Answers from the parties
Every division of society must be counteracted. We find the spreading of hatred towards those who think differently and towards minorities, as well as the contempt shown by some for the free and democratic form of our life together, intolerable.
We call on the established democratic parties and on our government to address these problems.
We are experiencing increasing diversity in our country. It is all the more important that the fundamental values of our liberal democracy are and remain the basis of our daily coexistence. Human rights and freedoms are not to be taken for granted; they have to be defended again and again. If we succeed in strengthening cohesion among the people in our country, we also make a decisive contribution to greater security. Muslims in Germany are called upon here as well. Muslim associations are urged to take part in security partnerships in order to prevent or counteract radicalisation.
We are concerned at how easily language becomes uninhibited, hatred is spread and violence is called for, especially on the internet. The CDU and the CSU are committed to a new culture of responsibility on the internet and to better protection against hate attacks, insults and threats in social networks.
We are all united by the wish for a just society that holds together. It is the wish for a country in which we are there for one another and treat each other with respect. More justice and respect strengthen our democracy. Part of this is that social cohesion in our country becomes stronger again and that decent dealings with one another are not lost to political radicalisation. We want people in Germany to be able to live in safety. We want to counteract radicalisation of every kind. Attacks on our free society also threaten from nationalists: right-wing extremist assaults and attacks have increased alarmingly in recent years. We are working to ensure that criminal offences with a right-wing extremist background are better recorded and statistically evaluated in future. A comprehensive strategy against right-wing extremists prepared to use violence includes deradicalisation. That is why, with a law on promoting democracy and preventing extremism, we will secure the structures of preventive work over the long term.
Hatred and violence are hostile to democracy and to humanity. All the more reason for the state, too, to give reliable support to initiatives that work for democracy and tolerance and against right-wing extremism, racism and antisemitism.
This begins, however, with the respective governments recognising the relevant problems, taking them up and tackling them. Unfortunately this is frequently not the case.
In our dissenting opinion on the final report of the NSU committee of inquiry in the 17th legislative period of the German Bundestag, we named a whole series of measures that in our view should be taken, such as the establishment of an independent monitoring body or of a federal foundation for the permanent support of the civil-society initiatives mentioned.
Group-focused enmity such as racism, antisemitism, antigypsyism, anti-Muslim racism, transphobia and homophobia, sexism, as well as the devaluation of homeless people, the long-term unemployed and people with disabilities, must be firmly opposed, no matter from whom it comes., It is the task of politics to ensure that all people – irrespective of their origin, their gender, their sexual identity or religion – can move about freely and safely.
We want to expand prevention and participation. We must do everything to ensure that young people do not slide into inhuman violence and violence-glorifying ideologies in the first place, whether right-wing extremist or Islamist. We want to expand prevention programmes against right-wing extremism as well as against violent Islamism and Salafism on a large scale and to strengthen civil-society approaches. Mosque congregations and imams also have a responsibility to make their contribution to prevention and to preventing the radicalisation of young people.
Without a certain self-evident basic consensus, a society constituted as a state cannot survive. Tocqueville developed these insights nearly 200 years ago in his book “Democracy in America”. For the AfD, the nation state offers the appropriate external vessel for preserving this basic consensus, particularly in a globalised world. Only the nation state organised along republican lines can nowadays assert regulatory sovereignty and a claim to validity while at the same time guaranteeing its citizens the necessary proximity, the sense of belonging together and the possibility of democratic participation. For this reason the AfD notes the various signs of the dissolution of nation states with concern. Supranationalism and multiculturalism represent serious dangers to the separation of powers, to democratic participation by citizens and to the state under the rule of law.
Communitarian multiculturalism (not pluralism!) and the ethnopluralism of the “New Right” prove on closer analysis to be brothers in spirit. While the former insists on cultural and consequently legal particularities within society, ethnopluralism seeks to “restrict the validity of human rights to a geographically limited cultural area […]”. (Egon Flaig) The AfD rejects both paths because they run counter to the universal claim of the Enlightenment.
In the AfD’s view, the voluntary import of radical Islamist (Islamo-fascist) Jew-haters by the current federal government is the most dangerous thing for the Jewish minority in Germany. The established parties are responsible for this extreme and radical policy and for its consequences. The trust in the established parties that current poll ratings appear to reflect astonishes the AfD. For where radicalism is concerned these established parties have not only failed to prove themselves; they must also accept the reproach of having positively encouraged radicalism.
Radicalism and extremism are of course both to be rejected. In the AfD’s view, more attention should currently be paid to the “extremism of the centre”. A Federal Chancellor who, as set out above, encourages radicalism and places herself above law and statute (example: the opening of the borders) shows herself by that act to be an agent fulfilling the pipe dreams of left-wing extremists (“No border, no nation!”). In her actions she executes the idea of rule laid down in Hegel and especially in Carl Schmitt, which is however inappropriate to a republic. (C. Schmitt: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.”) Something similar could already be observed during the so-called “euro rescue”, even if at the time it was packaged in the term “without alternative”. But even that form of having no alternative was already a kind of state of exception, and still is.
The AfD rejects this form of rule, because the sovereign is constantly and permanently the people of the state. For this reason too, the AfD would like to see referendums, such as are a matter of course in Switzerland and such as the Basic Law actually provides for, established in Germany as well.
As the party of freedom, we are resolute opponents of extremism of every kind. Where inner liberality and tolerance are concerned there can be no discount for anyone. The values of our Basic Law are not negotiable. There must be no tolerance towards intolerance. Criminal prosecution and the prevention of danger must therefore be efficient. This also includes the police and public prosecutors pursuing criminally liable postings in social networks more consistently. To this end these authorities must be adequately equipped in financial terms and in terms of staff. Prevention programmes must be targeted and must be intensified where necessary.
