On March 8, a top German court in Cologne ruled that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party could be labeled a “suspected threat” to Germany’s constitution, known as the Basic Law. The verdict is arguably one of the most important court decisions in modern German history, effectively marking a major turning point in the country’s democracy. With the decision, the court effectively “canceled” an entire political party with thousands of members and millions of votes from the political map, with the party burdened with near pariah status due to the enormous pressure it faces from the German state.
The direct political consequences of the verdict cannot be understated. In short, it paves the way for every member and politician in the party to be actively surveilled by the German state. It will also permit law enforcement to use informants throughout the party. Germany’s powerful domestic intelligence agency, the Office of the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), will have nearly unlimited power to surveil and monitor the private life of nearly anyone who chooses to associate with the party, regardless of whether that person has been accused of any crime.
As Remix News previously reported, one of the key justifications offered for this watershed moment in Germany’s democracy was the judges’ claim that there were signs the AfD sought to reduce non-German ethnic groups in Germany, and that the party operated under the paradigm of the “German people” as an ethnic concept. The court argued that advocating for the ethnic German people is in clear opposition to Germany’s Basic Law.
“The German people are central to our Basic Law”
Interestingly enough, in an interview with the Junge Freiheit news outlet, the vice-chairman of the AfD party in Hamburg, Alexander Wolf, did not immediately dispute the court’s ruling that the AfD operated under such an ethnic principle (although certainly other high-ranking members of the party would refute such a claim entirely). Instead, Wolf said that the ethnic concept of the German people is actually protected in the Basic Law.
“The German people are central to our Basic Law; the ‘German people’ gave themselves this basic law. This concept is something different than the ‘population within the borders of the Federal Republic of Germany,’” he said.
“Article 116 of the Basic Law expressly speaks of German ethnicity in addition to nationality. And for our citizenship law, [ethnic] descent was central until the year 2000.”
Wolf is referring to Article 116 (1 and 2), which states, “Unless otherwise provided by a law, a German within the meaning of this Basic Law is a person who possesses German citizenship or who has been admitted to the territory of the German Reich within the boundaries of 31 December 1937 as a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such person.”
The second clause states that “Former German citizens who, between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945, were deprived of their citizenship on political, racial or religious grounds and their descendants shall, on application, have their citizenship restored. They shall be deemed never to have been deprived of their citizenship if they have established their domicile in Germany after 8 May 1945 and have not expressed a contrary intention.”
The law refers back to the end of World War II, when ethnic Germans were expelled from countries across Europe, forcing them to leave or be killed in many cases following reprisals. Article 116 gave ethnic Germans fleeing into Germany’s postwar territory automatic citizenship, with a specific mention to the “racial” nature of these reprisals.
As to Wolf’s assertion that [ethnic] descent was central to the German system until 2000, there is some basis for that claim. For decades following World War II, Germany continued to operate under a system that was greatly biased towards Germans of ethnic descent, particularly in favor of men of German ethnic descent, at least when it came to the issue of citizenship.
For example, children born in wedlock between Jan. 1, 1914 and Dec. 31, 1974, acquired German citizenship only if the father was a German citizen at the time of their birth. Even for German women who had a child born into wedlock during the same time period, if the father was not a citizen, the child would receive citizenship only if that child would become stateless without German citizenship. After 1974, children born into wedlock where at least one parent was a German citizen became German citizens automatically.
In 2000, the German Citizenship Law did away with all of this. The law effectively removed the “blood” aspect of German citizenship, and determined that two foreign parents born on German soil could have their child eligible for German citizenship as long as one parent has resided in Germany for at least eight years. Germany’s new left-wing government looks to further relax that law and make other reforms to speed up the naturalization process for new immigrants.
Following World War II, most German citizens were ethnic Germans, and Germany remained more or less an ethnically homogeneous state, with the exception of its Turkish guest worker population, if not explicitly, at least implicitly. In this regard, Germany was not so different from many European nations at the time.
