AfD plans to turn Germany into authoritarian state, vice-chancellor warns
AfD plans to turn Germany into authoritarian state, vice-chancellor warns
Robert Habeck tacitly backs calls to ban far-right party after it participated in meeting to discuss mass deportations
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Am I the only one who sees hypocrisy in banning a political party in order to "mitigate a threat to democracy"?
Not asking in the specific context of the article either, I'm asking in general, because this sentiment isn't specific to just Germany...
How is a diverse opinion a threat to democracy? Excluding a portion of the population from the polls is the antithesis of the basic concept of democracy, and almost globally this is being wholesale ignored, and its almost exclusively a phenomena specific to the left...
Bro….. you can’t have a functioning democracy with an anti-democratic party freely participating in it. If a party’s explicit goal is to end democracy, they really SHOULDN’T be allowed to participate in democracy at all.
Paradox of tolerance and all…
Democracy shouldn’t be a free-for-all, where warlords can win enough votes to conquer the world. That is insane.
It's not hypocrisy because AfD is racist and anti-democratic. There's no paradox here. No tolerance for intolerance, if you let a party be part of the democratic process who is trying to destroy it, you stop have a working democracy. Only a fool would let this happen. Banning AfD doesn't suddenly shift Germany into a pseudo democracy, we have many more parties.
However we can also agree that this is just hiding a bigger issue. So it's no solution and is only gaining time to solve a deeper rooted issue.
If the situation is that you ban a political party because you're worried the people will vote for a facsist dictatorship (and I'm not saying that's an impossibility these days), this is just a band-aid at best. Because clearly the people will get what they want somehow, some day.
The solution needs to be to educate people better, because no sane and educated turkey votes for Christmas (Thanksgiving I guess for the Americans).
Education is potentially a worse band-aid than anti-democratic party banning, because education requires skilled, paid and motivated workers that aren't corrupted themselves. Party banning requires observing collective political organisations while education requires observing individual working persons.
Well, I'm not advocating against party banning. I'm just saying that if the reason a party is being banned is because there's a real chance they might win an election. Then it really is just deferring the problem.
Latent far right ideologies were the dominant background when the constitution came into existence. Yet, this is a situation (anti-democratic party with considerable power) that is not supposed to happen.
You're not banning part of the population from the polls, you're removing anti-democratic elements. I'd argue this is an essential step for democracy to thrive.
"[..] and its almost exclusively a phenomena specific to the left..."
What about the KPD 1956 or the German Autumn then? This party and movement also represented
"a portion of the population"
that was excluded from polls or 'participation'.
The paradox of tolerance, the historical fragility of each rule of law, the separation of powers and the constitutional state ( 'Rechtstaat' ) render parties and movements whose alignment aim for the qualitative destruction of these markers of political entities built to survive more than one election as not just risks, but dangers to regional democracy.
How is a diverse opinion a threat to democracy?
If the opinion is that there should not be a democracy, then that is a threat to democracy.
Excluding a portion of the population from the polls
They are not excluded. They are free to vote for a party that is in line with the constitution.
its almost exclusively a phenomena specific to the left...
I don't even know what to say. In which world are the far-right, fascists and nazis known to value opposing views? Are you serious?
Didn't they teach you the history of WW2?
Germany saw first-hand what happens when a far-right party is elected through democratic ways. They have all the reasons in the world to try to prevent it again.