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BERLIN — Germany’s mainstream political parties have pledged to better protect the country’s constitutional court from political influence by extremist parties such as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The country’s ruling parties — the Social Democratic Party, the Greens, and the pro-business Free Democratic Party — secured the necessary support from the conservative opposition in the Bundestag to enshrine in the constitution rules governing Germany’s constitutional court.
Once the rules become official after a planned two-thirds majority vote in both chambers of German parliament, any future changes would also require the support of two-thirds of lawmakers instead of a simple majority — as is now the case.
“Today is a good day for constitutional order and democratic culture in our country,” Justice Minister Marco Buschmann told reporters in Berlin on Tuesday.
He added that democratic backsliding in Poland and Hungary, along with a debate on judicial reform in Israel, prove how courts should be protected against governments that are not prepared to accept their decisions.
The deal illustrates growing alarm among many Germans over the rise of the AfD, which has gained in popularity even as it has grown more radical. The party is currently polling in second place nationally; in many regions of former East Germany, where three state elections will be held in September, it is in the lead.
Germany’s neighbor, Poland, serves as a cautionary tale of how a takeover of the judiciary by far-right forces could look.
Poland’s previously all-powerful populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, which ruled the country for eight years till December 2023, put the domestic judicial system under ever-tighter political control by, for example, refusing to seat elected judges and instead appointing judges seen as closer to the government.
To prevent such a scenario, the German proposal — which negotiators hope the Bundestag can approve by the end of this year — aims to enshrine in the constitution term limits for judges, an age limit for judges, and a limit on the total number of judges.
The 16 justices ruling Germany’s constitutional court currently serve 12-year terms and, in order to assure their independence, cannot be reelected.
Germany’s post-World War II constitution, or Grundgesetz, literally translated as “basic law,” was created in 1949 and designed to avoid a repeat of the Nazi past, when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor despite the Nazi party winning only a third of the vote.
The Grundgesetz contains provisions to prevent any anti-democratic party from using democratic means to rise to power. Parties deemed anti-democratic may have their state financing revoked or be banned outright.
“Those who wrote the constitution 75 years ago were surrounded by millions of Nazis and that’s why it is very robust,” Franz Mayer, a constitutional law professor at the university of Bielefeld in northwestern Germany, said in an interview.
“But even with this constitution, the Nazis would probably not have been stopped in 1933. Texts alone are not enough — in democracies, you need democrats, too.”
