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!
There has long been sufficient material to initiate the proceedings to ban the AfD party, but the conservative parties (CDU/CSU) have so far blocked this.
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."
Not sure those efforts will lead anywhere, as the conservative CxU party is already positioning themselves to be the "rational right-wing voice", parroting the same messages but more eloquently.
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...
> 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.
Now imagine you had only a center-right and a far-right party, and you have the U.S. :/
While it probably feels quite safe and dry under that rock you call home you might want to have a look around every now and then to get attuned to the zeitgeist. If you do you'll notice a bunch of useful idiots calling themselves the 'Democatic Socialists of America', a group which has been successful in many races and seems to be poised to take over the 'democratic' party. They have a major in New York and one in Seattle, they have a potential presidential candidate and they seem to be growing like fungus. Their program leads right to the bread lines which always seem to be the unspoken goal of socialist movements everywhere. They are at least as far to the left in their rhetoric as e.g. the Swedish and German communist parties (which both call themselves 'the left').
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.
The problem in Germany has been that there was no center-right party. Center-left (SPD) and center-right parties (CDU with Merkel) met somewhere in the middle, which was a problem for right-of-center voters - there are many of them and they needed something reasonable to vote for and there wasn't. The CDU moved more to the right again, and it should because there was a giant hole in the political spectrum.
Well, someone has to represent these voters, or they will co-opt another party or put up their own candidate. And the government can’t just keep banning them, or they’ll catch bystanders (“dog-whistles”) and look super illegitimate (when you prosecute people for holding an empty sign, like Russia, you’re the baddie). Already I believe banning the AfD is stupid and would backfire egregiously in a few years at most.
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.
“Fascist” means nothing in this context, not wanting to become a minority in your own country is a human desire which all people share. It’s not hateful at all, it’s just human nature.
Linking to that Wikipedia article doesn’t change the fact that the data obviously show Europeans will become a minority in almost all of their homeland countries within the next 50 years. It’s irrefutable.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Are you really going to sit here and pretend if the place you grew up in and invested your life began changing very drastically in a short time frame you wouldn’t be concerned for things you cherish? Why must the liberals always pretend to be inhuman when trying to discuss human rights? Refugees need homes and love and Germans are allowed to care about their culture.
Every place changes drastically. My country does not have an immigrant influx but is a completely different country from 20 years ago. Every person has what need as an excuse to become "conservative".
The changes are a constant everywhere. Using that as an excuse to hate is political manipulation.
> 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 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.
One can argue about refugees, I myself see that critical, but we are in dire need of more regular migration for demographic reasons and because the general lack of work force in multiple sectors like health care.
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.
Cultural preservation is for museums when it can no longer be organically sustained. Coherence is as non-sensical as trying to preserve eye and skin color. Culture is mutable and always will be. You might as well try to stop the tide
Culture is as mutable as borders of nations. Culture and nations are often seen as synonymous, to the point where one often get defined by the other.
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.
Preservation not in the stricter sense, but meant as "reasonable slowly moving culture" as it implies stability. You also need coherence to some degree to maintain a functional society. As an hypothetical extreme example imagine one half of the population not even understanding the language of the other half, such a society would break apart real quick.
Your assertion on coherence for a functional society and your extreme hypothetical is fallacious. Multiple governments and societies across the globe operate effectively without a single national language.
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.
If it costs you 200k pounds to house a single person, it sounds like the main issue isn't the immigrant/refugee but your economic system. What makes that far right is blaming the other for your society's greater ills
Welcome in current Polish politics. Konfederacja from our ground in currently playing to be buddy buddy with winning party and is treated as semi part of current government
The AfD is clearly anti-democratic and will try to destroy our society if they are voted into power. CDU/CSU makes terrible politics but they are not fascist.
People putting those parties into the same category is a significant part of the problem.
If you read it again you may notice that I didn't put them into the same category.
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...
That's a interesting theory. Usually what happens is the opposite: a right-wing party will pretend to be right-wing to win the election and then when in power it will do whatever the left-wing party does.
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.
> "Usually what happens is the opposite: a right-wing party will pretend to be right-wing to win the election and then when in power it will do whatever the left-wing party does."
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?
1. They secretly defend the interests of the wealthy, which want slave labour from the third world. This coincides with left-wing policies, even though they do it because they want to see the civilisation destroyed.
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.
Sweden is fairly well know for its public access to official records, and any email sent to an official position in government is part of the public accessible record. Politicians however all have private emails and are users of instance messages services that are not part of the public record. Public access is also only for the public role in government, not for example the role of being the party leader.
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?
It is a cat-and-mouse game. In the UK, when email rules started getting enforced, politicians moved to WhatsApp and then Signal. If Signal becomes subject to enforcement, they will probably find other ways; and the collateral damage will likely be that everyone's messages will become fair game even more than it already is.
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.
Same thing in the Netherlands. I believe our previous prime minister (now secretary general of NATO) even used an extremely old phone which can only keep a 20 message history to have a “plausible” excuse why he can’t comply with the requirements.
These types of shenanigans were even named after him, “Rutte doctrine”.
In this email leak, it is all emails from members of the party, not just elected officials. It is also emails sent from the outside to party members. Is that going too far? In term of transparency, allowing the public to see everything that happens and communicate within a political party would give some insight in what kind of people a party is made from.
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.
>
I do think politicians should waive some privacy rights when elected. Same thing for their bank accounts and other assets.
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 citizens really ask for surveillance laws against specific groups (in this case: 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.
> Though, as a public figure if your private life becomes embarrassing, or salacious you’re guaranteed to have news hounds on your trail.
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?"
It wasn't so long ago in America that having a private email server was actually the main complaint about a presidential candidate. Everyone knows that they all do it one way or another.
I think transparency in government is really important, but I don't think making ~all communication between officials public is the way. For the well behaved people it has all sorts of funny second-order effects, like people being reluctant to ask questions which might make them look silly in case they're taken out of context. For the poorly behaved they'll just work around it.
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?
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.
You cannot prevent private communication. It is just not possible to stop people from finding ways to exchange information in nonpublic ways.
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.
"AfD party member email contains antisemitic trope that Israel does the dirty work for us." [0]
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.
> This site is an index. The complete original emails — full headers, bodies and attachments, with DKIM signatures intact — are in the torrent.
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"?
They just won a state election a few weeks ago, and they're also ahead in nation-wide polls - how can you ban a party that receives the majority vote of the population?
If the party is actively working, in a combative and aggressive manner, to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany, the constitution allows for this party to be banned.
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.
You're not protecting democracy by not letting people vote for the only party that even pretends to care about their concerns. If you want people to vote for other parties then those parties should change to serve the people again instead of trying to make the people serve them.
Different talking points. A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic. People need to be protected from that no matter who or how popular they are.
Only one instance can answer that, the Bundesverfassungsgericht.
Getting that answer is part of the process to ban a party. Some people might not want that question answered.
Yes, they do that by fearmongering, calling the current government a "cartel", as if such a level of corruption could only arise due to current democratic processes.
So talking shit about other parties and/or alleging there's a conspiracy to keep them out of power (ie. brandmauer) should be enough to get them barred for being "anti-democratic"? That seems a hilariously low bar and totally arbitrary. It's not exactly an unpopular talking point on the left that politics are being secretly controlled by The Billionaires™ (or Israel). Should they be barred as well?
If it can be shown that left-wing politicians in key positions of their party want to abolish core concepts of the democracy or constitutionally guaranteed rights: sure.
Why are the goalposts getting randomly nudged around? First it was
>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.
The thing that invalidates it is that its a classic right wing troll tactic that actively hurts actual discussion of serious topics. I think I'll rise above internet argument rules this time and exercise free will
Of course democracy is being protected, when it is clear such a party is being actively used and supported by foreign actors which have no right to vote in the affected country. People are being manipulated. The law comes first, then, people can choose. It's why a judicial branch exists.
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.
There are democratic parties that care about people's economic concerns. Just because they get discredited by extremist trolls doesn't mean they don't exist.
Right wing talking points and moving the goal posts.
The constitution comes first. Popularity is not a shield.
We have to ban them, and ban them fast. Irrelevant what people think, there is a judicial process exactly to avoid this empasse.
The reason this is unpopular is because every coward party politician in power is worried about their own electoral consequences for supporting this process.
Cowards who will go down in history as the vile scum who let it happen again.
If people dont want democracy they should be able to choose so. Its clear that democracy has proven its failure for long term planning and useless bureocracy.
That is not how the German constitution is set up. You can do what you wish in your country, but here the "freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung" is not up for debate. There are also specific clauses in the constitution that cannot be amended or changed, one of them ensures Germany is a democracy.