The AfD’s Wolf contends that the there is nothing actually wrong with the Basic Law, and that it is only in the last few years that a politicized court has slowly been transforming the meaning of Germany’s constitution to disregard any concept of ethnicity. Now, Germany’s progressive judges are actually going so far as to claim anyone who says otherwise is a threat to that very constitution, which is the situation AfD currently finds itself in.
“The problem is that the political class has been turning this understanding of the Basic Law upside down for years, and that the courts, the politicized Federal Constitutional Court and other courts, are following suit. The OVG Berlin-Brandenburg declared in the middle of last year that maintaining differences between peoples violates Article 1 of the Basic Law of human dignity. This is obviously absurd, even unconstitutional — and at the same time it is applied by the courts as applicable law,” he said.
“We must work to ensure that this misinterpretation of the Basic Law is corrected,” he added.
Can ethnic Europeans organize politically?
Whether Wolf will change the thinking of a German political establishment increasingly dedicated to the idea of a multicultural, multi-ethnic nation, remains to be seen, but the whole debate raises an important question: can ethnic Germans lobby to maintain their majority status in their own country, particularly in the form of a political party?
It is an important question. While many ethnic Germans reject the idea that they are even a group that needs any representation, most ethnic groups in the world view political representation as a key element of not only furthering their goals, security and interests on an individual level, but also as a people. Germany’s historical guilt over World War II has made the country’s majority especially uncomfortable expressing any concerns over their demographic future, yet, there are signs that despite Germany’s welcoming image, many Germans remain opposed to mass immigration from non-EU countries and a sizeable oppose immigration even from other EU countries.
Statistics show that at least one out of every eight Germans is a foreigner, and the country’s foreign population increases every year, while the share of ethnic Germans decreases in turn. At the same time, the current left-wing government appears set to dramatically accelerate mass immigration in the coming years.
Yet, Germany’s court system is effectively asserting that the largest party opposed to mass immigration, the AfD, is not permitted to lobby and fight for their constituents when it comes to this specific concern. They are now a “threat to democracy,”. A move to squash the AfD by the courts — which have always lacked a certain element of democratic legitimacy — may be an attempt to preemptively snuff out democratic opposition to the German left’s increasingly aggressive immigration agenda.
Everyone else is doing it
Within Germany, minority ethnic blocs already exist and operate to maximize their interests. For example, the largest of these groups, Turkish-Germans, strategize on which parties to vote for, with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) particularly “unelectable because of its policy on Islam,” according to a report from Deutsche Welle. The report also details how Turks are disappointed there are not more explicitly “pro-Turkey” parties in Germany, but work to identify which parties will benefit Turkey and Turks the most.
Not all Turks vote along with the objectives of Turkish nationalism, but this ethnic group does vote almost entirely for pro-migrant parties, and they have every motive for doing so. So far, given their smaller size relative to the German population, they have been unable to materialize Turkish nationalist goals into a standalone political party — despite trying on a number of occasions. Even with Germany’s Muslim population only set to grow over the coming years, the dream of an explicitly pro-Islam, pro-Turkey party is unlikely to come to fruition due to the high thresholds parties have to enter government, but the immigrant and foreigner voting bloc will undoubtedly gain more power.
German Turks also show other signs that they remain deeply invested in Turkey, with voting patterns revealing a worrying trend for progressive Germany. Nearly half of Germany’s Turks are still allowed to vote in Turkey, and they vote overwhelmingly for the country’s Islamic strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Erdoğan has long been active in Germany’s Turkish community, where he regularly campaigns for their votes and addresses them in speeches.
“From here I say to my citizens, I say to my brothers and sisters in Europe… Educate your children at better schools, make sure your family live in better areas, drive in the best cars, live in the best houses,” said Erdoğan in 2017.
“Have five children, not three. You are Europe’s future.”
