Meridian World Desk
Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on 9 September that he remains sceptical a legal procedure to ban the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) could succeed, describing the constitutional threshold for such a move as very high. Speaking at a joint press conference in Berlin with European Council President António Costa, Merz said: “Ich bin und bleibe skeptisch, ob ein solches Verbotsverfahren erfolgreich sein kann” — I am and remain sceptical that such a ban procedure could succeed. He called instead for political efforts to win back AfD voters.
His remarks came two days after the AfD won Saxony-Anhalt’s state election on 7 September with 43.8% of the vote, more than double the tally of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which took 17.2%. The result fell just short of an outright majority in the state parliament, with the AfD projected to take 39 of 83 seats, three short of the threshold needed to govern alone. Ulrich Siegmund, the party’s lead candidate and state leader in Saxony-Anhalt, hailed the outcome as a mandate to govern.
The victory has reopened a debate within Germany’s governing coalition and beyond over whether to pursue a ban against the AfD nationally. Saxony-Anhalt’s AfD branch has been classified since 2023 by the state’s domestic intelligence agency as confirmed right-wing extremist, a designation the party is contesting in court; litigation over that classification is currently suspended. Saxony-Anhalt is one of five German states where the AfD’s state branch carries that classification.
Premiers divided
State premiers are not united on how to proceed. Hendrik Wüst, Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia and a member of the CDU, has proposed creating a joint federal-state working group — made up of experts from the federal and state governments, constitutional lawyers and officials from the domestic intelligence service — to examine how to deal with the AfD. Wüst has framed the review as open-ended, saying it would not automatically lead to a ban procedure.
Boris Rhein, the CDU Minister-President of Hesse, and Markus Söder, the Bavarian premier from the CSU, have both voiced scepticism about pursuing a ban. The Social Democrats and the Greens, by contrast, favour examining a ban procedure. On 10 September, Bundesrat President Andreas Bovenschulte backed Wüst’s proposal for a joint federal-state review, and some Union politicians signalled openness to a ban procedure even as Merz himself held to his sceptical position.
Roland Koch, the former CDU Minister-President of Hesse, said he had grown torn on the question, pointing to the years such a procedure would likely take to resolve.
A high legal bar
Under German law, only the Bundestag, the Bundesrat or the federal government can file an application to ban a political party, and only the Federal Constitutional Court can rule on it. The court would have to find that a party is actively working to undermine the free democratic basic order, a standard that has been met only twice in the country’s postwar history.
Merz’s position reflects the difficulty of clearing that bar against a party that has just won more than 40% of the vote in a state election, as well as concern within his own party that a failed ban attempt could hand the AfD a political victory. His preferred approach — persuading voters back from the AfD through policy and political engagement — sidesteps the legal question altogether, but leaves unresolved how the coalition intends to respond to a party now positioned to dominate politics in parts of eastern Germany.
The debate over Saxony-Anhalt is likely to continue shaping national politics as other German states weigh their own responses to AfD branches carrying the same extremist classification.