A German court has ruled that State officials and governments may use official communication channels to defame the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD).
That was despite the fact that it would violate their Constitutional mandate to stay politically neutral.
The Constitutional Court of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate dismissed two corresponding requests by AfD in a decision published on April 2.
The party had taken offence at a 2024 Instagram posting by Malu Dreyer of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), then the Minister-President of Rhineland-Palatinate, as well as several press releases on the official website of the Rhineland-Palatinate State government.
In the posting and the press releases, AfD was accused of “disseminating right-wing extremist ideas” and planning “the expulsion and deportation of millions of people for racist motives” with its calls for “remigration”.
The party was also referred to as a “right-wing extremist enemy of the constitution”.
AfD claimed the derogatory remarks had infringed on the right to equal opportunities for political parties that the German federal constitution mandates. It did so through the official communication channels of the Prime Minister’s office and the State government – rather than through party channels of the ruling SPD.
According to case law of the German federal Constitutional Court, the State was obliged to maintain neutrality in its relationship with political parties on the principle of equal opportunities for all under Article 21 of the Constitution.
The State court threw out the right-wingers’ complaint although it did not contest that the official postings and press releases had violated the neutrality mandate.
“The challenged statements interfere with the right to equal opportunities,” the presiding judges wrote in their decision.
“The statements in question do not comply with the neutrality requirement,” they found, adding that the AfD was expressively “qualified negatively”.
The official remarks “were justified in order to protect the free democratic basic order”, they said.
The court found it was permissible to accuse AfD of threatening democracy due to its “connections with right-wing extremist party members” that held “right-wing extremist, anti-tolerance and anti-free speech positions”.
The judges backed up their argument with quotes from the reports of the constitutional protection agencies of three German States – Thuringia, Saxony, and Saxony-Anhalt – which had all labelled the AfD as “definitely right-wing extremist”.
They also found it was not a problem to accuse the AfD of planning the deportation of millions of people out of racist motives – even though the party itself had repeatedly denied such claims.
“It does not matter how the applicant wishes the term ‘remigration’ to be understood,” the judges wrote. “Rather, the decisive factor is that the interpretation of ‘remigration’ by the defendant is not arbitrary and incomprehensible.”
In conclusion, the Constitutional Court found that Dreyer had acted in believing human dignity and the principle of democracy were at risk and that she was protecting the free democratic basic order by attacking the AfD.
The decision sparked outrage among right-wingers.
On April 3, Ulrich van Suntum, an economics professor and conservative commentator, called the ruling “scandalous” in a post on X.
“This means that all legal barriers against the persecution of the opposition by the parties in power are now breaking,” van Suntum wrote.
He also criticised what he called the “close party-political ties” between the courts and the ruling parties.
According to the newspaper Junge Freiheit, Lars Brocker – President of the Rhineland-Palatinate Constitutional Court and one of the judges who signed the AfD ruling – received a scholarship from an SPD-affiliated foundation and worked for the State government before becoming a judge.
