Episode 129: German Constitutional Law and Banning Extremist Political Parties
Eric Langenbacher
Senior Fellow; Director, Society, Culture & Politics Program
Dr. Eric Langenbacher is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Society, Culture & Politics Program at AICGS.
Dr. Langenbacher studied in Canada before completing his PhD in Georgetown University’s Government Department in 2002. His research interests include collective memory, political culture, and electoral politics in Germany and Europe. Recent publications include the edited volumes Twilight of the Merkel Era: Power and Politics in Germany after the 2017 Bundestag Election (2019), The Merkel Republic: The 2013 Bundestag Election and its Consequences (2015), Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe (co-edited with Ruth Wittlinger and Bill Niven, 2013), Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations (co-edited with Yossi Shain, 2010), and From the Bonn to the Berlin Republic: Germany at the Twentieth Anniversary of Unification (co-edited with Jeffrey J. Anderson, 2010). With David Conradt, he is also the author of The German Polity, 10th and 11th edition (2013, 2017).
Dr. Langenbacher remains affiliated with Georgetown University as Teaching Professor and Director of the Honors Program in the Department of Government. He has also taught at George Washington University, Washington College, The University of Navarre, and the Universidad Nacional de General San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has given talks across the world. He was selected Faculty Member of the Year by the School of Foreign Service in 2009 and was awarded a Fulbright grant in 1999-2000 and the Hopper Memorial Fellowship at Georgetown in 2000-2001. Since 2005, he has also been Managing Editor of German Politics and Society, which is housed in Georgetown’s BMW Center for German and European Studies. Dr. Langenbacher has also planned and run dozens of short programs for groups from abroad, as well as for the U.S. Departments of State and Defense on a variety of topics pertaining to American and comparative politics, business, culture, and public policy.
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Jeff Rathke
President of AGI
Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.
Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.
Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an M.P.P. degree from Princeton University and B.A. and B.S. degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.
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Russell A. Miller
Washington and Lee School of Law
Russell Miller teaches and researches in the fields of constitutional law, international law, comparative law theory and methods, and German law and legal culture. He is the author or editor of several books on international law, constitutional law, comparative law theory and methods, and German law and legal culture, including: Constitutional Places – Landmarks on the Road to German Democracy (Kunth 2025); An Introduction to German Law and Legal Culture (CUP 2024); Privacy and Power: A Transatlantic Dialogue in the Shadow of the NSA-Affair (CUP 2017); The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany (Duke 2012); Progress in International Law (Brill 2008); and Transboundary Harm in International Law: Lessons from the Trail Smelter Arbitration (CUP 2006). His articles and commentary have appeared in respected journals and in the international media. Miller is a two-time Fulbright Senior Research Fellow. In 2021 he was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize in recognition of his research on German law and his contributions to transatlantic understanding. Miller is the co-founder of the German Law Journal and the Berlin-based Rule of Law Academy. From 2020-2022, Miller served as the head of the Max Planck Law Network, a consortium of ten world-class research institutes involving more than twenty research directors and more than 400 PhD candidates, post-doctoral reserachers, and guest researchers. He has been a regular visiting fellow at universities and research institutes in Germany, including the Max Planck Institute for Public International Law (Heidelberg), the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the University of Münster, and the University of Freiburg. He served as a law clerk at the German Federal Constitutional Court and for Judge Robert H. Whaley of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington. Miller has degrees from Washington State University (BA 1991), Duke University (MA and JD 1994) and the University of Frankfurt (2002). He was a DAAD/AGI Research Fellow in 2015.
Even though it came in second place in the 2025 German federal election, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) was subsequently classified as an extremist party by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesverfassungsschutz, BfV). This has renewed discussions in Germany about banning the party as a threat to the democratic order. Dr. Russell Miller, an expert in German constitutional law, joins The Zeitgeist to discuss the purpose of the BfV, previous attempts to ban parties in Germany, and the procedures involved. He also discusses the transatlantic effects of a ban of the AfD, given the strong criticism the BfV’s designation drew from parts of the Trump administration.
