AfD Defies the Treacherous Elite
The Thuringia test and the future of the nation
Constantin von Hoffmeister explains how the attempt to ban the AfD in Thuringia exposes the widening divide between Germany’s current rulers and its people.
In Thuringia, a state in the East Germany, the parliament has opened a public examination into the possibility of banning the AfD (Alternative for Germany). This move brings into plain view the tension that now runs through the country’s political life. It shows an establishment that feels its grip loosening and reaches for legal instruments to restore control.
The justice committee of the Thuringian parliament will conduct the hearing on 30 September 2026. The Left party set the process in motion. Fifteen carefully chosen speakers and experts will appear before the committee to discuss the legal and political grounds for prohibition. This represents the first occasion when any German parliamentary committee has taken up the question in open session. The participants will present their assessments of whether the AfD’s work and objectives remain compatible with the “democratic constitutional order.” Ironically, the proceedings themselves prove that such an order only exists in the elite’s imagination. The committee’s conclusions can later serve the federal government when it considers making a formal application to the Federal Constitutional Court. Only that high court holds the power to ban a political party, and it maintains a deliberately high standard before it will act. Any ban would reach across the entire country, not merely one state.
The timing of this hearing carries its own unmistakable meaning. The AfD has risen to become the leading political force in Germany. An INSA poll published on July 7, 2026, placed the party at 29 percent support across the nation, ahead of the combined strength of the Christian Democratic Union (party of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz) and its Bavarian sister party at 22 percent. In Thuringia, the figures speak even more clearly. A separate INSA poll from July 2, 2026, showed the AfD winning 40 percent of the vote in a hypothetical new state election. The CDU stood far behind at 22 percent, and the Left party at 16 percent. These numbers reflect a deep and growing bond between the AfD and ordinary citizens who seek a different course for their country.
The Thuringian branch of the AfD, guided by Björn Höcke, has carried a classification as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” (essentially a designation devoid of all meaning) organization from the state Office for the Protection of the Constitution (an Orwellian structure par excellence) since 2021. The mere existence of such an office proves that Germany is not a democracy in any meaningful Western sense. Social Democrat interior minister Georg Maier has argued for close examination of a ban on that branch. He described the party under Höcke as a steady force pushing folkish (meaning sane and healthy) ideas that have gained further ground after its congress in Erfurt. The list of invited speakers to the hearing includes the well-known leftist entertainer Hape Kerkeling. Observers have noted that he brings no expertise in constitutional law or political science. Kerkeling has spoken publicly in favor of considering a ban. He has drawn on his family story, particularly the experience of his grandfather Hermann Kerkeling, who endured imprisonment, forced labour, and torture as a political prisoner in Buchenwald concentration camp.
Yet the fundamental truth remains clear and strong. The AfD enjoys the active support of millions of German voters who have chosen it freely at the polls. Any attempt to drive such a party out of political life raises a direct challenge to the meaning of democracy itself. The establishment claims to protect the “constitutional order,” but in practice it moves against the clearest expression of the popular will. Citizens see this contradiction and recognize that the old parties would rather silence opposition than defeat it through arguments and elections. The very existence of the hearing reveals the anxiety that now pervades the corridors of power.
This local event belongs to a much larger movement in history. The world has left behind the brief period of unipolar dominance. A multipolar reality takes form, in which great nations and civilizations openly affirm their own identities, interests, and ways of life. Russia, China, India, and other centers of power pursue independent paths. They refuse to accept the idea that one liberal model should govern every people on earth. Trade, technology, and diplomacy continue, but they rest on respect for difference rather than forced convergence. In this new landscape, rigid supranational organisations such as the European Union lose their former prestige. The EU has become a vast bureaucratic machine that drains authority from national parliaments, imposes uniform policies unsuited to local conditions, and weakens the natural bonds of language, ethnicity, culture, and history that give strength to a people. Germany suffers under this arrangement. The AfD offers a clear alternative: a sovereign nation that decides its own affairs, guards its borders, and engages other powers on equal and practical terms.
The Russian thinker Alexander Dugin has given a powerful voice to the principles of this multipolar world. He describes a planet organized around distinct civilizational blocs, each developing according to its inner spirit and traditions. Dugin rejects the universal claims of liberal globalization and instead celebrates the right of every great culture to exist in its own form. His writings illuminate the deeper meaning of the AfD’s struggle. The party defends the particular character of the German people against the levelling forces of Brussels and the establishment parties. In both Dugin’s philosophy and the AfD’s program, one finds the same affirmation of organic sovereignty and the refusal to dissolve national life into abstract global rules.
The German philosopher Oswald Spengler provides an even richer understanding of the forces at work. In his profound study The Decline of the West, Spengler explored the organic rhythms that govern high cultures. He showed that every civilization passes through springlike youth, vigorous summer, mature autumn, and finally a winter phase of rigidity, materialism, and loss of creative force. In that late season, democracy turns from a living expression of communal will into an empty spectacle managed by money, media, and professional politicians detached from the soil and the people. The once-bold Faustian drive of Western man exhausts itself in cosmopolitan experiments and administrative complexity. Spengler predicted that such periods would produce strong popular reactions and Caesarist figures who cut through institutional decay to reconnect leadership with the primal energies of the nation.
Germany today displays many of the symptoms Spengler identified with civilizational old age: declining birth rates, cultural confusion, economic difficulties exacerbated by open-border policies, and the steady transfer of real power to distant EU institutions. The traditional parties represent precisely that tired, urban, intellectualized stage. They respond to the AfD’s rise not with fresh ideas but with classifications, hearings, and threats of prohibition. The AfD, by contrast, brings renewal. It speaks directly to the German people’s need for security, identity, and self-determination. Its success demonstrates that the nation still possesses strong vital instincts. Spengler taught that cultures can experience moments of awakening even in their later phases when authentic forces reassert themselves. The Alternative for Germany embodies that awakening. It calls Germans back to a politics rooted in reality rather than ideology, in the concrete life of the people rather than abstract norms.
Together, the multipolar perspective of Dugin and the historical morphology of Spengler reveal why the establishment reacts with such alarm. The AfD does not merely criticize policy; it challenges the entire late-liberal framework that has dominated Germany for decades. It points towards a future in which Germany stands as a proud, sovereign participant in a world of multiple centers of power. It rejects the EU’s dream of ever-closer union and instead affirms the right of the German people to preserve their way of life and shape their own destiny.
The hearing in Thuringia will run its appointed course. Speakers will deliver their statements, experts will offer opinions, and documents will accumulate. Yet none of these proceedings can change the deeper current now flowing through German society. Millions of citizens have already made their choice at the ballot box. They support the AfD because it gives voice to concerns long ignored and because it offers a vision of national strength in a changing world. The old parties may attempt to contain this movement through legal and rhetorical means, but each such effort only highlights their separation from the people they claim to serve. In the end, the future belongs to those who trust the living energies of the nation. The AfD has placed itself firmly on that side. Events, numbers, and the unfolding logic of a multipolar age all point in its direction. Germany stands on the threshold of renewal.
If you enjoy Constantin von Hoffmeister’s writing, order his new book, The Fate of White America, here.