Germany may be about to get an interesting real-world test.
Full disclosure: this comes from our own reporting at EUobserver.
The AfD could win Sunday's election in Saxony-Anhalt, potentially giving the party its first opportunity to lead a German state government.
One institution already in its sights is public broadcasting. The AfD wants to terminate the state's treaty with MDR, while journalists working in the region describe growing hostility towards traditional media.
That made us interested in a broader question:
Is the bigger democratic risk from populist parties what they campaign on — or what happens to institutions once they actually acquire the administrative power to act?
We've seen clashes over media, courts and other independent institutions elsewhere in Europe. Germany's federal system creates different constraints, but Saxony-Anhalt could become an interesting test of how resilient those constraints actually are.
Posted by EUobs
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*>As its very first official act in the event of taking power, the AfD has announced plans to terminate the treaty funding the regional public broadcaster, the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (Central Germany Broadcaster, MDR).*
*>…Ulrich Siegmund, the lead AfD candidate, has branded it “anti-German”, “woke” (of course), and declared “no one should be forced to pay for disinformation.”*
*>”The AfD has declared that the closure of MDR would be just “the beginning of the end for compulsory, licence-fee-funded broadcasting”…”*
Campaigning openly to gut the independent press? Nothing to see here. Definitely not a threat to democracy