Erdoğan’s rhetoric may be crude, but for him there is a simple logic to more Turkish immigrants and children in Germany and Europe. In a democracy, demographics matter, and as the case of France shows — where 85 percent of Muslims voted in favor of Emmanuel Macron in order to keep the immigration restrictionist Marine Le Pen out of office — numbers matter. Whether Germans want to believe it or not, ethnic groups and foreign nations are playing a game that many Germans are totally unaware of, and while ethnic Germans may reject the idea of lobbying for their interests as racist, that does not necessarily mean other groups will have the same compunctions. In fact, most people across the world take a pragmatic approach to the issue of demographics, and Turkey’s government is no exception. Turkey, for example, sees the power of its country’s ethnic bloc as a positive with the potential to influence elections in Germany, Turkey’s foreign policy goals, and even Turkey’s domestic elections. Erdoğan, knowing that Turks vote for his nationalist and even racialist objectives, actively desires that more Turks migrate to Germany, that they have more children, and eventually displace or at least offset the power of other ethnic groups, including Germans, which have often been hostile to his government.
Germany is not the only country where this type of ethnic lobbying occurs. In countries across the West, migrants and foreigners are increasingly voting for pro-migration parties that represent their interests. In the Netherlands, for example, they have actually formed their own explicitly pro-migrant, pro-Islam party.
However, in most Western European countries, migrants do not need such parties, and already see their interests as being well-represented by a range of left-wing parties, which are nearly universally pro-migrant, with some notable exceptions. For migrants in Germany looking to bring their family members into the country, which is undoubtedly an interest of many ethnic blocs, they can choose from the Green Party, and the Social Democrats (SPD), Die Linke, and even the Free Democrat Party (FDP). This illustrates the increasingly one-way street on the issue of migration in the West, in which minorities, foreigners and migrants are allowed a nearly unlimited capacity to lobby for their interests and to actively increase their share of the population, while natives of Western countries are consistently excluded from this process, and in the case of Germany, now simply labeled a “threat to democracy.”
When majorities become minorities
Germany, along with the rest of Western Europe, is embarking on an unprecedented venture, in which the majority ethnic groups willingly become the minority through mass immigration. Most such events in history occurred through conquest, and many of them feature unfortunate endings for those who were conquered. There are no guarantees of ethnic Germans becoming a minority, but if current trends hold, there is little to stop this event from occurring.
This demographic transformation is a real worry of a large segment of Europe’s population. France, in particular, has taken the question of immigration to heart, with talk of the Great Replacement dominating the political discourse around April’s national election, including in the media and on the campaign trail. The fact that Le Pen scored nearly 42 percent of the vote shows how fractured that country’s political landscape has become.
The issue of demographic replacement is not going away either, and this is because there is no amount of sugarcoating that can hide the reality that Europeans are being replaced by non-Europeans. It is, in fact, a quantifiable phenomenon, and demographic data, whether it is from Norway or France, confirms it is taking place. Yet, conservative or even left-wing parties that discuss, debate or reject this trend may increasingly fall afoul of hate speech laws, court actions, and even physical threats.
If ethnic Germans or French become a minority, will a multicultural utopia follow? If history is any guide, it is unlikely. Vast cultural differences remain between Europeans and other non-European ethnic groups related to women’s rights, LGBT rights, and secular notions, just to name a few. One of the fastest growing populations in Europe hails from the Middle East, an area of the world where minorities are treated particularly poorly. However, the Middle East is no exception either when it comes to dominating and sometimes abusing its minority populations. Whether it’s the Han Chinese slowly squeezing out the Uyghurs and Tibetans, the Hutus killing the Tutsis in Africa, or the Muslim Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, both history and the modern era have consistently shown that being a minority has always been a dangerous proposition, which is why so often different peoples have historically fought to avoid this particular fate.
Even in Europe itself, areas where different ethnicities and religions have lived — even in peaceful coexistence for centuries — have erupted in bloodshed under the right conditions. The Balkan countries are just one recent example, but there are countless others.
Much of Germany’s welcoming stance also undoubtedly depends on political and economic stability. In this respect, Germany stands out. French society, while still boasting a remarkably high standard of living, is facing graver problems. Its industry is less competitive, the share of struggling working poor is greater, and inequality is higher. In such an environment, it is no surprise that ethnic and racial tensions are more pronounced. This tension broadly manifests itself throughout French society, including in ethnic ghettos that exist on a far smaller scale in Germany.