> If people dont want democracy they should be able to choose so.
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.
If the majority of German voters want "to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany", then is it not their democratic right to do so?
I'm confused, do you seriously think the AfD runs on phrases like "we want to get rid of the democratic system"?
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.
The rest of the world did object the last time we did that. I'd prefer if we don't try that again, and our constitution is specifically set up to prevent this.
You’re probably thinking about National Socialist German Workers' Party which was a left-wing party, which is obvious not only from its name, but also if you read their party program on Wikipedia
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?
Your snarky argument hinges on Marxism being the only existing socialistic ideology, while all other possible ideas on the planet being "right of center"
A party can be socialist without being Marxist/communist. It’s an older understanding of “left” and the current split between left and right has become a cartoon. But one could say that during the Second World War the Germans and the Russians were fighting in part over a radically different ideological approach to implementing a similar socialist system.
It's been dissected ad nauseam, but at base they're drastically different arrangements of who and what structures are privileged.
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.
The exact purpose of a constitution is to protect people from voting their rights away. There is lots of history establishing why successful democracies need strong constitutions.
Because Germany has laws specifically to ban parties that are shown to undermine democratic order, specifically to stop another situation where they gain a majority vote.
That is not the criteria of banning a party. There is the Verfassung or constitution. If you work towards the abolition of the constitution, then you will get punished.
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.
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. So that everybody can live their life as they please. The AfD clearly is against all of that. Our constitution offers a way to defend against these forces and it is time that the process is started.
well for example in Romania (EU member state), they canceled the presidential elections (2024) after they were won by a person no one knew anything about.
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.
Afaik, didn't the Romanian election also feature Russian money literally buying votes?
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?
Noone decides that, because that's not the metric. The metric is whether the party is antidemocratic. As we know from history, sometimes people do vote for antidemocratic parties. But back in 1946 it was decided that no antidemocratic parties shall be allowed anymore, no matter how much support they gain.
>Because who decides when its not in the people best interest? Oh right, not the people since they clearly voted for them for a reason.
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.
This is correct. They won ~43% of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. It is also worth mentioning that the population in that state is tiny, just 2.1 million people.
And do you also include the forced deportation of people with non-German ethnic backgrounds, even if they are citizens of Germany, in these "mildly conservative views"?
I have grown tired of people not accepting that a party can truly be far right and try to put it off as being a shift in perception of the general public.
Germany has five to six parties (depending on election cycle) in the parliament. Noone calls the SPD far right. You may find people debating whether the SPD or the CDU marks the center, but the AfD is clearly far right.
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".)
I am not informed enough about AfDs platform to judge.
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.
Well, they aren't running any camps yet, so how can you prove they will actually run camps in the future? You can't, so internet argument rules require you must accept that the opposite is factual.
The AfD became relevant precisely because the conservatives (CDU) were not far right enough. They exist to be more right wing than the conservatives. They are as blatently far right as it gets.
I think they are worried by the wrath of AfD voters. Would've been easier if they had done it years ago, I think there has been a lot of evidence that they are unconstitutional in Germany for a long time?
I'm not here to be an AfD apologist. I think a lot of their rhetoric is awful. However, in German constitutional law, there is a very high bar to ban a political party. In defense of the German Constitution, I think it is a good thing that there is a very high bar. If the bar was low, it could easily be abused.
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.
Also, it incredibly rare to ban political parties in Germany.
> 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.
Whenever I see Alice Weidel, I see a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is pretty genius that AfD selected her as head of the party. She provides a thin veneer of suitability over a horrible underbelly.
If a constitution had a pro slavery clause and a party is trying to change that we would consider them heroes, so why is it such a bad thing to change the system if it is failing to provide for the people?
The entire point of a constitution is to remain unchanged.
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.
That assumes the constitution isn't tyrannical or hasn't been conceived at a time where everything was different. It's like telling a slave you should follow the law because it's the law.
I don't see how you would look at the German constitution as tyrannical. It guarantees rights, not restrictions. (The German constitution is fairly weak btw, most of its articles are optional.) The only potentially oppressive article is the military draft for men.
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).
> Whatever happend to Voltares "I disprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it"?
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.
Voltaire never said that. However I understand your point, the truth is Europe has been on the precipice of far-right rule for decades and the only solution the European democracies found has been to push for banning, cutting funds, censoring the beast.
Anything but address the actual issues that helped catapult them to the top.
Free speech in Germany is limited. Hate speech, nazi slogans, etc... are banned.
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.
The main problem is that these far-right parties have backing of all billionaires around the western world. They are extremely well funded, they have used propaganda to lie to their citizens and gain adepts, they have loyalists inside institutions that will undermine any attempt to apply the law.
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.
Wasn't recently shown that after an attack on a Russian data center, the amount of right-wing supporting tweets went down by a large amount? Which is in my opinion a big supporting factor in your assessment
Nope, not a single proof. The only thing that went down is the number of yandex search engine related automated traffic, aka "bots", which has nothing to do with disinformation "bots"
Europe is divided by design. Not by Troll farms. I'm sick and tired of hearing every thing that went in EU favor is glorious success of EU and every EU failure is the work of evil Russian bot farms.
The trend is unfortunately active a lot further afield than just Europe or the USA. Similar recent spikes in political polarisation are showing up everywhere. Everywhere that there's been free social media for the past ~20 years, that is.
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.
History tells us, that only works in shortest of terms. If anything it raises their anti-establishment reputation (see how NDSAP was banned and it did nothing to stop Hitler's rise).
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).
The lesson the US should have taken from that period in Germany is that if a party leader attempts a coup once, you should not let them and their party get elected to finish the job.
What makes you say that? Between being sent to prison for high treason and having his party banned, what part was kid gloves handling? Not shooting him in the head? That's how you make a martyr for someone worse to take power. He was allowed to get close to power because he was less threatening to capitalist interests.
Hitler was sent to a gentlemen's prison (Festungshaft) for high treason with a sentence of five years, but released after eight months. That is completely ridiculous for high treason. The regular sentence was life, the absolute minimum in case of exonerating circumstances (in this case most likely being right-wing, sorry, "wanting the best for his country") was five years. I'm pretty sure that he would have spent life, or at least many years, in prison if he had been a communist.
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.
Even a tolerant society has to be selectively intolerant to preserve itself. The goal is maximally tolerant, not absolute tolerance.
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?
The only reason AfD grows in popularity is because the other parties are deaf to what worries their constituents.
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.
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.
> Hypothetically, should a party running on a platform of ending democracy be allowed to participate in democracy?
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.
The US still generally has freedom of speech and association. We don’t ban political parties from organizing, nor do we tell voters who they cannot vote for.
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. The AfD clearly is against hates both, is not democratic and should be banned.
So, by this standard you must agree that Democrat party must be banned, I saw one D senator threatening to go after young people who work with current administration, that's clearly a threat to democracy.
I wonder what is the longterm plan of those that want to ban the party. We have a situation where (depending on the state) more than 40% of the voters vote AfD. If you ban the party, where would one expect the current voters to go to? I don't think they would vote center-left then...
My personal belief is, that a big share of AfD voters don't know what they vote for. We saw it in the US, where Hispanic people were surprised that they are targeted by ICE. They are manipulated by propaganda. And this can be stopped by destroying the propaganda infrastructure and defund the people behind it.
Probably Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW? Ticks many of the same boxes: anti-immigrants, anti-EU, nationalist and pro-Russia. The primary difference is that they are socialist. So probably the techbros wouldn't be as happy.
It's called wehrhafte Demokratie - not easy to translate, something like fortified democracy. The paradox of tolerance is not the clever counter-argument that you think it is, it's a general problem. An open, permissive system cannot allow a closed system to use its freedoms against it to replace it.
> 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.
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. The AfD clearly is against both and thus is not democratic and should be banned.
You are bending a word to mean things it has never in its entire history meant. There is absolutely nothing intrinsic about democracy that protects minorities.
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.
>Internal AfD thread reveals party split over expelling a member for antisemitic writings and a plan to use Israeli government contacts to whitewash AfD antisemitism accusations.
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.
To me it seems that a topic that is both popular and a taboo is bound to cause issues, one way or another.
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.
AfD also self-censors. They frame the whole anti-immigration debate as anti-Muslim/asylumseeker, but if you read between the lines they are making arguements that apply to pretty much everyone who isn't German.
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.
I'm not sure restricting immigration or being selective who is especially bad and pretty much every country does it to some extent. It's other stuff associated with that like buddying up with / getting paid by Putin, trying to overthrow democracy and the like that is more of a problem.