Russ Miller’s Photo Essay from the 2017 NPD Party-Ban Proceedings
Host
Jeff Rathke, President, AGI
Guests
Eric Langenbacher, AGI Senior Fellow; Director, Society, Culture & Politics Program
Russell A. Miller, J.B. Stombock Professor of Law, Washington and Lee School of Law
Transcript
Jeff Rathke
I want to welcome all of our listeners to this episode of the Zeitgeist. Today we are talking about extremism, German law and the constitution, and the potential for banning political parties. I’m pleased to be joined by my colleague Eric Langenbacher, who is the director of our Society, Culture & Politics program, and in a moment, I’m going to hand things over to Eric to introduce our very special guest and get the conversation started.
But maybe just to set the scene a bit: in May of this year, Germany’s domestic security service, which is known as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, categorized the far-right Alternative for Germany party as what they call, “verifiably right extremist.” That party goes by the initials AfD, and many of our listeners will have heard of it. This determination by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution had no direct legal impact on the party’s ability to operate in the German political system, but it unleashed a very harsh reaction from Washington. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Twitter called it a called it “tyranny in disguise” and Vice President Vance said that the German establishment was “rebuilding the Berlin Wall.” Now, the German government rejected that criticism. As the Foreign Office posted, “we have learned from our history that right-wing extremism needs to be stopped.” The Foreign Office further said, “This is democracy.” It’s remarkable, this U.S. intervention in a German domestic political process. This was also about the same time that Donald Trump posted on his own social network, “FREE MARINE LEPEN!” in response to her conviction by a French court.
Since then, we have also seen a push in the German political system to start a process that could ban the AfD. This is a party that has 22 to 24 percent support in public opinion polls and has been around that level for quite some time. Naturally, the proposal to ban a political party raises all sorts of questions about the Constitution and the legal framework, about the consistency with democratic principles (especially at a time when the Trump administration is frequently accusing European countries of violating free speech and other norms). So, we wanted to get deeper into this and understand what is happening, what could happen, and how this fits into Germany’s legal framework. With that, Eric, let me hand it over to you and we can get started.
Eric Langenbacher
Thanks, Jeff. It’s my great pleasure to briefly introduce Russell A. Miller, who is the J.B. Stombock Professor of Law at Washington Lee University School of Law. He teaches and researches in the fields of constitutional law, international law, comparative law theory and methods, and German law and legal culture. He’s the author of multiple books; I’ll just mention a couple of the more recent ones here. One is Constitutional Places: Landmarks on the Road to German Democracy, which has come out this year; also An Introduction to German Law and Legal Culture, which came out last year; and then of course I have to mention the classic book, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, which is a standard work in the field. Russ has spent a lot of time in Europe in various capacities. I would point out that he clerked at the German Federal Constitutional Court as well as for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington before taking on his current role. He has degrees from Washington State University, Duke University, and the University of Frankfurt. Russ, thank you so much for joining with us today.
Russ Miller
Hey, Eric and Jeff, it’s great to be here with you, thanks.
Eric Langenbacher
I’ll start by posing a broader question. It would be great if you could explain the motivation behind the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or in German the Verfassungsschutz, as well as the legal and constitutional provisions that are in place to investigate and potentially ban parties.
Russ Miller
We have to do a little bit of German language introduction here. The terminology used to describe these offices is the term Verfassungsschutz and it literally translates—or the translation widely-used is—The Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
You have to remark the Orwellian sound to that translation, and I think to be fair, we have to speak plainly about it. These Offices for the Protection of the Constitution operate both at the federal level, and each of the federal states have their own local version of these offices. They are essentially domestic political spy agencies, and to the degree that that casts a color or tone to them, I think that they should own that status. Their purpose, their function, is to gather and evaluate information about political movements in German society.
Jeff Rathke
Russ, can I interrupt you there for a second? Because it’s also not just domestic. I mean, they also deal with counterintelligence and foreign espionage on German soil. So, they have not only a domestic function.
