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!
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...
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 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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Crypto is a political project to weaken the state in favor of markets.
AI is a political project to replace labor with pure capital - with the two major geopolitical players doing it for different reasons.
Freedom of expression and its limits is political.
Regulation and its pros and cons is political.
Markets and their consequences and implications are political.
Technology and its interplay with society is political.
Everything HN talks about is politics, just often with a lack of self-reflection required to recognize so.
What you consider non-political is just a reflection of your own personal politics.
The insistence people stop talking about politics is functionally equivalent to censorship of specific types of politics while leaving others unexamined.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
And that's straight up the reason why the brainrotten left parties (green and linke) are just objectively retarded branding a party like afd far right.
The party isn't. Their program includes increasing social programs like pensions etc. they're even pro immigration for - their program explicitly only alienates asylum seekers and people that aren't contributing to society.
Really, they're just populists, and until the idiotic "Brandmauer" falls they'll keep gaining more proof how they're the only one's on the side of the population.
It's like the people on the establishes parties are seriously braindead to not be able to understand such basic signalling.
So here we are now, creating another stupid controversy that will only ultimately increase their popularity with the next polls, because this whole thing is super easy to finagle into the establishment just spreading FUD and misinformation. Because let's face it, 95% of it is as most of the controversial things are even from the summaries obvious fucking politically incorrect jokes...
So, another day in which the media sabotages themselves, discrediting everyone involved in this affair.
I cannot believe these people publishing this and think "this is going to shut them down". Are they literally sub 80 IQ or something? Aka legally retarded?
The email dump seems to show that AFD is indeed far far right wing, and tired to brand itself as something different, or did I misinterpret the content?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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 them 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.
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.
I understand under the horrors of their post WWI economy, but we're nowhere near this kind situation right now... people can eat, they have a good social security net. And the people under that protections are the ones voting against it ?! Sorry /rant
I started writing a long rant as a response but I'm not going to because I think it's the wrong forum. Let's just let this post disappear, it's even slightly Off Topic. People seem to think hacker news has to do with security, when it's more about venture capital and startups.
Well it's pretty simple, the current situation we're in, is the consequence of decades of leadership by those. That's how bad they are. People any a change, any change from those failures.
Why tell blatant lies? The BSW is a moderate left leaning party with social capitalist and very conservative ideas about immigration. They‘re also Russia friendly, who are imperialist invasors. Nothing about them is left.
It‘s the opposite, all the traditional middle class types left „Die Linke“, who are now the clear far left candidate. They are the only candidate that propose a socialist economic reform, open borders and a stop to and and all deportations.
I'm sure BSW have equally disgusting mail conversations (But perhaps more Russia connectoins than just rabid racism and antisemitism). If you can find them, please publish. But don't do whataboutism.
Those meme and humor are the comment section on any social media platform today. If you think the far left are beyond these types of comments (except targeting the opposite groups of people) in their internal chats, you're clueless about the real world.
Just read the unhinged comments they make in public. What do you think they say in private.
>If you can find them, please publish.
Why don't they publish themselves if they're saints and got nothing to be assumed of?
> If you think the far left are beyond these types of comments
Who mentioned the far left? And why would it matter what other extremists do?
This sounds like "yes but what about..", and I see it in several comments here but I don't understand it. How does that matter? There could be a similar dump from another party or organization and people would (rightfully) be equally upset.
Of course if a party - even internally - emails really crude racism and antisemitism then people should know. Their "core" voters don't care. But for a party to get 20-25-30% of the vote, it needs a _lot_ of votes from people who are repulsed by this.
Whataboutism at its finest. I guarantee you nobody wants to make handbags out of billionarse, as much as you would like to take "eat the rich" literally.
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.
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.
> 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”.
Obviously all very moderate and centrist behaviour.
Where did anyone say they would bring back the Third Reich? That's a strawman. And you seem to have moved the goalposts too about calling them "far right."
People have a very reasonable worry that voting for people who talk about executing refugees (note the term "refugee" and not "economic migrant") might actually enact the policies they speak of.
Any association with the Third Reich reasonably comes from their use of Nazi symbolism and use of Nazi slogans.
The parallels are striking. Now the outgroup is immigrants instead of jews.
Give angry people an outgroup to vent their anger and hate, one can become the ruler of the nation. US did not get a great economy by incarcerating or throwing those few thousand immigrants out. Its economy is currently getting messed up by stupid policies. But people need an outgroup to hate and it is enough for the right wings to get to power.
> This idea that somehow it just starts with small things, and then before you know it, the Third Reich is back. Come on. It's 2026.
And in 2026 we see the state of US going exactly in that direction. Humans are pretty predictable and something similar to Third Reich will happen before you know it. "This time will be different" is hope. Not a given.
> 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”.
Yes this "so-called far right" is totally sane and normal.
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
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/
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...
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?
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.
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 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.
These types of shenanigans were even named after him, “Rutte doctrine”.
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.
Why not publish the actual emails? Why do they need to be summarised, perhaps incorrectly?
Propaganda works like this; they know most people won't dig any further than the headline and summaries.
I’ve been here since 2010, and there has always been a general snobby dislike of contemporary political topics.
HN doesn't like political discussion that doesn't align with what they would like to see become the prevailing ideology.
What is considered political and what isn't is a political decision in itself.
Judging by your profile, you’re an overtly politics-focused person that’s been reading HN for 7 months.
