Otto Schily said it recently, and so did the writer Juli Zeh: The exclusion of the AfD, including the withholding of positions in the Bundestag to which the party is entitled according to the statutes, will not make this highly problematic party smaller, but ever larger. Schily and Zeh are both lawyers, SPD members and are not suspected of being in any way close to the new right. Neither does the long-time top German diplomat and head of the Munich Security Conference (MSC), Wolfgang Ischinger.
This event in Munich, which has now become a global meeting point for international politics, will soon be held again. And Ischinger has spoken a word of power, broken a spell: After two years in which the AfD had to stay outside the doors of the Bayrischer Hof hotel, its leaders are being invited back. Ischinger is thus revising a wrong decision made by his predecessor (and previously also his successor) as MSC boss, Christoph Heusgen.
There is no reliable justification for this exclusion. At the time, Heusgen took advantage of the fact that the AfD had left the Bundestag when Ukrainian President Zelenskyj was allowed to speak there. That was rude and not appropriate, but no reason to ban her from the MSC.
There is also no security-relevant information to be gained there that they could immediately pass on to the Kremlin as spies. Anyone who assumes this is misunderstanding the nature of this conference. This is not a Western international security council where secrets are presented. But a place where opinions and perspectives are exchanged. For better understanding. Russians, including Putin himself, were guests there for long, long years. Foreign Minister Lavrov in 2020.
The exclusion now would come at exactly the wrong time. Because its source of life, migration, is currently drying up, the AfD has to face open political competition in other areas. And in doing so, it gets tangled up in ever-increasing contradictions, especially when it comes to security-related issues such as conscription and the war in Ukraine.
You can and must tackle these contradictions. And make it smaller. Instead of allowing them to continue to grow through exclusion that cannot be democratically justified.
