The impact of the extreme right wing AfD’s electoral victory in a German state with just 1.7 million voters suggest that it is not only democracy’s institutions that open the way to enemies of the system. Those who take part in the public debate – politicians, journalists, citizens on social media – play their part, too. On the one hand, they allow the extremists to keep the discussion focused on issues that benefit them, and, on the other, they speak and act as if the struggle is already lost and they can do nothing but wait for the unavoidable subversion of liberal democracy.
Responsibility lies also with institutions, whose inertia expresses the reservations of politicians too frightened to clash with those who exploit their democratic rights as they work to deprive others of them. The master of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, summarized this in a comment in 1928. “The big joke on democracy,” he said, “is that it provides its mortal enemies with the means to its own destruction.” The rise of the Nazis, and World War II which they provoked, made clear that democracy must have the means to defend itself. That is why the Basic Law adopted by West Germany in 1949 (which became the Constitution after reunification in 1990) expresses the will of a “militant democracy” to deal with forces trying to abolish it. That is why the AfD is being accused of trying to violate the Basic Law’s inviolable principles with its positions.
