Judges on Germany's highest court unanimously threw out legal complaints brought by the AfD. They said far-right lawmakers failed to show how Merkel's 2015 decision to let in refugees was a constitutional violation.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Weigel
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Germany's Constitutional Court dismissed three complaints initiated by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) challenging German Chancellor Angela Merkel's refugee policies in 2015.
Judges on the high court unanimously rejected all the cases, which were brought by the AfD's group in parliament, deeming them to be "inadmissible."
The cases focused on Merkel's September 2015 decision to temporarily waive EU rules on migration and allow asylum-seekers to cross Germany's borders.
The AfD argued that the move violated the right of the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, to participate. They also said the move violated Germany's principle of the separation of powers.
In their decision, judges wrote that the AfD lawmakers "failed to sufficiently substantiate that the Federal Government's decisions on this matter violated or directly threatened its rights."
Furthermore, judges noted, the AfD was elected to the national parliament for the first time in 2017 and wasn't represented in the Bundestag at the time the German government took the 2015 decision.
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
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Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
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Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
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AfD cases too weak in court
The AfD's attempts to legally challenge the German government failed on multiple levels, but judges argued that the way they went about challenging the government posed one of the biggest problems.
The party had attempted to try the German government using a specific type of legal proceeding called an "Organstreitverfahren" — where a party in the Bundestag can face off in court against the federal government.
The Constitutional Court took issue with the AfD's complaints against the government, saying that the proceeding isn't intended to force the government to comply with a specific behavior.
The AfD was attempting to obligate the government "to perform a specific action — i.e. the rejection of asylum seekers at the borders," the court said in a statement.
In early September 2015, Merkel made a decision not to close the southern border with Austria, allowing thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa to enter the country. The government justified the move as an exceptional, temporary response to a humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands seeking to cross into Austria from Hungary, en route for Germany.
Although the move was widely supported at the time and drew international praise, Merkel's decision came in for heavy criticism at home, especially with the passing of time. The decision also helped cement AfD's position on Germany's political landscape; migration and Muslims dominate the party's agenda.
