Germany is currently undergoing a development that should be cause for serious concern. State judicial bodies and electoral authorities are preventing candidates from the democratic opposition party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) from standing in a number of state and local elections, while political and legal powerbrokers openly argue for banning the party altogether.
This is an authoritarian development that deserves far more critical scrutiny than it receives from publicly funded media.
According to a survey published in 2025, only 46 per cent of Germans believed they were free to express their political opinions in Germany. That alone says something about how seriously the German public already perceives the deterioration of democratic debate.
At the same time, these developments vindicate the criticism voiced by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference last year. There, he warned that the greatest threat to Europe’s freedom did not necessarily come from Russia or China, but from European governments themselves eroding democratic norms — through censorship, the suppression of dissent and the exclusion of populist voices from the democratic process.
That is precisely what we can now observe in Germany.
The suppression of the democratic opposition and increasingly severe restrictions on freedom of expression, including on social media, are taking place against a backdrop of growing public anger over violent crime and insecurity — discontent that is to a large extent connected with decades of liberal immigration policies pursued by the political elite.
This fits the description of Germany as an increasingly anarcho-tyrannical state.[1]
This summer, Germans have once again witnessed a Muslim terrorist attack against a Pride parade in Berlin, widespread immigrant clan violence and dominance-related violence at the country’s outdoor swimming pools, as well as violent attacks and attempted blockades by the far left against the AfD party conference in Erfurt in July.
At the same time, sections of the political establishment are openly working with the judiciary and the domestic intelligence service to prevent AfD candidates from participating in democratic elections and to pave the way for an outright ban on the party.
While the political street violence and criminality may evoke memories of the crisis years of the Weimar Republic, developments within the institutions of the state are even more serious. For here we can discern the contours of a dismantling of democracy that bears a disturbing resemblance to the process that culminated in the Nazis’ Enabling Act of 1933.
Here are some of the latest examples.
AfD Candidates Barred from Elections
Several AfD candidates have recently been barred from standing in local elections in Lower Saxony by a politically appointed municipal supervisory authority.
They include Stephan Bothe, deputy chairman of the AfD in Lower Saxony and a member of the state parliament, who was rejected as a candidate for district administrator in the district of Lüneburg. Martin Sichert, a member of the Bundestag, was likewise rejected as a candidate for district administrator in the district of Friesland.
Among the grounds cited against Sichert were negative statements about the rainbow flag and remarks critical of Islam.
Thorsten Moriße was also denied the right to stand in Wilhelmshaven, while AfD candidate Justin Vogel has been barred from running in the mayoral election in Herzberg am Harz.
Among the reasons given for excluding the candidates from democratic elections is their membership of the AfD, which the electoral supervisory authority describes as “hostile to the constitution”.
It is remarkable in itself that the possibility of such interference in the democratic process in Lower Saxony was created through an amendment to the state’s local election law initiated by SPD Interior Minister Daniela Behrens.
In other words, the German sister party of Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats is interfering in the democratic process and changing the rules so that certain candidates can be excluded from elections.
The affair becomes even more remarkable when the excluded AfD candidates ask to be told the precise grounds for their exclusion. They are informed that the relevant case files were deleted after the decision had been made.
It is difficult not to be reminded of East Germany when confronted with practices of this kind.
The Intelligence Service as a Political Instrument
Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV), also plays a central role in these developments.
The SPD in particular has exerted considerable political influence on the intelligence service with a view to securing a ban on the AfD — a party that is increasingly taking voters from the established parties. The BfV came under Social Democratic Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who appointed CDU politician Thomas Haldenwang as head of the intelligence service. Haldenwang has played a central role in efforts to label the AfD a threat to the democratic order.
In a secret report, the BfV concluded that the AfD was “right-wing extremist” and constituted a “threat to Germany’s democratic order”. Among the reasons cited was the allegation that the AfD advocates an “ethnic concept of the people”, while Alice Weidel was accused of engaging in “anti-Muslim agitation”.
SPD chairman Lars Klingbeil subsequently used the report as an argument for an outright ban on the AfD.
We thus have an unelected state institution, whose original purpose is precisely to protect democracy against anti-democratic forces, being used to criminalise and delegitimise the political opposition.
That is a development that should concern every democrat.
The Silence of the Danish Media
The Danish Free Press Society has previously criticised this undemocratic development in Germany. Unfortunately, we have largely stood alone in doing so.
Publicly funded media in Denmark have to a considerable extent accepted, or uncritically repeated, the German state’s view of the AfD. This has happened either directly, as in the case of DR journalist Steen Nørskov, or more indirectly, as with Germany correspondents Uffe Dreesen and Mirko Reimer-Elster.
To my knowledge, none of them has seriously challenged the German state institutions’ restrictions on freedom of expression or their interference in the democratic process where the AfD is concerned.
By contrast, this summer I heard Reimer-Elster on Radio4 criticising measures taken by the German authorities against left-wing bookshops that had been designated “hostile to the constitution”.
That criticism is entirely legitimate. I will defend the freedom of expression and freedom to conduct business of communist bookshops at any time.
But the question is why the defence of fundamental freedoms apparently becomes far less principled when those freedoms belong to political opponents whom one happens to dislike.
Democracy’s Two Fundamental Rules
In Europe’s largest country and Denmark’s great neighbour to the south, we are thus witnessing a development in which the old parties of power are increasingly using the institutions of the state to ban, exclude or delegitimise the democratic opposition.
This is not merely a political question about the AfD. It is a question of what we mean by democracy at all.
For democracy rests on a simple twofold principle:
Every government must tolerate an opposition — and all political power derives from the people.
If the established parties no longer accept the first principle, and the institutions of the state are used to obstruct the second, then it is no longer merely the opposition that is under pressure.
Democracy itself is being dismantled.
[1] The term “anarcho-tyrannical state” is used here to describe a state that, on the one hand, fails to perform its fundamental duties — including border control, public safety and the prevention and prosecution of crime — while, on the other, responding with authoritarian measures against critical citizens, opposition parties and independent media. This development is reinforced by publicly funded media through their uncritical support for, or passive acceptance of, state intervention.
