SPD has nicknamed its large hall Otto Weis Hall, in honor of an SPD politician who opposed the rise of National Socialism. Though Otto Weis Hall is not an official name, having the AfD take over the space would allegedly dishonor the opponents of fascism.
Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the AfD, was uncharacteristically at a loss for words in reacting to the committee chair boycott and the meeting room tantrum, before alighting upon the mots justes—“bottomless impudence”—to describe the mainstream parties. Meantime, a day after two members of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. were assassinated by a pro-Hamas sympathizer, Weidel called for the end of a planned evacuation of Gaza residents to Germany:
While police officers are being seriously injured at anti-Israel demonstrations in German cities and imported anti-Semitism is spreading . . . anyone who continues to conduct mass reception operations in the face of thousands of anti-Semitic crimes and a growing propensity for violence in radicalized circles . . . has learned nothing from 2015. . . . The protection of Jewish life, our police, and public order must finally be a priority again. Humanitarian aid must be provided locally—not through further border expansion and immigration into an already overwhelmed system.
The AfD has been Israel’s strongest supporter in the Bundestag; it alone has tried to defund UNRWA and other Palestinian fronts for promoting anti-Israel ideology. Yet the party is reflexively labeled a threat to Jews, while the spawn of the establishment’s immigration policies scream their support for the Intifada’s martyrs in Berlin, Hamburg, and Stuttgart.
Ten million of Germany’s voters have again been disenfranchised in the elite’s desperate attempt to preserve the status quo. That elite’s claim to represent democracy against fascism is now long past being a silly pose. It is a blatant lie. Germany is at the forefront of the battle between power and censorship on the one hand and regime change and free speech on the other, all centered around the twenty-first century’s central issue: mass Third World migration. What happens next in Germany will be an augury for the future of democratic systems.
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