Berlin justice minister: Debate on banning far-right AfD premature

Public debate over a ban on the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is premature in the view of Felor Badenberg, justice minister in the city of Berlin and a former vice-president of Germany's federal domestic intelligence agency (BfV).

Badenberg said she expected the AfD, which was on Friday designated as "confirmed right-wing extremist" by the intelligence agency, to take legal action against the designation. The classification has implications for how the party is monitored by the intelligence services.

Speaking to national public radio Deutschlandfunk, she noted that this could drag on for years. Politicians should start considering the issue only after the courts had ruled on the designation, Badenberg said.

On Friday, the BfV said in a lengthy report that there was now concrete evidence that the anti-immigrant party pursued efforts that threaten Germany's democratic order and that its understanding of the German nation as based on ethnicity and descent was incompatible with Germany's free democratic order.

The AfD has charged that the decision is not based on evidence.

The BfV designation has revived public debate on applying to the Constitutional Court for a ban on the AfD.

The court has been reluctant to ban political parties. After banning two communist parties in the 1950s, the court ruled in 2017 against banning the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). An earlier attempt to ban the party was dropped on procedural grounds in 2003.

US administration keeping close eye on Germany

Badenberg rejected criticism of the BfV decision from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said on Friday: "Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That's not democracy - it's tyranny in disguise."

She told Deutschlandfunk that she could see nothing anti-democratic in the BfV designation.

Noting that the AfD had taken second place in the February elections, Rubio said it was the German establishment that was extremist in backing an open-border immigration policy that the AfD vehemently opposes. He called on German to "reverse course."

Immigration was a key issue in the elections in February that will return the conservative Christian Democrats to power at the head of a coalition government.