Russ Miller
That’s right, they have really two mandates. The first mandate is to preserve and protect the “free democratic basic order” of the constitutional regime founded in Germany after the war. But you’re right, Jeff. They also have the mandate to ensure the existence of the Federal Republic, and that has something like, you know, the sense of security concern and existential threats from outside. But you make an important point. These operate alongside traditional law enforcement or intelligence institutions in the German system. It would be important for our listeners to understand that, to the degree that these offices do surveillance work (monitor and surveil institutions or people in German society), that sounds maybe a little bit like what the FBI might be doing or the or the CIA might be doing. The important thing to underscore, this distinguishes these offices from the FBI: They exist strictly to gather political information. The FBI surveils, in principle, in order to interdict crime. There’s a set of norms we enforce as crimes in our society and the FBI as a law enforcement agency meant to interdict and develop evidence to prosecute crime. The Germans have those kinds of institutions as well, but these Verfassungsschutz offices exist strictly to gather political information.
And Eric asked about the history or the background to them. I’m afraid that sort of requires a bit of a detour. It requires me to say that they exist in order to implement the Constitution’s commitment to what we refer to as “militant democracy.” The German translation, or German terminology, is “streitbare Demokratie” or “wehrhafte Demokratie.” These domestic political spy agencies exist in order to realize that constitutional agenda that is “militant democracy.” And your listeners will have great familiarity with this, but Karl Loewenstein, the exiled political theorist, comes to the United States in 1938, and he writes these two monumental political science articles in which he develops the theory of militant democracy. He says, theoretically we should recognize that the tolerance that democracy promotes can be the tool that the enemies of democracy use to destroy it. So that’s the theoretical dimension of his work. He says democracy, to the degree that it tolerates pluralistic approaches to policy and politics actually invites extremists who oppose democracy into the process, and they’ll use it to destroy their democracy. And then he had a second part of this, this militant democratic theory. He developed a set of tools, theorized a set of tools to implement the protection of democracy against that agenda. And those tools consist of dramatic, undemocratic, illiberal measures like banning political parties, forfeiting individual liberties in specific cases. He advocated for censoring speech, propaganda, and democratic-threatening speech. He, interestingly, proposed banning the wearing of uniforms by civilians in society. And you can imagine all of this is reactive in 1938 to what they had already seen in the 30s in Germany. I like linking Loewenstein’s theory about militant democracy to a book that was written at the same time by Max Lerner. The title of that book was It is Later Than You Think, and that’s the message of this theory: you have to build illiberal, anti-democratic tools into your democratic system in order to protect democracy, and domestic political spy agencies like the Verfassungsschutz is one of those tools.
Eric Langenbacher
And what about the specific provisions to ban parties? To give a little bit more history, there have only been two parties in the history of the Federal Republic that have actually been banned. The Socialist Reich party back in 1952, the Communist Party in 1956, and then, there were quite a few attempts over the last few decades to ban the NPD party. I believe that a partial ban was eventually successful back in 2021, but maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that. Apparently, there are two conditions that have to pertain for a party to be considered for banishment: that they have to have an aggressive and combative attack, with the ultimate aim to abolish the liberal democratic order, then, there’s a new or newer criterion called “potentiality,” that they actually have to have a decent chance of being able to overthrow the Liberal Democratic order. If memory serves, the NPD was found to be aggressive and combative, but it wasn’t really a threat to the liberal democratic order. So that’s why a kind of soft ban happened. But maybe you can walk us through that a little bit.
Russ Miller
I’ve described the background to all of this as a set of theories articulated by a scholar clearly reacting to the politics and the processes used by the Nazis. But in fact, much of that theory was implemented, integrated into Germany’s postwar Constitution. It’s not just political theory now, it’s a set of constitutional provisions. And you’re right, Eric. The Constitution, the postwar Basic Law, adopts a number of these tools that Loewenstein described.