The actual emails can be accessed through the torrent. Although I can't imagine just publishing the emails in their entirety would be more resource/labor intensive than publishing individual AI summaries of each.
It's fair that you disagree with AFD, even disagree a lot. But could we please rethink the use of "far", when they have 20% of the seats in parliament?
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.
By some measures... yes? Take slavery, which would be considered even more right wing than whatever the current US "far right" is, but was more or less tolerated before abolition. Does that make all parties of the time far right?
I think you didn't get the point GP was making, so let me rephrase:
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.
Well they are definitely far right especially if you compare them to other right wing parties in Europe. AfD is monitored by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and their former youth organizations have been designated as confirmed right-wing extremist by them. They talk about mass deportations of citizens termed as "remigration" and leading party figures intentionally used the banned Nazi SA paramilitary slogan "Alles für Deutschland" ("Everything for Germany") at campaign events.
People vote for them because the media has spent decades learning that the easiest way to gain ad revenue is by spreading outrage. And now it's coming back to bite many countries
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.
> would find any discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants "dehumanizing"
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?
Let me tell you a secret, most people even more so none Europeans use derogatory terms of that level daily in their private conversations. Considering the rape rates in the EU you can't begrudge some Germans having low opinion of Muslims.
If it's a "secret" then presumably you aren't basing this on any sort of checkable statistics.
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.)
Re your last sentence: US politics is "WWE style", certainly. Is German politics like that? Or are they more... European or something, where there's still decorum?
The EU is a little bit more tame than the US, but not by much, also those are private emails, not public statements. My point is using such language is (unfortunately) not something "scandalous".
I am no fan of the AFD (especially because I live in Poland) but mostly because I don’t like having opinions on political parties in countries where I don’t live and don’t speak the language.
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.
The right only cares about wellbeing of the rich, and is usually keen to exploit the demographic majority in the interest of the few (see what is happening in US now). I follow politics of democratic countries closely for few dozen years, but I have yet to find an example of rightist party which improved economic wellbeing of its constituents (except those who are already rich)
Exactly. The establishment doesn’t care about the people and wave them off, so populist parties took the advantage. This happened before and will happen again.
Let's be crystal clear, parties like the AfD don't care either. History is chock full of examples where far-right leaders got into power and broke most of their promises and achieved the polar opposite for most of their followers. For example Trump campaigned on "eggs too expensive" and promptly passed legislation that allowed the farms to price-fix even harder leading to "eggs even more expensive". The same has happened again and again with the "let's make the country secure again" claims, e.g. starting WW2 did not in fact make the average German's life safer.
Their propaganda is that they care so the point is that the other guys don’t care so people flock to someone who says they genuinely care. It’s hard to fix the economy so I don’t think anyone can fix it. And as history shows again and again I think whoever gets the government is going to sleep with the big corps anyway.
I don’t really understand what you’re asking, but I don’t think the AFD is really a unique phenomenon. The popularity of right wing parties is across the entire West and IMO it’s for the exact reasons I just wrote.
Harris lost to Trump in 2024 for what I see as exactly the same reasons.
I think you downplay the role of social media in fanning the flames.
"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.
Sure that’s a factor. But I think it’s pretty obvious in reality that a lot of people are not having a good time in contemporary western society. Social media didn’t invent that.
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.
I think both can be true: there are issues with affordable housing and integration of immigrants. But at the same time parties are poisoning minds with mass-scale disinformation, propaganda, trolling, through social media. These are even more effective when issues already exist.
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's like saying the establishment would have an easier time controlling the unruly populance if they still had an iron grip on all public communication. True, but doesn't exactly advance the argument that I think you want to.
I don’t see how that goes against what I’ve said. It’s not about right wing parties becoming more inherently popular, it’s about them taking advantage of the unpopularity of the establishment, and voters looking the other way on moral issues because of it.
That doesn’t imply that the candidate must have morally dubious character, just that morally dubious characters are taking advantage of it.
> I don’t like having opinions on political parties in countries where
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)
It's a little condescending to treat millions of people as puppets of billionaires. Are there not billions behind the media you consume? (ycombinator...)
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.
I agree with much of what you are saying. Personally, I have a distaste for far-right and far-left parties, to put it mildly. However, I think it's really telling that the term "populism" has been so vilified. Here is the definition of populism according to Merriam-Webster:
> 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.
The Nazis became popular during The Great Depression (which affected Germany) and we are seeing history repeat itself. Someone is now going to tell me we aren't in a recession because "number go up!" while everything around us tells us a different story.
The great depression was just as much a wealth concentration at the cost of the 95% as is happening now, history will repeat itself. Speculation followed by wealth inequality followed by tarifs followed by reduced international trade. Sounds familiar.
The economic platform of the AfD doesn't even pretend to care about normal people. Neither does the Republican platform and Trump in particular in the US.
This argument has been repeated for decades, but I just don't see it.
> the AfD doesn't even pretend to care about normal people.
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".
Deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy aren't conservative values. Any conservative that believes that has been duped into libertarian capitalism.
> Deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy aren't conservative values.
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.
Sure, fair enough, but in my defense, "conservative" used to mean fiscal conservativism is a very American concept. I wouldn't say 'conservative-minded "normal people"' in a discussion about the AfD necessarily or obviously invokes the idea of fiscal conservativism.
I have different hypothesis. How I see it democracy have 2 very good feedback loops.
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.
Well, this is exactly how people voted for Hitler, and I would have assumed people know from history how it ended when "moral approach" was thrown away.
> But I think this kind of moral approach is precisely why right wing parties have been winning globally
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.
I don't think being hacked by an anonymous entity grants much political advantage? If anything the downside is shifting the overtone window by dumping all the far right takes on the broad public and making them a bit more familiar.
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).
I think part of the advantage is providing public evidence in favor of a Verbotsverfahren, e.g. the process of banning a political party for being counter to the principles of the German constitution and with that, pressure towards the state organs to stop ignoring the threat and finally do their job.
Yeah that's also what I thought the idea is behind that, but I'm afraid that at this point, a Verbotsverfahren will not work out the way people hope it will.
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.
I think the ideal moment to ban them was years ago. The next best one is right now.
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.
Maybe, but otoh, action bias alone is a terrible advisor.
"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.
If "popular ideas" == Neonazis trying to overthrow the German constitutional order, then yes, that is the appropriate response.
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!
You don't need more evidence for a Verbotsverfahren. That's not the reason one wasn't already started. It's the unwillingness of the parliament to initiate one
That they are rabidly pro-Israel while simultaneously glorifying Hitler and indulging in conspiracy theories of Jewish domination certainly lends credence to the idea that anti-Zionism ≠ antisemitism
One can be an anti-Semite ("Jew hater") and pro-Zionist ("Israel supporter") at the same time: "I hate them so much that I want them out of my country and into their own country".
I think it is even simpler than that. Populist parties need to have a simple message that their supporters can easily understand. Having two quite different enemies at the same time would make things harder.
If there were 0 muslims in Germany today, their politics would be 100% about Jews controlling the world and all that stuff.
I'm convinced that many right wingers pretend to support Israel while being secretly delighted to see the country heading deeper into trouble. It serves as a convenient disguise for their antisemitism.
There is no confusion: Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein famously denounced the right-wing tendencies of Israel in 1948 in a letter to the New York Times:
"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.
Because Israel is their wet dream: an ethno-suprematist country, with right to self-determination only for the majority group, that seeks for lebensraum and shoots anyone who opposes it.
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
There's a general issue with immigrants coming from different cultures and whose values and traditions don't align with our, often in ways that go against the principles of our societies. It's something that needs to be addressed seriously, and the failure of political parties to do so has fuelled the growth of a right that profits from the issue and tries to paint it bigger than it is.
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.
> 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 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.
There are parties like this in every European Country.
E.g. RN in France, FPÖ in Austria, Fidesz in Hungary, PVV in Netherlands and so on.
These populist parties get a lot of votes, mainly because the parties that have been in charge for the past 10-30 years have failing to address issues of voters.
Doesn't mean that these ones are any better - they arent.
The only advantage most of these parties have is not having been in a position of power to demonstrate they are at least as incompetent as other parties that have, if not significantly more so.
The PVV in The Netherlands twice (once as a coalition supporter, once as part of a coalition). Both times were a disaster. People just go to the next populist right-wing party (e.g. FvD, which is more extreme right than the PVV, pretty similar to the AfD) and then after a few years they come back.
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.
The people funding the Nazis won't let the moderate parties do anything useful for the common person, they protect their own wealth while they force the politicians to implement austerity that drives people to support Nazis.
