The German political establishment plot to cleanse the civil service of AfD supporters

The report substantiating the AfD’s alleged extremist tendencies soon leaked to unsympathetic media, and we all got to read it. It turned out to be an even greater joke than I imagined. In its nearly 1,000 pages, the AfD stand accused of anti-constitutional tendencies inter alia because party members sometimes complain about “globalists” (allegedly an antisemitic dog-whistle), because they frequently criticised Covid measures as anti-democratic (in this way undemocratically undermining the democratic legitimacy of increasingly anti-democratic German institutions), because in many of their statements they assume or assert the existence of a German ethnicity and because they coined the cheeky campaign slogan “Alice für Deutschland.”

The AfD immediately filed suit with the Administrative Court in Cologne to overturn their new classification, and the BfV agreed to cease calling the AfD confirmed right-wing extremists until judges should decide the case. That decision is due any day now, and our political leaders are eagerly planning for what comes next.

Among other things, they hope the court will uphold the designation, so that they will have a reason to purge the civil service of politically suspect AfD party members:

The debate over how to deal with AfD members in the civil service is intensifying. Brandenburg’s Minister President Dietmar Woidke and Thuringia’s Interior Minister Georg Maier (both SPD) announced plans for decisive action in the event that the classification of the AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is confirmed by the courts.

“As long as the AfD is not banned, I think it is fundamentally difficult from a legal standpoint to discriminate against party members,” (ER: Does this language not admit to an intention to ‘discriminate’?) Woidke said … If the Administrative Court in Cologne confirms the assessment of the BfV, however, Woidke says it will become necessary to examine “whether people who act as spokespersons for this party are acceptable in certain areas of public service – for example, as civil servants with a special duty of loyalty to the state.” This duty of loyalty applies “around the clock, not just during working hours.”

Thuringia’s Interior Minister Maier also sees a need for action. He referred to a working group of federal and state interior ministers that is currently preparing possible measures. “The group must now work quickly because we expect a decision from the Cologne Administrative Court at any moment,” Maier said … The goal is to develop a uniform federal approach should the AfD classification be upheld in court.

Some states have already introduced measures. Brandenburg has established a so-called constitutional loyalty check since 2024, whereby applicants for civil service positions are routinely screened by the BfV. “This makes it much more difficult for enemies of the constitution to teach our children in school or to judge guilt and innocence at court,” Woidke said.

Thuringia has also informed civil servants about the possible consequences of their party membership. Maier made it clear: “If it becomes that someone is an AfD member … they will face consequences.” These could be disciplinary in nature – “initially a warning, for example” – but in serious cases could also “lead to dismissal.”

At the federal level, stricter disciplinary law has been in force since 2024, enabling the faster removal of enemies of the constitution from public service …

I have four points about this:

1) The BfV are a goofy and incompetent domestic spy agency operated by the Ministry of the Interior. “Confirmed right-wing extremist” is a typically clumsy bureaucratic designation that their pencil pushers just pulled out of their collective ass. It has no legal or other significance beyond the minds of the constitutional protectors, and there is no legal basis to fire or punish people for belonging to organisations that the BfV doesn’t like. In their mortal fight against the AfD, however, the German establishment have elevated the BfV rhetorically and also practically into a quasi-judicial organ, whose every utterance is sacred, blessedly independent and fraught with significance. They want these meaningless BfV designations to have consequences, just like they want the BfV to screen not only civil servants but also electoral candidates for political reliability. The BfV was never supposed to do any of this. No sane person, whatever his politics, should want a secret spy agency to wield this kind of power.

2) Pressing the BfV into service as an ad hoc political commissariat, like all of the other measures against the AfD, is a very bad idea. Imagine if Hitler really were summoned from the grave and made Chancellor once again. He could direct his Interior Minister to send this newly powerful BfV against his enemies and use all the nefarious innovations in speech crime prosecutions to silence critics. In their quest to wield the tools of offensive democracy against the opposition, our rulers are just endowing the Federal Republic with a more erratic, closed and dangerous political system. We are literally abolishing democracy in order to defend it, and I don’t know if there is ever going to be a way back from this.

3) Germany has a very robust public sector; something like 12% of everyone works for the government. By going after AfD members who work for the state, left-leaning Minister Presidents and cabinet ministers hope to intimidate broad portions of the population away from supporting their political opponents. It is that blunt and stupid, what they are doing here.

4) Outside the strictly political sphere, the German ruling elite are overwhelmingly located in the civil service, particularly among the nearly 1.8 million Beamte – those civil servants who enjoy especially generous pension benefits and job security equivalent to that of a tenured American professor. The elite want to cleanse their own ranks of the opposition by way of establishing the bureaucracy as a stronghold against the AfD, in the increasingly likely event that the party enters government somewhere in the East.

Source

Featured image source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/08/german-court-rules-far-right-afd-party-a-suspected-threat-to-democracy

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