One major lesson from the political catastrophes of the 20th century appears paradoxical: Democracies sometimes must pursue seemingly undemocratic measures against those who would cynically exploit the system to gain power and then abolish democracy altogether.
This apparent dilemma has returned with the rise of far-right populist parties.
Read more about the threat posed by far-right parties with authoritarian tendencies and how democracies should respond in the article by Jan-Werner Müller of Princeton University: Democracy must defend itself: why banning far-right parties is justified.
Consider the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Given the threat that it poses to Germany’s constitutional order, there is a strong case for banning the AfD outright.
The German Federal Constitutional Court applied it by prohibiting a successor party to the Nazis, and then by barring the German Communist Party in the 1950s.
In the 1930s, the German-Jewish exile Karl Loewenstein was among the first to argue that democracies should restrict the fundamental rights of those using democratic means to pursue authoritarian ends.
More recently, the same court rejected an attempt to outlaw the tiny neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD, later renamed Die Heimat), on the grounds that it had no serious prospect of gaining power. The court suggested, however, that lawmakers amend the constitution to deny state financing to parties that have been officially designated as hostile to democracy, and the Basic Law has since been amended accordingly.
Unlike the NPD, the AfD might well form a government in one of eastern Germany’s states later this year.
Anticipating this possibility, a highly regarded team of specialists recently published a massive report on whether a ban might be approved by the Constitutional Court.
Many commentators worry that banning a party that might garner as much as 40% of the vote in an eastern state–and which currently tops national polls–amounts to excluding a large segment of citizens from the political process.
They warn that a ban could leave many voters disillusioned with democracy altogether, as well as allowing the far right to claim the mantle of martyrdom.
But these concerns are overblown. Size matters, but if a ban cannot be placed on a party that is too small to win power, you cannot then argue against a ban on a party that is large. Obviously, the larger the anti-democratic party is, the greater the threat it poses to democracy.
And sometimes, one’s preferred program must be prohibited in order to uphold the polity’s fundamental commitments to democratic governance, the rule of law, and human dignity.
But people would suffer in the meantime, and even allowing a party to advocate openly for anti-democratic ends would damage a country’s politics, by signaling to citizens that such goals might be acceptable.
The far-right tendsto reject the basic democratic bargain that everyone else has accepted.
Far-right figures who win power–from Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland to Donald Trump in the United States–have consistently tried to tilt what should be a level playing field in their favor. Give a far-right party enough time and power and it is likely to usher in “competitive authoritarianism“: a system in which elections are still held, but are no longer fair.
This is why it is wrong to complain of a double standard between democrats and authoritarians. One side wants to preserve political competition; the other wants to eliminate it permanently.
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