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 |
There are some general observations one can make:
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.
It's misdirection to the point of conspiracy theory to assume that Germany is incapable of organically producing a hateful far-right movement like AFD without it being manufactured by Russia
Honestly, I hate to tell you this, but the Germans have a whole track record of this fascism malarkey. I'm sure Vlad is pleased as punch, and definitely nudging it along, but if the influence was quite so impactive it would also be a lot more visible.
Never said they were installed by Russia.
Putain only has to find the proper bad seeds and water them.
That is clearly what is happening here. This is well known in Germany, and they are even kinda fighting internally over how much display of sympathy for Russia is proper to show publicly.
This comes after a campaign that has been going on for weeks claiming that Die Linke is antisemitic (the left-wing party that got the most votes in Berlin's most recent election). CDU (the current national governing party) has been pushing the narrative that Die Linke is comparable to AfD, because they call for human rights in Gaza and to stop the unconditional support for Israel by the German government.
It is not "mildly conservative" to call for deportation of citizens with middle-eastern roots, removing disabled children from normal schools and glorifying Hitler while taking money from Russia
I mean if 1/3rd of the people have that view then by definition it’s not “far” anything, no matter what the view is. It’s okay to just say you disagree with them
Surely you must realize how absurd your line of thinking is. Far left and far right are not labels based on popularity! Communism is still far left ideology if you live in communist country, same with fascism being far right.
Some context:
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!
[0] https://afd-gutachten.de/
There has long been sufficient material to initiate the proceedings to ban the AfD party, but the conservative parties (CDU/CSU) have so far blocked this.
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."
Not sure those efforts will lead anywhere, as the conservative CxU party is already positioning themselves to be the "rational right-wing voice", parroting the same messages but more eloquently.
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...
> 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.
Now imagine you had only a center-right and a far-right party, and you have the U.S. :/
While it probably feels quite safe and dry under that rock you call home you might want to have a look around every now and then to get attuned to the zeitgeist. If you do you'll notice a bunch of useful idiots calling themselves the 'Democatic Socialists of America', a group which has been successful in many races and seems to be poised to take over the 'democratic' party. They have a major in New York and one in Seattle, they have a potential presidential candidate and they seem to be growing like fungus. Their program leads right to the bread lines which always seem to be the unspoken goal of socialist movements everywhere. They are at least as far to the left in their rhetoric as e.g. the Swedish and German communist parties (which both call themselves 'the left').
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.
The problem in Germany has been that there was no center-right party. Center-left (SPD) and center-right parties (CDU with Merkel) met somewhere in the middle, which was a problem for right-of-center voters - there are many of them and they needed something reasonable to vote for and there wasn't. The CDU moved more to the right again, and it should because there was a giant hole in the political spectrum.
Well, someone has to represent these voters, or they will co-opt another party or put up their own candidate. And the government can’t just keep banning them, or they’ll catch bystanders (“dog-whistles”) and look super illegitimate (when you prosecute people for holding an empty sign, like Russia, you’re the baddie). Already I believe banning the AfD is stupid and would backfire egregiously in a few years at most.
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.
"far right" as a term can cover a multitude of things, some quite reasonable and some that you don't really want.
What 'quite reasonable' things have been labeled far right?
Controlling the borders and who gets in.
Germans will be a minority in their own country by 2045, likely sooner as migration trends tend to accelerate.
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.
Ask for quite reasonable and get one of the most classically far right, white supremacist tropes of all time.
You aren't fooling anyone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_t...
"Being opposed to ethnic erasure" and saying "multiculturalism doesn't work" is not "white supremacy". i didn't now reddit thinking had spilled here
> "multiculturalism doesn't work"
It works very well where I come from. India.
What kind of ethnic erasure? What words do you use to describe what's happening in Gaza ?
Take your fascist apologia elsewhere. No one is interested
“Fascist” means nothing in this context, not wanting to become a minority in your own country is a human desire which all people share. It’s not hateful at all, it’s just human nature.
Linking to that Wikipedia article doesn’t change the fact that the data obviously show Europeans will become a minority in almost all of their homeland countries within the next 50 years. It’s irrefutable.
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.
How does that work, don't the immigrants become Germans when they gain citizenship?
Arguments like these are what hateful racist say.
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.
> Germans are people having a German passport.
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.
> I don't care at all about ethnicity ...
> 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
> 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.
Are you really going to sit here and pretend if the place you grew up in and invested your life began changing very drastically in a short time frame you wouldn’t be concerned for things you cherish? Why must the liberals always pretend to be inhuman when trying to discuss human rights? Refugees need homes and love and Germans are allowed to care about their culture.
Every place changes drastically. My country does not have an immigrant influx but is a completely different country from 20 years ago. Every person has what need as an excuse to become "conservative".
The changes are a constant everywhere. Using that as an excuse to hate is political manipulation.
> 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 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.
Gotta keep German culture pure.... now where have I heard that before?
One can argue about refugees, I myself see that critical, but we are in dire need of more regular migration for demographic reasons and because the general lack of work force in multiple sectors like health care.
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.
Cultural preservation is for museums when it can no longer be organically sustained. Coherence is as non-sensical as trying to preserve eye and skin color. Culture is mutable and always will be. You might as well try to stop the tide
Culture is as mutable as borders of nations. Culture and nations are often seen as synonymous, to the point where one often get defined by the other.
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.
Preservation not in the stricter sense, but meant as "reasonable slowly moving culture" as it implies stability. You also need coherence to some degree to maintain a functional society. As an hypothetical extreme example imagine one half of the population not even understanding the language of the other half, such a society would break apart real quick.
Your assertion on coherence for a functional society and your extreme hypothetical is fallacious. Multiple governments and societies across the globe operate effectively without a single national language.
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.
As a Brit, sending the Africans arriving in small boats illegally home rather than spending £200k a head getting them housing and the like?
If it costs you 200k pounds to house a single person, it sounds like the main issue isn't the immigrant/refugee but your economic system. What makes that far right is blaming the other for your society's greater ills
No it costs £200k because we have decent housing and services. What is so wrong with legal immigration rather than illegal?
Welcome in current Polish politics. Konfederacja from our ground in currently playing to be buddy buddy with winning party and is treated as semi part of current government
The AfD is clearly anti-democratic and will try to destroy our society if they are voted into power. CDU/CSU makes terrible politics but they are not fascist.
People putting those parties into the same category is a significant part of the problem.
If you read it again you may notice that I didn't put them into the same category.
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...
That's a interesting theory. Usually what happens is the opposite: a right-wing party will pretend to be right-wing to win the election and then when in power it will do whatever the left-wing party does.
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.
> "Usually what happens is the opposite: a right-wing party will pretend to be right-wing to win the election and then when in power it will do whatever the left-wing party does."
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?
1. They secretly defend the interests of the wealthy, which want slave labour from the third world. This coincides with left-wing policies, even though they do it because they want to see the civilisation destroyed.
In any case, the average plain, poor person of the country gets screwed.
To add to that: https://afd-verbot.de/
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.
Sweden is fairly well know for its public access to official records, and any email sent to an official position in government is part of the public accessible record. Politicians however all have private emails and are users of instance messages services that are not part of the public record. Public access is also only for the public role in government, not for example the role of being the party leader.
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?
It is a cat-and-mouse game. In the UK, when email rules started getting enforced, politicians moved to WhatsApp and then Signal. If Signal becomes subject to enforcement, they will probably find other ways; and the collateral damage will likely be that everyone's messages will become fair game even more than it already is.
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.
I largely agree with you, but the problem is when they try to get away with being racist in private and hide or obscure their views in public.
Same thing in the Netherlands. I believe our previous prime minister (now secretary general of NATO) even used an extremely old phone which can only keep a 20 message history to have a “plausible” excuse why he can’t comply with the requirements.
These types of shenanigans were even named after him, “Rutte doctrine”.
He might have just been hooked on snake.
I do think politicians should waive some privacy rights when elected. Same thing for their bank accounts and other assets.
In this email leak, it is all emails from members of the party, not just elected officials. It is also emails sent from the outside to party members. Is that going too far? In term of transparency, allowing the public to see everything that happens and communicate within a political party would give some insight in what kind of people a party is made from.
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.
> I do think politicians should waive some privacy rights when elected. Same thing for their bank accounts and other assets.
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 citizens really ask for surveillance laws against specific groups (in this case: 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.
> Though, as a public figure if your private life becomes embarrassing, or salacious you’re guaranteed to have news hounds on your trail.
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?"
