A premature application to ban the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would possibly even be helpful for the party in the upcoming German state elections, according to Günter Krings, a spokesman for legal policy in the CDU/CSU parliamentary group.
"We must fight the AfD, including its sub-organizations, first and foremost politically and examine very carefully in any banning procedure whether it could do more good than harm to this party, at least in the short term," the former parliamentary state secretary in the German ministry of the interior told dpa.
As an "ever-increasing radicalization" can apparently be observed in the AfD's youth organisation, the Junge Alternative (JA), the CDU politician said. Krings said that it would be justified to at least carefully consider banning this association.
"The findings of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution are crucial and indispensable for a successful ban," he emphasized.
However, only the federal government, not the opposition, has access to this information obtained by intelligence services. It was therefore up to the federal government to make an assessment, on the basis of which only it could then issue such a ban.
The Federal Constitutional Court decides whether a party is banned. The Bundestag can submit a corresponding application. The Federal Government and the Bundesrat also have this option.
However, only the interior minister can ban an association that operates on a supra-regional level. Interior minister Nancy Faeser of the centre-left SPD banned the neo-Nazi group Hammerskins Deutschland last year, for example.
Last week, the Cologne Administrative Court denied an application for interim legal protection by which the AfD and the JA had attempted to prevent the youth organization from being monitored by Germany's domestic intelligence agency - formally called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution - as an extremist organisation.
The AfD youth group has lodged an appeal against this.At the end of January, the Federal Council accepted a petition entitled "Check AfD ban!", which around 800,000 people had signed since mid-August. The same demand had been raised at numerous rallies against right-wing extremism and in favour of protecting democracy in recent weeks.
The protests were triggered by revelations from the Correctiv media centre about a meeting of radical right-wingers in Potsdam in November, which was also attended by AfD politicians as well as individual members of the CDU and the conservative WerteUnion conservative group.
