Schleswig-Holstein Minister-President Daniel Günther of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) supports banning the anti-globalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)—Germany’s second most popular party and the CDU’s principal competitor—declaring that allowing citizens to vote for the party must not be tolerated.
The comments, from the executive who has governed Germany’s northernmost state since 2017 alongside the left-liberal Green party, came during an interview with Cicero, a Berlin-based political and cultural magazine, that was published over the weekend.
His statements about a potential ban come despite opinion polls indicating that nearly half of all German citizens (47%) would find it acceptable if the AfD were to become coalition partners in future state-level governments.
Günther’s anti-democratic comments astonished the interviewer, Daniel Gräber, who mentioned on X that he was “quite amazed by [the CDU politician’s] understanding of democracy.”
Germany’s established globalist ‘democrats’ on the left and the right, as Günther calls them, must “now assume their responsibility and change course vis-à-vis the AfD.”
“We have accepted for far too long that a not insignificant proportion of our population wants to express their protest by voting for the AfD. We must not tolerate people voting for such a party out of protest.” he insisted.
The AfD, Günther claimed in the magazine interview, is “dangerous in its structures, large parts of the AfD want to eliminate our democracy.” For this reason, the CDU minister-president expressed that he has “great sympathy for a [AfD] ban procedure to be initiated,” which ought to be “carefully prepared by the federal government.”
“A defensive democracy must use its instruments,” he insisted, and that means “fighting parties that are unconstitutional with all the means of the constitutional state.”
Gräber, the chief editor in Cicero magazine’s economics section, pushed back slightly, asking the minister-president if it “is democratic if government parties want to ban an opposition party that, according to election surveys, has over 30% in some federal states.”
The CDU politician replied: “If a party has an anti-constitutional orientation, if it is extremist and therefore rejects our free and democratic basic order and wants to actively and militantly implement this stance, then I think a debate about banning it is right.”
In comments given to The European Conservative about the latest call to ban the AfD, Bavarian MP Petr Bystron, who serves as the foreign policy spokesman for the party, didn’t mince words. “The last German chancellor who banned a democratic party was Adolf Hitler. All of those who are now trying to ban the AfD are following in his footsteps,” he said.
Günther is only the latest establishment figure to express support for banning the AfD, following others like President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD), SPD co-leader Saskia Asken, and CDU MP Marco Wanderwitz.
In August, Wanderwitz—who in 2021 lost a local election to an AfD candidate—announced his intention to bring a motion to ban the opposition party before the Bundestag. To do this, however, he first needs the support of at least 36 MPs, which so far he’s been unable to garner, suggesting there is little to no appetite among German lawmakers to take such a radical, anti-democratic step.
Opposition leaders like Sahra Wagenknecht, who recently founded a new left-wing, sovereigntist party, have sharply criticized calls to ban the AfD. “Banning unpopular parties because they become too strong is incompatible with a free society,” she said in a November interview, adding that she found “fighting a political competitor with unconstitutional ban proposals incompatible with democratic aspirations.”