Timothy Garton Ash argues Germany should not ban AfD

A protester holding a placard reading “Nazis raus” stood between rival rallies at Munich’s Königsplatz on 12 September, according to the Guardian. Days later, Timothy Garton Ash argued that Germany’s recurring debate over banning the Alternative für Deutschland is a distraction from the harder work of constraining it within the law. The question has sharpened after the AfD’s regional victory in Saxony-Anhalt and its continued strength in national polls.

Germany’s constitutional order was built with memory baked in: a state designed to survive what the Weimar Republic did not. The Basic Law allows parties hostile to the “free democratic basic order” to be banned, and senior politicians have again floated taking the AfD to the constitutional court. But a ban application is not a switch; it is a long, public process that turns the court into the arena and the AfD into the defendant-in-chief, with every procedural step framed as proof that “the system” fears voters. Ash’s point is not that the AfD is harmless—he notes rhetoric that echoes Nazi language—but that outlawing a party supported by a large share of the electorate amounts to telling citizens their preferred ballot is illegitimate.

The more immediate risk, he writes, looks less like 1933 than like the administrative capture seen in Budapest after 2010 or Washington in 2025: power consolidated through appointments, decrees, and control of enforcement rather than a single dramatic rupture. That is where Germany’s existing toolkit sits. The state can investigate and prosecute criminal acts; it can enforce rules around public service neutrality; it can use parliamentary procedure and budgetary oversight to limit abuse. Ash points to Article 37 of the constitution, which allows federal authorities to overrule anti-constitutional behaviour by a state government—an instrument never used in the Federal Republic’s 77-year history, and therefore untested in the one moment it would matter.

The AfD’s own promises sketch the collision points. Alice Weidel, the party’s national co-leader, has said that if the AfD enters government after the federal election scheduled for 2029, Germany would abandon the euro and leave Schengen. Those are not marginal administrative tweaks; they are decisions that would force immediate renegotiations with neighbours, markets, and courts. A ban debate, by contrast, can run for years without changing a single hiring decision in a ministry or a single instruction to a police chief.

Germany’s democracy was built to be defended, not merely admired. For now, the most concrete fact in Ash’s essay is procedural: Article 37 has never been used.