It wasn't so long ago in America that having a private email server was actually the main complaint about a presidential candidate. Everyone knows that they all do it one way or another.
I think transparency in government is really important, but I don't think making ~all communication between officials public is the way. For the well behaved people it has all sorts of funny second-order effects, like people being reluctant to ask questions which might make them look silly in case they're taken out of context. For the poorly behaved they'll just work around it.
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?
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.
You cannot prevent private communication. It is just not possible to stop people from finding ways to exchange information in nonpublic ways.
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.
"AfD party member email contains antisemitic trope that Israel does the dirty work for us." [0]
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...
Article without wall: https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/20/hackers-steal-421000-ema...
And the whole thing is here: https://www.hexane.cc/
And a [flagged] discussion linking to the source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50157664 (13 hours ago, 69 comments)
> This site is an index. The complete original emails — full headers, bodies and attachments, with DKIM signatures intact — are in the torrent.
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"?
That's not the whole thing. Looks like it's mostly meta data. The whole thing is some 200G+ bittorrent.
I have yet to see any actual data of this leak, even though it's all over the news.
Which is also linked on the site
This is an entirely different article than the OP
Yes, obviously. Another article on the same news but readable without registration.
Not enough details
Thanks!
Just start the process to ban this party already. There is enough evidence that they are enemies of our constitution.
They just won a state election a few weeks ago, and they're also ahead in nation-wide polls - how can you ban a party that receives the majority vote of the population?
If the party is actively working, in a combative and aggressive manner, to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany, the constitution allows for this party to be banned.
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.
You're not protecting democracy by not letting people vote for the only party that even pretends to care about their concerns. If you want people to vote for other parties then those parties should change to serve the people again instead of trying to make the people serve them.
Different talking points. A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic. People need to be protected from that no matter who or how popular they are.
>A party that wants to get rid of the system that enabled them to get voted for in the first place is anti-democratic.
Does AfD actually do that, though?
Only one instance can answer that, the Bundesverfassungsgericht. Getting that answer is part of the process to ban a party. Some people might not want that question answered.
Yes, they do that by fearmongering, calling the current government a "cartel", as if such a level of corruption could only arise due to current democratic processes.
So talking shit about other parties and/or alleging there's a conspiracy to keep them out of power (ie. brandmauer) should be enough to get them barred for being "anti-democratic"? That seems a hilariously low bar and totally arbitrary. It's not exactly an unpopular talking point on the left that politics are being secretly controlled by The Billionaires™ (or Israel). Should they be barred as well?
If it can be shown that left-wing politicians in key positions of their party want to abolish core concepts of the democracy or constitutionally guaranteed rights: sure.
Why are the goalposts getting randomly nudged around? First it was
>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.
This is a bad faith response. Don't feed the troll
Even if it's in bad faith, that doesn't make it invalid, and internet argument rules require you continue to engage.
The thing that invalidates it is that its a classic right wing troll tactic that actively hurts actual discussion of serious topics. I think I'll rise above internet argument rules this time and exercise free will
Free will is the most expensive thing in the world.
Of course democracy is being protected, when it is clear such a party is being actively used and supported by foreign actors which have no right to vote in the affected country. People are being manipulated. The law comes first, then, people can choose. It's why a judicial branch exists.
Well, actually it is.
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.
There are democratic parties that care about people's economic concerns. Just because they get discredited by extremist trolls doesn't mean they don't exist.
You're not protecting democracy either by letting people vote on a party that aims to undermine said democracy.
That's how we got literal Hitler back in the days, I'm not sure your argument is very strong in practice
Right wing talking points and moving the goal posts. The constitution comes first. Popularity is not a shield. We have to ban them, and ban them fast. Irrelevant what people think, there is a judicial process exactly to avoid this empasse. The reason this is unpopular is because every coward party politician in power is worried about their own electoral consequences for supporting this process. Cowards who will go down in history as the vile scum who let it happen again.
“party is actively working, in a combative and aggressive manner, to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany”
You declared it, so it must be true.
If people dont want democracy they should be able to choose so. Its clear that democracy has proven its failure for long term planning and useless bureocracy.
That is not how the German constitution is set up. You can do what you wish in your country, but here the "freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung" is not up for debate. There are also specific clauses in the constitution that cannot be amended or changed, one of them ensures Germany is a democracy.
> If people dont want democracy they should be able to choose so.
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.
The core principle of democracy is doing what is popular, not what is right.
The idea that democracy is synonymous with the current neoliberal order is nonsense.
At what point does a minority become a majority? Is that defined?
I invite you to look up those two words in literally any handy dictionary. Their definitions are quite uncomplicated.
We have a "minority" which votes en masse and can sway the results of an election.
Is that still a minority? I invite you to introspect more. It's not complicated either.
Counting.
10% is all you need as a vote bank to flip an election.
if a person doesn't like democracy then they should simply not vote
I told the leopard I did not consent to my face being eaten, but it ate my face anyway.
If the majority of German voters want "to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany", then is it not their democratic right to do so?
I'm confused, do you seriously think the AfD runs on phrases like "we want to get rid of the democratic system"?
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...
No, because it may cause the violation of basic human rights of minorities.
However, it is in our democratic right to fight parties that are anti constitutional. It's in the constitution.
The rest of the world did object the last time we did that. I'd prefer if we don't try that again, and our constitution is specifically set up to prevent this.
No, article 20 of the German constitution forbids this, and article 79 forbids changing article 20 in the way you suggest.
Edit: There is a loophole, though. Article 146 allows the German people to replace the constitution in its entirety.
History should be a lesson on why. Wouldn't be the first time a German far right party became a dictatorship from a minority rule.
You’re probably thinking about National Socialist German Workers' Party which was a left-wing party, which is obvious not only from its name, but also if you read their party program on Wikipedia
> which is obvious not only from its name
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?
You conveniently missed the second part of "not only ... but also ..." to win a straw man argument
Ah yes, I believe I read something about that.
"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...
Your snarky argument hinges on Marxism being the only existing socialistic ideology, while all other possible ideas on the planet being "right of center"
Just get out of here and keep watching more slop history on YouTube.
Tik, right?
A party can be socialist without being Marxist/communist. It’s an older understanding of “left” and the current split between left and right has become a cartoon. But one could say that during the Second World War the Germans and the Russians were fighting in part over a radically different ideological approach to implementing a similar socialist system.
It's been dissected ad nauseam, but at base they're drastically different arrangements of who and what structures are privileged.
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.
*tenets. Useful take thank you. A structuralist take is a Marxist take.
One could say that, if they were a liar or simply didn't know better.
Which are you?
One who doesn’t trade in false dichotomy.
The exact purpose of a constitution is to protect people from voting their rights away. There is lots of history establishing why successful democracies need strong constitutions.
Because Germany has laws specifically to ban parties that are shown to undermine democratic order, specifically to stop another situation where they gain a majority vote.
That is not the criteria of banning a party. There is the Verfassung or constitution. If you work towards the abolition of the constitution, then you will get punished.
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.
Just because people think something and it becomes popular doesn't make it in their best interest.
> Because Germany has laws specifically to ban parties that are shown not to be working in the best interest of the people
The laws don't work like that, otherwise we arguably would not have any parties left.
You're right, I've updated my comment with the correct wording
Germans, of all people, should know the danger.
Some of them know the exact danger, and want it to happen because they assume they will be part of the in-group.
They don't get a majority. They get 28% of the votes at current polls.
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. So that everybody can live their life as they please. The AfD clearly is against all of that. Our constitution offers a way to defend against these forces and it is time that the process is started.
By following Article 21(2) of the Basic Law and Sections 43 et seq. of the Federal Constitutional Court Act
well for example in Romania (EU member state), they canceled the presidential elections (2024) after they were won by a person no one knew anything about.
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.
You're holding up unelected judges overturning an election as a good example of democracy?
Afaik, didn't the Romanian election also feature Russian money literally buying votes?
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?
> How can you ban a party that receives the majority vote of the population?
Why not?
Because who decides when its not in the people best interest? Oh right, not the people since they clearly voted for them for a reason.
Noone decides that, because that's not the metric. The metric is whether the party is antidemocratic. As we know from history, sometimes people do vote for antidemocratic parties. But back in 1946 it was decided that no antidemocratic parties shall be allowed anymore, no matter how much support they gain.
Most people do NOT vote for them though, we're talking about 30% at most, and the other 70% are definitely not supporting anything close to the afd
> who decides when its not in the people best interest? Oh right, not the people
Damn right it isn't, because for most of them it is against their own interests. They vote out of emotion.
