The Alternative für Deutschland has dramatically expanded its support, established itself as a dominant political force in parts of eastern Germany and is now a major national political force. The response from parts of Germany's political establishment has reopened an extraordinary question: if voters increasingly reject the established parties, should politicians change their policies — or seek to remove their competitor from the ballot?
Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, who also leads the SPD, has again called for serious examination of proceedings to prohibit the AfD. Klingbeil has described examination of such a procedure, provided the legal conditions are established, as part of defending German democracy.
Instead of dismissing those results, the governing parties themselves have acknowledged that voters are sending Berlin a message and that government policy must respond.
Yet simultaneously, the debate about legally excluding the party many of those voters supported is intensifying.
“The timing inevitably raises a difficult democratic question. Recent state elections have demonstrated the scale of the political shift, particularly in eastern Germany.”
EuroAsia.News, reporting from Berlin
Supporters of prohibition reject the suggestion that this is undemocratic. Germany's constitution deliberately contains the concept of "wehrhafte Demokratie" — militant or defensive democracy. Article 21 allows parties seeking to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order to be declared unconstitutional.
Crucially, however, the government cannot simply ban the AfD. An application can be brought by the Bundestag, Bundesrat or federal government, but the decision belongs exclusively to the Federal Constitutional Court. That separation was deliberately designed to prevent governments from eliminating inconvenient political opponents.
Germany's history explains why.
The Federal Republic was constructed after two catastrophic experiences: the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship that followed. The constitution's designers wanted democracy capable of defending itself against movements seeking to use democratic institutions to destroy democracy.
But they were equally conscious of another danger: the state itself suppressing political competition.
The Constitutional Court describes these two objectives together. Germany must be capable of combating anti-constitutional parties, but political parties must simultaneously remain as free as possible from state interference. The decision was therefore placed with an independent constitutional court rather than the executive.
The threshold is intentionally extremely high.
Germany has prohibited only two parties since the Federal Republic was founded: the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party in 1952 and the Communist Party of Germany in 1956. Even the NPD — regarded by the Constitutional Court in 2017 as pursuing objectives hostile to the constitutional order — was not banned, because the court found insufficient evidence that it had the potential to achieve those objectives.
The court has consequently treated party prohibition as democracy's most severe constitutional instrument. Merely expressing radical, offensive or even anti-constitutional ideas is insufficient. A party must actively and systematically work toward undermining the democratic order, and there must be weighty indications that its efforts could succeed.
Ironically, the AfD's electoral growth could therefore make the legal question more serious because the constitutional test includes a party's potential to implement its objectives.
But political legitimacy is a different question from constitutional legality.
The danger for Germany's governing parties is that the prohibition debate becomes a substitute for understanding why millions of Germans are voting AfD.
The latest elections followed years of weak economic performance, disputes over migration, energy policy, pensions, Ukraine, industrial competitiveness and declining trust in traditional institutions. Those are political questions that cannot themselves be settled by a constitutional court.
And another electoral test is already approaching.
Germany's next major election cycle begins on 18 April 2027, when Schleswig-Holstein and Saarland elect new state parliaments. Just one week later, on 25 April, North Rhine-Westphalia — Germany's most populous state — votes. Bremen follows on 30 May and Lower Saxony on 26 September. The next regular federal election is expected in spring 2029.
That calendar makes the present debate especially consequential. Within seven months, German voters will again be asked to judge the established parties and their alternatives across several very different parts of the country.
A democracy unquestionably has the right to defend its constitutional foundations. If a party genuinely seeks to dismantle democratic government, Germany's Basic Law provides a legal mechanism for dealing with precisely that threat.
But a prohibition procedure cannot answer another question: why did voters abandon the established parties in the first place?
Banning a political organisation does not automatically eliminate dissatisfaction over migration, living costs, industrial decline, energy prices or distrust of government. Nor does it erase the political opinions of millions of voters.
Germany therefore faces two separate tests.
The Constitutional Court may eventually have to determine whether the AfD crosses the exceptionally high legal threshold established by Article 21.
Germany's established parties face another test much sooner — April 2027 — when voters return to the ballot box.
The first question belongs to judges and constitutional law.
The second can ultimately be answered only by politics and voters.