So, for example, it permits party bans like we’ve been discussing. But it also permits the banning of civic associations or civil society groups. And the Constitution also anticipates the forfeiture of basic rights in Article 18 of the Constitution. So, the founders of the postwar Federal Republic reflected on, embraced, the theory and the toolkit articulated by Loewenstein, and so the possibility for party bans exists. You’re right, of course, that this is meant to be rare, but the possibility exists, and it was implemented early in the Federal Republic in what most regard as sort of a left-right attempt at rebalancing the politics in postwar Germany. So, the neo-Nazi right-wing party, the Socialist Reich party was banned, and then shortly thereafter, the left-oriented Communist Party of Germany was banned. Since then, this has loomed on the political horizon as an important signaling, constitutional signaling, but has been rarely implemented. You’re right that the main efforts to really pursue, we can say in the “modern era,” party ban have been focused on the National Democratic Party of Germany, that had very low-level, very modest, but kind of persistent political traction in the 90s. And I imagine that party as a sort of old school right-wing or old school neo-Nazi parties, in the sense that the old Front National of LePen’s father was sort of an open neo-Nazi sympathizer. And that is, the NPD occupied a space prior to what we would call the modernizing, moderating developments of these populist right-wing parties from Meloni and LePen the daughter and now the AfD. So that’s the character of that NPD, and it’s true.
The Germans sought to ban it on two occasions. In the early 2000s, there was an attempt to ban the NPD and then again in 2015-2016, in that time period. Both of those attempts fundamentally failed, so the ban, the attempt to ban the party in the sense that the Constitution anticipates was a failure in both of those circumstances but for different reasons. The first attempt to ban the NPD failed in a procedural phase of the case, and it failed because as we’ve been discussing, the Offices for the Protection of the Constitution are the fact-gathering entity that’s meant to gather the evidence needed to justify or evaluate the possibility of a ban by the Federal Constitutional Court. As the case developed in 2001-2002, it became increasingly clear to the Federal Constitutional Court that the paid informants of the Verfassungsschutz had achieved so much prominence in the party that it was no longer possible to tell what the organic policy of the party was and what was, in some sense, state-funded, state-directed policy of the party. The court, in a very narrow vote had to decide, “we’re setting that process aside, we’re denying the pursuit of that party ban, because we can no longer distinguish what is the authentic organic, extremist policy of the NPD, and how much of its extremism has been fomented and fostered by state-paid informants.” That was the failure in the early 2000s.
In the later attempt 2015-2016, that attempt to ban the NPD was brought exclusively by the Federal Council of States, the Bundesrat. The Court concluded that on the legal standard to be applied, that the first element had been fulfilled, that the NPD, as you said, represented an aggressive and hostile force towards the “free democratic basic order.” That their policies of racism, xenophobia, all operated to deny and undermine the “free democratic basic order.” But in that decision the court reached and elevated a second element to the party ban standard. And it said it’s not enough just that the party embodies that kind of threat to the free democratic basic order, but a ban can be justified only if the party has the potential to realize that threat.
So I characterize these two elements of the Court’s standard, the standard is articulated by the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. But I characterize them in terms that the first is a qualitative element. You have to be qualitatively convinced of the threat. And the second, you could crudely say is a quantitative element: do they represent enough dynamism and force in the political space to justify a ban. So, the Court concluded in 2017 that the NPD had fulfilled or satisfied the first of those elements, the qualitative one, but not the second, the quantitative one.
Jeff Rathke
Russ, let me jump in with just one clarifying question or maybe to back up a second, and that is: How does a ban process get initiated? Because in the hyperbolic response from the Trump administration to the declaration of the Verfassungsschutz about the AfD, there seemed to be a presumption that that was the beginning of a ban process. But tell us a little bit more about who actually can initiate that type of proceeding.
Russ Miller
The party ban proceeding must be preceded first and foremost by extensive public debate. That’s not ordained, obviously, but this is such a dramatic, ultima ratio kind of political instrument that it must be built upon and fueled by, framed by, very broad, very deep public debate around the possibility. But formally the possibility for pursuing a party ban is possessed exclusively by the federal government, the Bundestag (the lower House of the federal parliament), and then the Federal Council of the States. So those are the three entities that have the authority to pursue a party ban. That ban consists, that effort consists of an application presented exclusively to the Federal Constitutional Court and the process is then heard by the second Senate—the eight justices of the second Senate of the Court in Karlsruhe.