>Because who decides when its not in the people best interest? Oh right, not the people since they clearly voted for them for a reason.
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.
Who is the banner? The public?
It's in Article 21 of the Grundgesetz
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/
not a majority, just biggest share
This is correct. They won ~43% of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. It is also worth mentioning that the population in that state is tiny, just 2.1 million people.
I have grown tired of anyone calling mildly conservative views as far right or authoritarian. Look at the condition Europe is in.
And do you also include the forced deportation of people with non-German ethnic backgrounds, even if they are citizens of Germany, in these "mildly conservative views"?
I have grown tired of people not accepting that a party can truly be far right and try to put it off as being a shift in perception of the general public.
Today anything that is not left is labeled as far right in the media.
I think journalists have to realize that crying wolf always stops working when you need it the most.
Germany has five to six parties (depending on election cycle) in the parliament. Noone calls the SPD far right. You may find people debating whether the SPD or the CDU marks the center, but the AfD is clearly far right.
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".)
I am not informed enough about AfDs platform to judge.
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.
Are you saying the AfD represents "mildly conservative views"?
Well, they aren't running any camps yet, so how can you prove they will actually run camps in the future? You can't, so internet argument rules require you must accept that the opposite is factual.
What condition the Europe is in and in comparison to what?
The AfD became relevant precisely because the conservatives (CDU) were not far right enough. They exist to be more right wing than the conservatives. They are as blatently far right as it gets.
I think they are worried by the wrath of AfD voters. Would've been easier if they had done it years ago, I think there has been a lot of evidence that they are unconstitutional in Germany for a long time?
Similar to the UK. Neither cons or labour want to take action against reform, because then it labels them as the party that is overreaching
I'm not here to be an AfD apologist. I think a lot of their rhetoric is awful. However, in German constitutional law, there is a very high bar to ban a political party. In defense of the German Constitution, I think it is a good thing that there is a very high bar. If the bar was low, it could easily be abused.
Two important facts:
Also, it incredibly rare to ban political parties in Germany. Whenever I see Alice Weidel, I see a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is pretty genius that AfD selected her as head of the party. She provides a thin veneer of suitability over a horrible underbelly.If a constitution had a pro slavery clause and a party is trying to change that we would consider them heroes, so why is it such a bad thing to change the system if it is failing to provide for the people?
The entire point of a constitution is to remain unchanged.
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.
That assumes the constitution isn't tyrannical or hasn't been conceived at a time where everything was different. It's like telling a slave you should follow the law because it's the law.
I don't see how you would look at the German constitution as tyrannical. It guarantees rights, not restrictions. (The German constitution is fairly weak btw, most of its articles are optional.) The only potentially oppressive article is the military draft for men.
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).
> Just start the process to ban this party already
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!).
> Whatever happend to Voltares "I disprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it"?
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.
Voltaire never said that. However I understand your point, the truth is Europe has been on the precipice of far-right rule for decades and the only solution the European democracies found has been to push for banning, cutting funds, censoring the beast.
Anything but address the actual issues that helped catapult them to the top.
Free speech in Germany is limited. Hate speech, nazi slogans, etc... are banned.
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.
Well, given it is in none of his published works: nothing?
Even if the quote was correct, it is about free speech. Being elected and holding political office is beyond that.
It's usually superseded by "don't piss on my head and then tell me it's raining"
The main problem is that these far-right parties have backing of all billionaires around the western world. They are extremely well funded, they have used propaganda to lie to their citizens and gain adepts, they have loyalists inside institutions that will undermine any attempt to apply the law.
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.
Added to that, these parties often get helped by Russian troll farms. A divided Europe that is occupied by infighting is great for them.
Wasn't recently shown that after an attack on a Russian data center, the amount of right-wing supporting tweets went down by a large amount? Which is in my opinion a big supporting factor in your assessment
Nope, not a single proof. The only thing that went down is the number of yandex search engine related automated traffic, aka "bots", which has nothing to do with disinformation "bots"
Are you sure about that? Because troll farms will troll anything that helps to disenfranchise - either far left or far right.
Europe is divided by design. Not by Troll farms. I'm sick and tired of hearing every thing that went in EU favor is glorious success of EU and every EU failure is the work of evil Russian bot farms.
The trend is unfortunately active a lot further afield than just Europe or the USA. Similar recent spikes in political polarisation are showing up everywhere. Everywhere that there's been free social media for the past ~20 years, that is.
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.
Polarisation is just the unfortunate necessity to win the war of capital against labor. Divide et impera.
> By the way, defund billionaires. The Epstein class is behind the funding of these extremist dangerous parties.
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.
History tells us, that only works in shortest of terms. If anything it raises their anti-establishment reputation (see how NDSAP was banned and it did nothing to stop Hitler's rise).
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).
The lesson the US should have taken from that period in Germany is that if a party leader attempts a coup once, you should not let them and their party get elected to finish the job.
A better lesson would be that if you keep ignoring the will of the people they might just choose a new leader to replace you.
You definitely can, and should.
Letting bigots and racists continue to express these views is extremely problematic.
What? The opposite is true. It was treating Hitler with kid gloves that enabled his takeover.
What makes you say that? Between being sent to prison for high treason and having his party banned, what part was kid gloves handling? Not shooting him in the head? That's how you make a martyr for someone worse to take power. He was allowed to get close to power because he was less threatening to capitalist interests.
Hitler was sent to a gentlemen's prison (Festungshaft) for high treason with a sentence of five years, but released after eight months. That is completely ridiculous for high treason. The regular sentence was life, the absolute minimum in case of exonerating circumstances (in this case most likely being right-wing, sorry, "wanting the best for his country") was five years. I'm pretty sure that he would have spent life, or at least many years, in prison if he had been a communist.
Judging by (https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47780/how-did-hi...) the judge and other were already tilted in his favor, as was the Bavarian state as well.
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.
Yeah, nothing smells like protecting the democracy more than banning opposing parties. /s
Even a tolerant society has to be selectively intolerant to preserve itself. The goal is maximally tolerant, not absolute tolerance.
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?
The only reason AfD grows in popularity is because the other parties are deaf to what worries their constituents.
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.
Has the AfD stated they would “end democracy”?
I wouldn’t expect them to state it plainly and publicly if they were.
Are you for real lmao?
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-...
https://amp.dw.com/en/inside-the-afd/a-78193248
> https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilung...
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...
> Hypothetically, should a party running on a platform of ending democracy be allowed to participate in democracy?
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.
Does the current USA smell democratic to you? Are the powers there working or just even more generalised corruption?
The US still generally has freedom of speech and association. We don’t ban political parties from organizing, nor do we tell voters who they cannot vote for.
America is a one party state. It's just that in typical American extravagance, there are two of them.
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. The AfD clearly is against hates both, is not democratic and should be banned.
So, by this standard you must agree that Democrat party must be banned, I saw one D senator threatening to go after young people who work with current administration, that's clearly a threat to democracy.
I wonder what is the longterm plan of those that want to ban the party. We have a situation where (depending on the state) more than 40% of the voters vote AfD. If you ban the party, where would one expect the current voters to go to? I don't think they would vote center-left then...
My personal belief is, that a big share of AfD voters don't know what they vote for. We saw it in the US, where Hispanic people were surprised that they are targeted by ICE. They are manipulated by propaganda. And this can be stopped by destroying the propaganda infrastructure and defund the people behind it.
Probably Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW? Ticks many of the same boxes: anti-immigrants, anti-EU, nationalist and pro-Russia. The primary difference is that they are socialist. So probably the techbros wouldn't be as happy.
It's called wehrhafte Demokratie - not easy to translate, something like fortified democracy. The paradox of tolerance is not the clever counter-argument that you think it is, it's a general problem. An open, permissive system cannot allow a closed system to use its freedoms against it to replace it.
Come on now. AfD is not arguing for or against social or economic issues. This isn't a spat about budgets, or energy.
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.
citation needed
The first image on the article this comment thread is attached to: https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/53/98532a3a-3542-4bcd-a05e-a26...
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dangerous-liais...
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.
Take a look at the leaked mails
"People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people"
Paradox of tolerance is a hypocritical bullshit invoked by people who want to act intolerant not continue to consider themselves tolerant.
There is nothing wrong with being intolerant to something. But claiming you are still tolerant is wrong.
There's nothing the German state hates more than democracy.
Democracy is not only rule of majority. It is also protection of the constitution and minorities. The AfD clearly is against both and thus is not democratic and should be banned.
You are bending a word to mean things it has never in its entire history meant. There is absolutely nothing intrinsic about democracy that protects minorities.
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.
