Berlin justice senator: Debate on banning far-right AfD premature

Public debate over a ban on the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is premature in the view of Felor Badenberg, justice senator in the city of Berlin and a former vice-president of Germany’s federal domestic intelligence agency (BfV).

Badenberg said she expected the AfD, which was on Friday designated as “confirmed right-wing extremist” by the intelligence agency, to take legal action against the designation. The classification has implications for how the party is monitored by the intelligence services.

Speaking to national public radio Deutschlandfunk, she noted that this could drag on for years. Politicians should start considering the issue only after the courts had ruled on the designation, Badenberg said.

On Friday, the BfV said in a lengthy report that there was now concrete evidence that the anti-immigrant party pursued efforts that threaten Germany’s democratic order and that its understanding of the German nation as based on ethnicity and descent was incompatible with Germany’s free democratic order.

The AfD has charged that the decision is not based on evidence.

Badenberg rejected criticism of the BfV decision from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said on Friday: “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy – it’s tyranny in disguise.”

She told Deutschlandfunk that she could see nothing anti-democratic in the BfV designation.