It raises, Jeff, a really interesting question. I have to say for me, I had always understood that the decision to pursue a party ban was an exclusively political decision that the political parties and the political actors based on political debate would have to make a political decision whether to pursue this dramatic mechanism. But there is emerging scholarly debate around the claim that once a party reaches the categorization that the Verfassungsschutz has recently applied to the AfD, that the political actors are obliged, they’re legally mandated, to pursue a party ban process. That’s a novel argument. It builds a bit on the language in Article 21, paragraph two, of the Basic Law, which says that a party shall be banned if it is a threat to the free democratic basic order. But I have to say, I’ve just returned from some work in Berlin, and I was talking to as many constitutional scholars about this as I could, including (I won’t name names) a few former justices of the Court in Karlsruhe, and most of them quite casually confirmed, confidently confirmed, that this is actually a political decision. There’s no legal mandate to pursue a party ban, even if the Verfassungsschutz moves to that classification of a party as a confirmed threat. And so those are those are the sort of the foundational elements of this: the political parties in the states and the government or the parliament will have to choose whether or not to pursue a ban.
Jeff Rathke
And that’s just a simple majority, so a cabinet decision or a simple majority in the Bundestag or in the Bundesrat?
Russ Miller
I’m not sure, that’s a great question. I don’t know how the Bundestag would take this decision. And it would be interesting if it’s a strict simple majority, you would think that that would drive a decision, first and foremost, by the government, because the government merely duplicates and mirrors the majority in the parliament. But I’m sorry, I don’t know the inside processes for how the Bundestag would make this decision.
Eric Langenbacher
If I can jump in with one follow-up question as well, mainly for our U.S.-based listeners. I find this doctrine of militant democracy to be quite fascinating and obviously key to understand the German system. How unique are these procedures, the party ban procedures in particular? I came across a quote by a former head of the Verfassungsschutz, a controversial person himself, Hans Georg Maaßen, who said that it’s only Germany and Austria that that have this kind of procedure. Is this really that unique?
Russ Miller
No, it’s unique, but it’s not that unique, and I’m very glad that you made reference to the former director of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. I want to answer your question, but it allows me to once again underscore that this process requires convinced democrats and liberals to partner and ally themselves with these Offices for the Protection of the Constitution. And they exist and operate, by their nature, as an illiberal institution. In fact, they sometimes produce really troubling effects. Maaßen, as an example of this, he was the director of the federal offices and has now emerged as a really troubling right-wing ideologue. But more problematic is the history of the NSU murders, the National Socialist Underground murders, a spree of ten murders over ten years that involved migrant victims across Germany. And it emerged after some investigation that the local Offices for the Protection of the Constitution had really troubling proximity to those murders. It at least gives me a chance to underscore that I’m not a natural fan of the Offices for the Protection of the Constitution. And it’s worth highlighting, in the same way that progressive Americans were raised to be somewhat suspicious of the FBI. These processes require good, clear-eyed, conscientious liberals and democrats to operate alongside the Offices for the Protection of the Constitution. That was an aside. I’m sorry about that.
But it’s not true that only Austria and Germany have these party ban proceedings. There are a number of other states. Most prominently, Turkey has the same mechanisms. I mention Turkey as a prominent example because its party ban processes have been tested, reviewed, and upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and so that’s an example of the range of possible other states that use these processes.
Eric Langenbacher
Alright, we are rapidly coming to the end of our time, but I’d like to kind of swing back to one of the points that Jeff mentioned, which was the political reaction by some members of the Trump administration to this potential ban on the AfD. How should Americans react to these kinds of processes, or how can how can we get Americans to understand these illiberal tools that are that are still justified by many in Germany to defend the basic liberal democratic order?
Russ Miller
I think I have to begin by saying we should all be very conscientious about saying, “our approach to these developments requires us to acknowledge that the AfD is deeply problematic. Their xenophobic, anti-immigrant positions are cruel, threatening, and really problematic.” That’s important to me to make that viewpoint clear. But in response to the idea, how might Americans think about this? Maybe a good tool would be to say, let’s use the old tools that make Americans comfortable when interpreting our constitution. History and text are the safe zones, the safe rooms, of constitutional interpretation of the last generation or so. And if you take those approaches, one answer to Americans who find this befuddling or troubling is to say, like it or not, love it or not, the text of the Constitution provides for it. A straightforward textual understanding of constitutionalism, and there’s plenty of stuff in the U.S. Constitution that we struggle to understand or implement, but it’s there. It’s present, and we live with it, and try to make it functional. That’s an important concession. Whether it’s wise policy, whether Germany has outgrown it or not, it’s a squarely, soundly articulated textual framework in the Constitution.