>Internal AfD thread reveals party split over expelling a member for antisemitic writings and a plan to use Israeli government contacts to whitewash AfD antisemitism accusations.
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.
Excellent find. Confirms what I've suspected for years.
The entire leak is available here: https://www.hexane.cc/
To me it seems that a topic that is both popular and a taboo is bound to cause issues, one way or another.
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.
AfD also self-censors. They frame the whole anti-immigration debate as anti-Muslim/asylumseeker, but if you read between the lines they are making arguements that apply to pretty much everyone who isn't German.
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.
Nations should act in the interests of their people. Not everyone else.
I'm not sure restricting immigration or being selective who is especially bad and pretty much every country does it to some extent. It's other stuff associated with that like buddying up with / getting paid by Putin, trying to overthrow democracy and the like that is more of a problem.
> "as AI summaries"
Why not publish the actual emails? Why do they need to be summarised, perhaps incorrectly?
The actual emails can be accessed through the torrent. Although I can't imagine just publishing the emails in their entirety would be more resource/labor intensive than publishing individual AI summaries of each.
But legally pretty perilous regarding copyright and personality rights.
Considering the emails were originally accessed through illegal hacking, I doubt copyright and personality rights(?) are a factor in any way.
The hacker can remain anonymous, the publisher is easily sued.
Good luck suing the site that's hosted anonymously. I'm sure that won't be a futile legal exercise
Originals are in the torrent
Narrative control. Now second order articles can be written which quote only the summaries.
Propaganda works like this; they know most people won't dig any further than the headline and summaries.
Article without the e-mail wall: https://vovavili.github.io/afd-leak-article/
Sounds interesting, but this put me off: "You've read 21% Give us your email to read the full story"
You gotta respect the honesty.
Did they also publish the prompts and models they used for the summaries? It'd be nice to test this on some examples :)
I don't see the metadata of ALL 421 179 emails available on the index https://www.hexane.cc/table/?board=mail. Am I missing something?
It's fair that you disagree with AFD, even disagree a lot. But could we please rethink the use of "far", when they have 20% of the seats in parliament?
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.
In 1933, NSDAP gained about 44% of seats which would make them more centrist than AfD by your logic.
By some measures... yes? Take slavery, which would be considered even more right wing than whatever the current US "far right" is, but was more or less tolerated before abolition. Does that make all parties of the time far right?
I think you didn't get the point GP was making, so let me rephrase:
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.
As we all know, any popular political party in Germany can never turn out to be literal facists
Well they are definitely far right especially if you compare them to other right wing parties in Europe. AfD is monitored by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and their former youth organizations have been designated as confirmed right-wing extremist by them. They talk about mass deportations of citizens termed as "remigration" and leading party figures intentionally used the banned Nazi SA paramilitary slogan "Alles für Deutschland" ("Everything for Germany") at campaign events.
they are nazis, and should be called as such. go away if this bullshit of both sides are bad.
>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.
It wont change anyone's opinion. People vote for them because they are the only serious anti-immigration party.
People vote for them because the media has spent decades learning that the easiest way to gain ad revenue is by spreading outrage. And now it's coming back to bite many countries
Ah so you want the media to not report on the replacement of western populations with third world migrants nobody voted for. Got it.
Ah so you're responding with a bad faith reductio ad absurdum argument. Got it
People still think that's possible? lmao.
this is bullshit, lets look at this "email leak": "https://www.hexane.cc/detail/?uid=!%26!AAAAAAAAAAAYAAAAAAAAA..."
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.
> would find any discussion based on statistically correct data of immigrants "dehumanizing"
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?
Let me tell you a secret, most people even more so none Europeans use derogatory terms of that level daily in their private conversations. Considering the rape rates in the EU you can't begrudge some Germans having low opinion of Muslims.
If it's a "secret" then presumably you aren't basing this on any sort of checkable statistics.
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.)
Re your last sentence: US politics is "WWE style", certainly. Is German politics like that? Or are they more... European or something, where there's still decorum?
The EU is a little bit more tame than the US, but not by much, also those are private emails, not public statements. My point is using such language is (unfortunately) not something "scandalous".
I am no fan of the AFD (especially because I live in Poland) but mostly because I don’t like having opinions on political parties in countries where I don’t live and don’t speak the language.
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.
The right only cares about wellbeing of the rich, and is usually keen to exploit the demographic majority in the interest of the few (see what is happening in US now). I follow politics of democratic countries closely for few dozen years, but I have yet to find an example of rightist party which improved economic wellbeing of its constituents (except those who are already rich)
Worth considering Spain. Spain should be much wealthier than it is. And that's due to Franco.
Exactly. The establishment doesn’t care about the people and wave them off, so populist parties took the advantage. This happened before and will happen again.
Let's be crystal clear, parties like the AfD don't care either. History is chock full of examples where far-right leaders got into power and broke most of their promises and achieved the polar opposite for most of their followers. For example Trump campaigned on "eggs too expensive" and promptly passed legislation that allowed the farms to price-fix even harder leading to "eggs even more expensive". The same has happened again and again with the "let's make the country secure again" claims, e.g. starting WW2 did not in fact make the average German's life safer.
Their propaganda is that they care so the point is that the other guys don’t care so people flock to someone who says they genuinely care. It’s hard to fix the economy so I don’t think anyone can fix it. And as history shows again and again I think whoever gets the government is going to sleep with the big corps anyway.
Are you not a fan of AfD if you believe everything they claim and completely demonize the other side?
I don’t really understand what you’re asking, but I don’t think the AFD is really a unique phenomenon. The popularity of right wing parties is across the entire West and IMO it’s for the exact reasons I just wrote.
Harris lost to Trump in 2024 for what I see as exactly the same reasons.
I think you downplay the role of social media in fanning the flames.
"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.
Sure that’s a factor. But I think it’s pretty obvious in reality that a lot of people are not having a good time in contemporary western society. Social media didn’t invent that.
> Social media didn’t invent that.
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.
I think both can be true: there are issues with affordable housing and integration of immigrants. But at the same time parties are poisoning minds with mass-scale disinformation, propaganda, trolling, through social media. These are even more effective when issues already exist.
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's like saying the establishment would have an easier time controlling the unruly populance if they still had an iron grip on all public communication. True, but doesn't exactly advance the argument that I think you want to.
That's not at all what I'm saying, you can make your point without trying to stuff words in my mouth.
The mistake in your analysis is that it is not just the far right but populism in general is on the rise, Mamdani, Green party in the UK etc.
I don’t see how that goes against what I’ve said. It’s not about right wing parties becoming more inherently popular, it’s about them taking advantage of the unpopularity of the establishment, and voters looking the other way on moral issues because of it.
That doesn’t imply that the candidate must have morally dubious character, just that morally dubious characters are taking advantage of it.
> I don’t like having opinions on political parties in countries where
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)
It's a little condescending to treat millions of people as puppets of billionaires. Are there not billions behind the media you consume? (ycombinator...)
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?
> ... centrist governments ... shoulder any blame
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.
I agree with much of what you are saying. Personally, I have a distaste for far-right and far-left parties, to put it mildly. However, I think it's really telling that the term "populism" has been so vilified. Here is the definition of populism according to Merriam-Webster:
> 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.
The Nazis became popular during The Great Depression (which affected Germany) and we are seeing history repeat itself. Someone is now going to tell me we aren't in a recession because "number go up!" while everything around us tells us a different story.
The great depression was just as much a wealth concentration at the cost of the 95% as is happening now, history will repeat itself. Speculation followed by wealth inequality followed by tarifs followed by reduced international trade. Sounds familiar.
The economic platform of the AfD doesn't even pretend to care about normal people. Neither does the Republican platform and Trump in particular in the US.
This argument has been repeated for decades, but I just don't see it.
You're probably too well informed. Most people aren't.
> the AfD doesn't even pretend to care about normal people.
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".
Deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy aren't conservative values. Any conservative that believes that has been duped into libertarian capitalism.
> Deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy aren't conservative values.
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.
Sure, fair enough, but in my defense, "conservative" used to mean fiscal conservativism is a very American concept. I wouldn't say 'conservative-minded "normal people"' in a discussion about the AfD necessarily or obviously invokes the idea of fiscal conservativism.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv98ze40jz18o
Correct, everyone is paying more except the top 1% under Trump.
>here is my state media propaganda which proves ruling party point!
I have different hypothesis. How I see it democracy have 2 very good feedback loops.
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.
Well, this is exactly how people voted for Hitler, and I would have assumed people know from history how it ended when "moral approach" was thrown away.
Apparently, everyone forgot already.
You’ve taken the exact opposite point from the comment I wrote. Please try again.
