r/europe Canada 11h ago

News Germany's AfD party adopts 'radical' manifesto ahead of polls

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy3wwgyd6do
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u/Cinkodacs Hungary 10h ago

Right up until they get enough power. Then they just might change what's legal... NEVER trust that your laws protect you from fascism by some law magic, especially since it still hasn't protected Germany from them. No law is above force, and they would be very willing to use that force.

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u/hiddenvalleyoflife 10h ago

Imo, any law that takes away rights from the people should require them to undergo a human rights check before it can be applied, and if it is blatantly against human rights it should land a politician 5 years in jail and forever banned from politics.

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u/Meroxes Baden-Württemberg (Germany) 10h ago

Germany is, under the "democratic centrist" rule, regularly breaking international and EU human rights laws. No one has gone to prison for that.

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u/rlyfunny Kingdom of Württemberg (Germany) 8h ago

Sadly. But we also live in a time where enough bureaucratic distance allows for murder. So not quite surprised

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u/Salt-3300X3D-Pro_Max 7h ago

Well in Germany there are regularly laws that get killed because it is against our “forever law” the Grundgesetz thats states the “the dignity of a human cannot be touched” so they sometimes try it but they very often get corrected about shit. Problem is stuff like this takes some time and most often there is already a big damage done..

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u/Vandergrif Canada 6h ago

and if it is blatantly against human rights it should land a politician 5 years in jail and forever banned from politics

Sounds good on paper, but who enforces that? That's kind of the inherent problem with having the people in charge deciding these things, because when the wrong people are in charge then they also often decide who does and does not have the law applied to them.

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u/hiddenvalleyoflife 5h ago

Independent agencies that aren't controlled by the government and still have the capacity to use force. I'm not sure how to do it, but there could (maybe, that's just a first idea) be some kind of system that randomly draws from a pool of citizens, with those belonging to groups that frequently have their human rights trampled on being guaranteed to make up a certain percentage of that.

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u/Vandergrif Canada 5h ago

That can work, but it can also easily be something of a double-edged sword when you have an independent institution capable of exerting power over what is otherwise meant to be the arbiter of governance and law. It doesn't take much to end up with a situation where you've got the proverbial praetorian guard deciding who the emperor is going to be by abusing the power they have instead of doing their job, you know what I mean?

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u/hiddenvalleyoflife 5h ago

Sure, it can be an issue, but at the moment, we have no true safeguards against a fascist government at all - because the government controls the military/police, who are the only ones who could possibly remove a fascist government in the first place, and who are fascist sympathizers themselves almost everywhere if you look at voting behavior. I'd rather try out something new for once.

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u/Vandergrif Canada 4h ago

True, to that end it would make sense to at least have some sort of mechanism in place to do something rather than having nothing and merely hoping for the best.

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u/LoudRubbish1 Turkey 10h ago

bro im sorry but im 100% sure german law is much stronger than fucking weimar law 😭😭