A German court has rightly blocked the country’s domestic intelligence service from continuing to brand the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) party a “right-wing extremist” organization.
Otherwise lawfully operating political movements, however distasteful, must be confronted through argument and competition rather than through a ban. If not, you don’t have a true democracy. A free marketplace of ideas remains the most powerful mechanism for exposing bad arguments and marginalizing those who peddle them.
Germany’s desire to police the boundary of political discourse is understandable. The Basic Law, adopted in 1949 in the long shadow of the Third Reich, grants the state sweeping powers to dissolve parties that threaten the democratic order. Only two have ever been banned, both in the 1950s. The swastika, the Hitler salute, and the SS motto “Alles für Deutschland” (“everything for Germany”) have all been criminal offenses under the criminal code for decades. And yet Neo-Nazis have simply adapted. They marched under the old Imperial flag, adopted the Black Sun and the Algiz rune, and built networks that the intelligence services estimated as having 24,000 active extremists in 2019.
The American model, for all its imperfections, offers a more durable template.
The United States has tolerated the existence of the Ku Klux Klan for over a century. It has allowed the American Nazi Party, the Aryan Nations, and dozens of white supremacist hate groups to operate on the fringes of its politics. Instead of focusing on speech and political organization, the U.S. prosecutes individuals who commit crimes and turn violent. It also enforces civil rights legislation and allows cultural and political debate. The Klan was defeated by the courage of the Civil Rights movement and by a society that openly rejected its ideology.
Germany should draw from this wisdom. Slapping a state-sanctioned label on a party that won over 20% of the vote and 152 seats in the Bundestag parliament in the last election achieves the opposite of its intended purpose. It gives the AfD exactly the narrative it craves. Prohibition has a long history of making the prohibited more attractive.
The targeting has also made the AfD subject of otherwise undue admiration among prominent American right-wing figures. Elon Musk declared that “only the AfD can save Germany,” and Steve Bannon has long championed the party. Vice President JD Vance met the leader of AfD, Alice Weidel, in Munich in February 2025. These Americans fail to recognize that the party they champion is, at its ideological core, profoundly anti-American. Weidel has described Germans as a “slave” of the U.S. Other senior party members have long expressed opinions presenting the U.S. as oppressing Germany. The party far prefers Moscow to Washington.
In Germany, the AfD has been empowered on the back of genuine grievances: uncontrolled immigration, suffocating bureaucracy, EU overreach, and economic stagnation. These are real problems that mainstream German parties have been slow to address. But the current Chancellor Friedrich Merz may have the answer. Merz has admitted the AfD’s support is driven overwhelmingly by the migration question and that once this is brought under control, the party will shrink back to the margins.
Until then, Germany will keep learning that free societies do not win by deciding which ideas their citizens are permitted to hear. They win by producing better ideas. The Cologne court has upheld that principle. Now it falls to Germany’s politicians to prove it was worth upholding.