I wouldn’t ascribe broad political opinions to HN, other than the general cultural dislike of political discussion, in the most broad sense.
Crypto is a political project to weaken the state in favor of markets.
AI is a political project to replace labor with pure capital - with the two major geopolitical players doing it for different reasons.
Freedom of expression and its limits is political.
Regulation and its pros and cons is political.
Markets and their consequences and implications are political.
Technology and its interplay with society is political.
Everything HN talks about is politics, just often with a lack of self-reflection required to recognize so.
What you consider non-political is just a reflection of your own personal politics.
The insistence people stop talking about politics is functionally equivalent to censorship of specific types of politics while leaving others unexamined.
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"?
I have yet to see any actual data of this leak, even though it's all over the news.
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.
Does AfD actually do that, though?
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.
You declared it, so it must be true.
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 idea that democracy is synonymous with the current neoliberal order is nonsense.
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...
However, it is in our democratic right to fight parties that are anti constitutional. It's in the constitution.
Edit: There is a loophole, though. Article 146 allows the German people to replace the constitution in its entirety.
"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...
Tik, right?
Which are you?
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.
The laws don't work like that, otherwise we arguably would not have any parties left.
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.
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?
Why not?
Damn right it isn't, because for most of them it is against their own interests. They vote out of emotion.
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.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/
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.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.
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.
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).
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?
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
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.
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.
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!).
Anything but address the actual issues that helped catapult them to the top.
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.
Even if the quote was correct, it is about free speech. Being elected and holding political office is beyond that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The party isn't. Their program includes increasing social programs like pensions etc. they're even pro immigration for - their program explicitly only alienates asylum seekers and people that aren't contributing to society.
Really, they're just populists, and until the idiotic "Brandmauer" falls they'll keep gaining more proof how they're the only one's on the side of the population.
It's like the people on the establishes parties are seriously braindead to not be able to understand such basic signalling.
So here we are now, creating another stupid controversy that will only ultimately increase their popularity with the next polls, because this whole thing is super easy to finagle into the establishment just spreading FUD and misinformation. Because let's face it, 95% of it is as most of the controversial things are even from the summaries obvious fucking politically incorrect jokes...
So, another day in which the media sabotages themselves, discrediting everyone involved in this affair.
I cannot believe these people publishing this and think "this is going to shut them down". Are they literally sub 80 IQ or something? Aka legally retarded?
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.
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.
Harris lost to Trump in 2024 for what I see as exactly the same reasons.
"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.
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.
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 doesn’t imply that the candidate must have morally dubious character, just that morally dubious characters are taking advantage of it.
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)
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.
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.
This argument has been repeated for decades, but I just don't see it.
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".
Correct, everyone is paying more except the top 1% under Trump.
Apparently, everyone forgot already.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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.
no thanks
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.
This however speaks nothing of anti-Zionism.
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
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.
They hate Jews
They really hate muslims
It's hilarious watching old European neonazis allying themselves with Israel today.
The confusion is palpable.
If there were 0 muslims in Germany today, their politics would be 100% about Jews controlling the world and all that stuff.
"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.
> 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
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.
I leave it to the reader to decide if I'm talking about now or the 1930s.
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.
So, they got a bit of a clean-up.
It‘s the opposite, all the traditional middle class types left „Die Linke“, who are now the clear far left candidate. They are the only candidate that propose a socialist economic reform, open borders and a stop to and and all deportations.
But yeah, on paper they don't sound too bad (ignoring their pro-russia sentiments)
Those meme and humor are the comment section on any social media platform today. If you think the far left are beyond these types of comments (except targeting the opposite groups of people) in their internal chats, you're clueless about the real world.
Just read the unhinged comments they make in public. What do you think they say in private.
>If you can find them, please publish.
Why don't they publish themselves if they're saints and got nothing to be assumed of?
Who mentioned the far left? And why would it matter what other extremists do?
This sounds like "yes but what about..", and I see it in several comments here but I don't understand it. How does that matter? There could be a similar dump from another party or organization and people would (rightfully) be equally upset.
Of course if a party - even internally - emails really crude racism and antisemitism then people should know. Their "core" voters don't care. But for a party to get 20-25-30% of the vote, it needs a _lot_ of votes from people who are repulsed by this.
Those tricks don't work anymore.
Obviously all very moderate and centrist behaviour.
This idea that somehow it just starts with small things, and then before you know it, the Third Reich is back. Come on. It's 2026.
Today simply waving the flag of your own nation is almost a crime in some countries. We've completely lost it.
People have a very reasonable worry that voting for people who talk about executing refugees (note the term "refugee" and not "economic migrant") might actually enact the policies they speak of.
Any association with the Third Reich reasonably comes from their use of Nazi symbolism and use of Nazi slogans.
Give angry people an outgroup to vent their anger and hate, one can become the ruler of the nation. US did not get a great economy by incarcerating or throwing those few thousand immigrants out. Its economy is currently getting messed up by stupid policies. But people need an outgroup to hate and it is enough for the right wings to get to power.
> This idea that somehow it just starts with small things, and then before you know it, the Third Reich is back. Come on. It's 2026.
And in 2026 we see the state of US going exactly in that direction. Humans are pretty predictable and something similar to Third Reich will happen before you know it. "This time will be different" is hope. Not a given.
Yes this "so-called far right" is totally sane and normal.
Ahh, old good mild conservatism.