In my last post, I wrote that “The campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is not going well.” Today – a mere 72 hours later – you could say that the campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is all but dead. This is because the people most committed to banning the AfD also happen to be some of the stupidest, most incompetent legal and political operators the world has ever seen. Their incompetence is so enormous that I am for once willing to entertain conspiracy theories as to why they might have undermined their own project. It is that bad.
Two weeks ago, you may remember, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser forced the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to rush its long-planned upgrade of the AfD and declare the party to be a “confirmed Right-wing extremist” organisation. Word spread of a mysterious 1,100-page assessment, full of damning proofs that allegedly supported this upgrade. This document had to be kept secret, Faeser explained in an interview, “to protect sources and withhold indications of how our findings were obtained”. So espionage, much secret, wow.
The thing was, the anti-AfD dossier could not have been that secret, because somebody (almost certainly somebody in the Interior Ministry) immediately leaked it to Der Spiegel, whose journalists published various excerpts in an effort to make the case for how evil and fascist and Nazi and Hitler the AfD is. In this way the press could climax repeatedly in a wave of unceasing democratic orgasms over the renewed possibility of an AfD ban, even in the absence of the supersecret report.
The media circus dissipated quickly, however. The publicity campaign, the rollout – a lot of things went wrong, some of them inexplicably wrong. Still, I thought there was a 40% chance that the Bundestag would try to open ban proceedings sometime this year. That, as I said, was on Monday. What happened on Tuesday, is that Cicero, NiUS and Junge Freiheit all received the secret 1,100-page assessment (actually, it contains 1,108 pages) and published it in its entirety. Since Tuesday evening, a great many people have been reading this document, and they have been realising various things.
The first thing they’ve realised, is that it contains hardly anything derived from supersecret spy sources at all. It is little more than a collection of public statements by AfD politicians. Faeser’s sources-and-methods justification for keeping the report hidden was a total lie.
Hellbound and Down 