> But I think this kind of moral approach is precisely why right wing parties have been winning globally
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.
And this is the party endorsed by Elon Musk. The guy who performed a Nazi salute on stage, twice.
Anyone have the full article?
"Give us your email to read the full story"
no thanks
On Mac one can create throwaway iCloud email addresses for such cases, but yeah..
too much hassle especially considering I dont live in Germany and I was only mildly interested, closing the tab is much easier
the whole article isn't even hidden inside the HTML code
mailinator works.
yo@grr.la
This somewhat worries me, because I am not sure if the trade was worth it, strategically speaking.
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.
They commit all the crimes already. If afd was anything but a political party, the security agencies would investigate them using those measures.
They've already been investigated by security agencies in Germany
They've already infiltrated all the agencies in Germany
I don't think being hacked by an anonymous entity grants much political advantage? If anything the downside is shifting the overtone window by dumping all the far right takes on the broad public and making them a bit more familiar.
If you allow me to play spin doctor:
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).
I think part of the advantage is providing public evidence in favor of a Verbotsverfahren, e.g. the process of banning a political party for being counter to the principles of the German constitution and with that, pressure towards the state organs to stop ignoring the threat and finally do their job.
Yeah that's also what I thought the idea is behind that, but I'm afraid that at this point, a Verbotsverfahren will not work out the way people hope it will.
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.
I think the ideal moment to ban them was years ago. The next best one is right now.
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.
Maybe, but otoh, action bias alone is a terrible advisor.
"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.
Look at this tyrant trying to ban popular ideas that he doesn’t like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Sometimes you gotta, if you want to keep a free society free
If "popular ideas" == Neonazis trying to overthrow the German constitutional order, then yes, that is the appropriate response.
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
You don't need more evidence for a Verbotsverfahren. That's not the reason one wasn't already started. It's the unwillingness of the parliament to initiate one
Well, duh, I mean, if they have to pick a side, how are they supposed to continue fleecing both sides?
That they are rabidly pro-Israel while simultaneously glorifying Hitler and indulging in conspiracy theories of Jewish domination certainly lends credence to the idea that anti-Zionism ≠ antisemitism
One can be an anti-Semite ("Jew hater") and pro-Zionist ("Israel supporter") at the same time: "I hate them so much that I want them out of my country and into their own country".
This however speaks nothing of anti-Zionism.
Its actually quite simple:
They hate Jews
They really hate muslims
Jews are grandfathered in, muslims are the new enemy.
It's hilarious watching old European neonazis allying themselves with Israel today.
The confusion is palpable.
I think it is even simpler than that. Populist parties need to have a simple message that their supporters can easily understand. Having two quite different enemies at the same time would make things harder.
If there were 0 muslims in Germany today, their politics would be 100% about Jews controlling the world and all that stuff.
I'm convinced that many right wingers pretend to support Israel while being secretly delighted to see the country heading deeper into trouble. It serves as a convenient disguise for their antisemitism.
There is no confusion: Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein famously denounced the right-wing tendencies of Israel in 1948 in a letter to the New York Times:
"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.
Because Israel is their wet dream: an ethno-suprematist country, with right to self-determination only for the majority group, that seeks for lebensraum and shoots anyone who opposes it.
Frankly, I think their supposed "antisemitism" is a joke compared to their anti-Arab and anti-muslim attitude. Those are their real enemies now.
The reality is that quite a bit of islamic attitudes and culture don‘t fit in in the west. We‘ve not figured out how to counter this yet.
A lot of this is this is just invented.
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's very simple: stop destabilizing the Middle East.
Was that also your argument before the crusades?
I'm honestly struggling to see what the crusades have to do with this discussion, mind helping me out?
There's a general issue with immigrants coming from different cultures and whose values and traditions don't align with our, often in ways that go against the principles of our societies. It's something that needs to be addressed seriously, and the failure of political parties to do so has fuelled the growth of a right that profits from the issue and tries to paint it bigger than it is.
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.
Nazis and fascism are getting socially acceptable again. The revulsion after WW II didn't last very long.
It lasted whilst it was still in living memory
> 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 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
Uh, I have a few immigrant friends in Germany. This is really uncomfortable.
There are parties like this in every European Country. E.g. RN in France, FPÖ in Austria, Fidesz in Hungary, PVV in Netherlands and so on. These populist parties get a lot of votes, mainly because the parties that have been in charge for the past 10-30 years have failing to address issues of voters. Doesn't mean that these ones are any better - they arent.
The only advantage most of these parties have is not having been in a position of power to demonstrate they are at least as incompetent as other parties that have, if not significantly more so.
The PVV in The Netherlands twice (once as a coalition supporter, once as part of a coalition). Both times were a disaster. People just go to the next populist right-wing party (e.g. FvD, which is more extreme right than the PVV, pretty similar to the AfD) and then after a few years they come back.
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.
Germany's immigration policy over the last decade wasn't an ooopsie though but a deliberate choice by the establishment.
I know, I have them in my country too. But sometimes this reality fades in the background and every now pops up again and hits you hard.
The people funding the Nazis won't let the moderate parties do anything useful for the common person, they protect their own wealth while they force the politicians to implement austerity that drives people to support Nazis.
I leave it to the reader to decide if I'm talking about now or the 1930s.
Article text:
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.
Here's a helpful diagram:
There are some general observations one can make: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.
this discussion is gonna escalate quickly I fear. But I hope any mods here can unflag as much as possible to not skew the discussion.
We had to make them illegal while we could, but we went too soft on these Russian assets. Now we gotta deal with the consequences
Why?
Honestly because they are fucking nazis in disguise, and it’s clear just by scratching the surface. The dog whistles alone were enough.
It's misdirection to the point of conspiracy theory to assume that Germany is incapable of organically producing a hateful far-right movement like AFD without it being manufactured by Russia
It’s obscene to think they would be so successful however without Russia’s active role in it.
It's pretty easy to be successfull when your competition is the established parties who make they contempt for Germans clear every day.
The German-Russian sympathy is the most incredible oddity and never fails to breed a major fraud - Schroeder, Wirecard, AfD.
Honestly, I hate to tell you this, but the Germans have a whole track record of this fascism malarkey. I'm sure Vlad is pleased as punch, and definitely nudging it along, but if the influence was quite so impactive it would also be a lot more visible.
Never said they were installed by Russia. Putain only has to find the proper bad seeds and water them. That is clearly what is happening here. This is well known in Germany, and they are even kinda fighting internally over how much display of sympathy for Russia is proper to show publicly.
These comments are getting spicy... sad.
The timing of the release is rather sinister
How so?
This comes after a campaign that has been going on for weeks claiming that Die Linke is antisemitic (the left-wing party that got the most votes in Berlin's most recent election). CDU (the current national governing party) has been pushing the narrative that Die Linke is comparable to AfD, because they call for human rights in Gaza and to stop the unconditional support for Israel by the German government.
the timing is fortunate then in my opinion :)
This submission is against the guidelines. And several comments are illegal. But no one cares of course.
I don't see how it is against the guidelines. And no comment here is illegal, everybody is entitled to their own opinion about the party.
In Germany, a lot of things related to these themes are illegal to say.
hard to imagine HACKED emails be against guidelines of HACKER news
Nothing speaks more about the quality of your newsletter than forcing people to sign up for it.
It’s clearly the central topic here, congratulations
In all fairness, handing over emails does seem like the central topic here.
First they came for my email address…
I dont know why almost everyone is Labelled far right who have mildly conservative views.
If you have mildly conservative views in Germany, you vote CDU or FDP. You don't vote AfD.
Left and communist views have failed. Hence such parties rise. If the centrist parties can take bold decisions, such parties won't be needed.
Centrist and far-right views have failed. Spectacularly so in Germany. Maybe spectacularly is not the right word for WW2 and the Holocaust?
Things that far right people say who consider themselfes mildly conservative for 100.
It is not "mildly conservative" to call for deportation of citizens with middle-eastern roots, removing disabled children from normal schools and glorifying Hitler while taking money from Russia
> a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”
Ahh, old good mild conservatism.
I mean if 1/3rd of the people have that view then by definition it’s not “far” anything, no matter what the view is. It’s okay to just say you disagree with them
That is an interesting moral compass you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.
Don't worry, they can just throw it away when it becomes inconvenient.
Shooting the messenger is fun and all but maybe you should place your killing instincts on something more worthy of its target…Jesus Christ
Surely you must realize how absurd your line of thinking is. Far left and far right are not labels based on popularity! Communism is still far left ideology if you live in communist country, same with fascism being far right.