Draft agreement seeks to ensure convicted extremists from parties such as the AfD cannot contest elections

Germany’s centre-Right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and the centre-Left Social Democrats (SPD), which are holding coalition talks, have proposed a law that will block people with multiple extremism convictions from standing in elections.

https://archive.ph/yNQwE

  • federal reverse@feddit.orgMEnglish
    2·
    17 hours ago

    Tbf, if you remember, the Afd started out as a party critical to European integration and the Euro in particular. They were right of Merkel’s CDU and they were dumb but they were not fascist. But very, very quickly, they were infiltrated in various ways by people and funds who were previously entangled with the NPD (now “Heimat”).

    And there definitely are a bunch of other right-wing parties that ex-Afd people could hop onto: Werteunion, Bündnis Deutschland, yada. It’s reasonable to ask how quickly this process would be. The real solution is actually teaching democracy and living democracy, from a young age and with the chance to actually have a real impact.

    • Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      2·
      16 hours ago

      At the very least, it’d buy us more time to educate the masses. But I’m not optimistic that this will work. Social media needs to die first for that and that’s not likely to happen. Tossing some lies around via bots funded by Russia is so, so much easier than refuting said claims with facts. People have no interest in spending time and effort to do research. Plus the short format content being pushed everywhere completely destroys people’s capability to focus on anything that take more than 20 seconds.

      Banning the AfD will also make sure that the same people can’t work together anymore. They’ll have a very hard time building up something like this again. At least in the foreseeable future.

      • federal reverse@feddit.orgMEnglish
        2·
        16 hours ago

        At the very least, it’d buy us more time

        That it will.

        to educate the masses. But I’m not optimistic that this will work. Social media needs to die first for that and that’s not likely to happen.

        I am less pessimistic. But I do think ownership structure of social media needs to change.

        Banning the AfD will also make sure that the same people can’t work together anymore.

        Legally? Like forcing people to find new circles of friends? I can’t quite imagine that.