However, if German society becomes less comfortable or an internal or external shock occurs, such as a major food crisis, which many consider an unthinkable scenario, Germans could quickly turn on the liberal consensus. This same sort of radical rethinking of society occurred after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Germany’s once pacifist-leaning public suddenly gearing up for a war, shipping heavy weapons east, and planning to invest up to €100 billion in its military. Of course, this dramatic change in thinking was greatly guided by the media, and that same media is unlikely to change its consensus attitude on the issue of immigration regardless of what occurs internationally or domestically. Yet, the threat is still there for every multicultural society: how do the different cultures and peoples react to one another should the “good times” come to an end and competition for resources increases?
At the same time, historical grudges against White Europeans could become more manifest in a political environment where ethnic Europeans head towards minority status, as is the case involving Whites in America. Despite optimism in a diverse future, a potential shift in political power could be unfavorable to Whites in the form of discrimination, reparations, and wealth and property taxes based on race, all which sound alarmist, but all which are current proposals growing in popularity in the U.S. and could easily be transferred to Europe in the future.
The classic argument is that White people do not need political representation, as they already represent the current ruling power. However, this power is in many ways illusory specifically because so many of the Whites in power in the West adhere to an anti-White ideology, and even those Whites who find this anti-White trend repugnant, many are deathly afraid of promoting anything that even comes close to the idea that their own group has its own interests. The power that Whites think they hold in the West also looks increasingly tenuous over the long-term, and doubly so in countries like the United States, where anti-White rhetoric and even legislation seems to be promoted more freely every year in tandem with White people’s approaching minority status.
The U.S. is especially worth examining for Germans and Europeans of all nations, for what is happening there seems to presage what will happen in Europe. For all the talk of White privilege, Whites in the U.S. are dying earlier, facing social deterioration, and also earn less than a range of other minority groups. Nevertheless, Whites are the only ethnic or racial group in the U.S. not permitted to explicitly lobby for their own interests. In Congress, for example, Black and Hispanic caucuses exist while a White caucus would be unheard of. There are explicitly Black magazines, a Black Entertainment Television (BET) channel, and a Black Lives Matter movement, while any such attempts for Whites to organize in a similar manner would be treated as domestic extremism. Even Donald Trump, consistently labeled a White supremacist, went out of his way to never openly mention White people as a group, instead referring constantly to Black and Hispanics, all in an effort to gain their votes based around their clear interests, whether it was justice reform or education. Trump’s Platinum Plan outlined his “promise to Black America over four years.” Making any promises targeted to “White America” — which, as noted, is a demographic group also facing serious headwinds — would have made national headlines and virtually disqualified Trump despite Whites making up the vast majority of his supporters.
The U.S. is no exception, and statistics from Great Britain suggest a worrying picture there as well, with Whites dying earlier than any other ethnic group while at the same time, poor White males have the lowest educational achievement of any ethnic group in that class of people.
In Germany, White people are still the dominant group, and within this group, ethnic Germans are still the majority. Yet, falling birthrates and mass immigration will lead eventually to the inevitable, and with that, ethnic Germans will likely see the same loss of political power as Whites as a group have seen in the United States. While the AfD has effectively lost its ability to operate as a normal party or promote the interests of the majority ethnic group in the country, there is no reason to believe that the left-wing parties of Germany will stop working to promote the interests of other ethnic groups, offer foreigners more benefits, and even work towards making Germany’s main ethnic group a minority two to three generations.
The German political and judicial establishment no longer operates based on the principle of interests, but instead ardently follows the quasi-religious ideologies of human rights, multiculturalism, and liberal democracy, with these concepts often tailored to exclude anything that reeks of “Whiteness,” “Christianity,” or “cisgender males” — just to name a few concepts the liberal establishment increasingly refuses to tolerate. That is why the AfD cannot be allowed to represent the interests of what has traditionally constituted the “German people” for centuries: ethnic Germans. Instead, Germany, along with the rest of the West, appears fervently determined to embark on an experiment that very well may end in tragedy.