And of course, you must couple that with the historical justification for the introduction of these possible tools in the postwar Constitution. Germans deeply internalized the idea that the Nazis were able to seize power in Germany by using liberal tools, liberal institutions. They were elected, they took advantage of free speech, they freely assembled, and they used all of those liberal pluralistic commitments to develop a base of power that would allow them to destroy the democracy. That’s deeply internalized.
And it’s easy from this far removed, eighty years removed, it’s easy to forget just how devastating the consequences of that kind of broad trust in democracy turned out to be for Germany. They’ve deeply internalized the devastating consequences of a too-great reliance on broad liberal commitments. And we have to say the Americans to this point haven’t made the same kind of experience. We have to be careful about how we view others’ constitutional positions and their constitutional experiences.
I’m a legal scholar, not a social psychologist, but I would add one bit of social psychology, and that is that, for as long as I’ve been associated with Germany, it was a political necessity for elites, elites in the Academy or in politics, to clearly signal their disdain for and opposition to that Nazi history. And so, these processes around party bans, to the degree that we hear very strong, almost unanimous commitment to opposing the AfD, consensus around that, the emerging demands for banning the party, there is a bit of social psychology there, too. Elites have very little leeway around, say, open discourse or around these policies. It’s a signal of civic and political virtue as well to say, “I’ve internalized the lessons of the Nazi past and I’m not going to be the one to stand by and let that history repeat itself.” That’s a dawning point for me, is to recognize that that in some sense, the elites have a social obligation around articulating their opposition to the AfD here.
Jeff Rathke
We’ve had a great discussion and we haven’t been able to cover every aspect of this. To flag for people’s interest things we’ll be coming back to. Russ, you’ve just been in Berlin as you said, and my reading of things is that if we think about who might initiate a ban process, that we’re nowhere near that happening. Because if Chancellor Merz and his center-right Union parties are not in favor of a ban process, although there are a few isolated voices within those parties that are talking about it. The SPD at its party congress last weekend spoke out in favor of a national deliberative process about a ban, but that’s different from saying they’re ready to vote for it right away. And the other parties, there’s no majority in the Bundestag for this. So I think it’s just important to leave people with an understanding of where we are along that process timeline that you outlined.
Russ Miller
Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s a very delicate, highly strategic political affair in any case. And now it’s really altogether new territory. The Germans have never talked about a party ban relative to the second most powerful party in the Bundestag, the leading opposition party in the Bundestag, a party that, for example, in some polls, was leading all parties in recent public opinion polling. So that’s brand-new territory. It’s hard to imagine.
And I would add that Merz doesn’t just have to try to manage the strategic politics around all of that, but the open support for the AfD from Washington, from the Trump White House, adds another really difficult dimension to this debate in Germany. Merz will have to assess the values implicated by the threat posed by the AfD, but he’ll also have to do the hard political analysis of what are the risks and possible benefits of pursuing a ban, and he has to manage the fact that Trump wields these tariff threats all the time in such a security cudgel that I think it’s a really, really delicate process. The one thing I would I would say is, the chatter around, Unter den Linden, in the heart of Berlin, is strongly in favor. There’s a strong consensus in favor of a ban, and I say that on the basis of some conversations from the political side to civil society to the academic side, and for Merz it will be a delicate affair to manage the growing political logic and virtue around demanding a ban.
Jeff Rathke
I think we’re going to have to leave it there because you’ve been very generous with your time, Russ, and so we will bring things to a close. But I will also highlight that this aspect of our work, under the headline “Understanding the AfD,” which is one of the most visited aspects of our website, is something we’re going to be continuing, including at the end of the summer break. We’ll be doing a webinar that will look further at the ban dynamics, both political as well as legal and constitutional. We look forward to having people back with us then, and for now, then, let me just thank you, Russ Miller, for being with us today and sharing your expertise and your recent insights with us. It’s been great to have you.
Russ Miller
Yeah, thanks both of you.
Jeff Rathke
And we look forward to having all of our listeners with us on the next episode of The Zeitgeist.
