They won’t, in no small part because the AfD has enough seats to block the attempt.
They cannot block a decision of the federal constitutional court, don’t be ridiculous. Germany has measures in place exactly for this scenario, and they are about to be enforced. They cannot be vetoed away, it’s a legal matter.
Can you ban a party that’s got a plurality of seats in the Parliament? Or will they be the ones banning you?
Of course. And it’s nonsensical to claim we cannot ban them, while worrying they could ban us. We can and we should, based on what you yourself wrote:
If you pass a law but never enforce it, the law does nothing.
We have laws against undemocratic parties, so we should enforce them.
I mean, by all means, feel free to give it a shot. But it seems like you’re asking an elected government to do a thing it isn’t designed to do.
But it is designed to do exactly that. That’s like a core mechanism of our democracy.
The only way to argue we shouldn’t ban the AFD is if you claim that they somehow should be exempt from our mechanisms against fascism. They were enforced before, they will be enforced again. And the AFD fits the bill in every way.
That rather speaks for banning the AfD though. We have a law for banning fascist parties, so we should enforce it, or it truly would mean nothing.
Some of us are convinced this measure does nothing
Nothing? How can it do nothing? You could argue that it doesn’t do enough or not the right things, but if nothing else banning the party would obviously keep them out of the government at least for the next few years.
Killing the head of a terrorist organization won’t help if you don’t fix the underlying issues.
And yet we don’t allow terrorist organizations to campaign for office, officially and supported by tax money, in our societies.
banning it won’t make the people who vote for it and run it any less, well, fascist.
Correct. But it’s no supposed to do that. Banning a fascist party doesn’t solve every problem of a divided society, but it prevents the worst (a fascist party seizing power) and gives us time (and the chance!) to solve some of the others.
There’s basically no other option. Either a society has effective rules against fascism in place or it will stand idly by while being undermined. And if it has these effective rules, it must abide by them. ‘Fascists should not be allowed to rule the country’ seems to be a reasonable lower limit.
Don’t know what’s there to be so smug about. “Oh you would rather ban them in a constitutional process than to wait for them to seize power and fight a bloody civil war, or worse?” Yes please! I hope we all much prefer the first option.
Read the article. It’s already happening.
You don’t seem to know a lot about the German constitution. The opposite is true. Unppular fringe groups are not banned because they are not actually a danger to democracy, as long as government positions are not in reach for them. That’s exactly how the german federal constitutional court has argued in the past. Successful bans ever only targeted actually successful parties.
The core mechanism of democracy is to protect itself, and first and foremost that means protecting itself from facism. A political organisation that’s threatening democracy should obviously not be allowed, so it will be banned.