Democracy by Starvation: The Push to Cut off the AfD's Millions

When the political establishment finds itself struggling to win arguments at the ballot box, the urge to use state machinery against political opponents becomes hard to resist. A complete party prohibition remains a clumsy tool—treacherous to enforce and optically hazardous. Constitutional scholar Christoph Möllers has put forward a cleaner mechanism: instead of attempting an outright ban on the Alternative for Germany, the state should simply starve it financially.

Writing in Die Zeit, Möllers framed the stripping of state party funding as an effective alternative carrying fewer political risks. Depriving a party of taxpayers' money is, in his view, far easier to sell to the public. Under Article 21, Paragraph 3 of the Basic Law—a legal provision added in 2017 and applied for a six-year period against the former NPD in January 2024—the Federal Constitutional Court can cut off funding to parties deemed hostile to the constitutional order.

The financial blow would be severe. For 2025, the Bundestag administration set state funding for the AfD at roughly 18.2 million euros. An exclusion would wipe out these subsidies alongside tax breaks and donation benefits. While the party would retain its electoral rights, MP mandates, and parliamentary group funding, its central finances would take a catastrophic hit. Möllers openly hopes this financial squeeze might incentivize the party to purge its ethno-nationalist elements and rebrand.

Yet the legal path is hardly a shortcut. As Möllers noted in early 2024, cutting funding is nearly as complicated as a full ban. The sole procedural advantage is that prosecutors do not need to prove the party has the concrete potential to achieve its aims. Crucially, the Federal Constitutional Court must still rule the party anti-constitutional.

That hurdle remains high. In February 2026, the Cologne Administrative Court handed the AfD a temporary legal victory, preventing the domestic intelligence agency from classifying the federal party as explicitly right-wing extremist, noting that unconstitutional elements did not characterize the entire party. Though Möllers and fellow legal expert Sophie Schönberger reviewed an extensive report by the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte in June 2026 confirming its scientific approach, turning legal theories into financial sanctions remains fraught.

Instead of confronting political rivals through persuasive policy, mainstream political figures prefer technical fixes and administrative sanctions. Depriving millions of voters of their preferred party's financial backing may feel convenient in Berlin, but it leaves an uncomfortable question unanswered: is this a defense of democracy, or simply an attempt by the political class to neutralize competition?

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com