What the AfD leak can lead to: Game changer for a party ban

The AfD would rather not talk about its internal emails. More than 420,000 of them have been online since Monday. On Tuesday, the party spoke of a “hacker attack” on its hosting service provider, but said on Wednesday that it would not answer questions about the content. Nobody should use or distribute the data. The authenticity of the inventory has not been conclusively proven, but there is much to suggest it.

The emails go back from 2026 to 2013, deep into the party's history. It contains documents on exclusion procedures as well as internal strategy papers. Party arbitration tribunal mailboxes are also said to be affected. What can we say about the AfD as a whole?

Würzburg lawyer Chan-jo Jun believes a new assessment of the party is possible based on the emails. The leak could be a “game changer” for a ban on the AfD, says the IT legal expert of the taz. Provided the data is authentic – which the lawyer assumes.

Jun searched through the mass of data primarily for evidence that party organs knew about unconstitutional events. And especially how they dealt with it. “We never lacked material for anti-constitutional efforts, but what we lacked all the time is attribution, namely proof that the party leadership or party organs were aware of this.”

Arbitration documents could be important for this, answering questions such as: What was a member accused of? How did the party court justify its decision to expel a member or not? Such correspondence shows how the party dealt with radical members, said Jun.

For example, the justification or rejection of a decision could be relevant. However, a failed exclusion alone does not prove that the entire party agrees with the member's statements. But now, based on the huge data material, it can be understood much more deeply. Something that the constitutional protection offices would have been able to do legally for a long time, as Jun emphasizes.

According to Jun, the second type of data that could be interesting for a ban procedure is that which proves a planned, intra-party action to impair or eliminate the free-democratic basic order. Internal strategy papers can show whether there is a common political intention behind public statements. Until now, planning often had to be derived from public behavior, he says, but this is now different. There must also be important evidence that the party could be successful with its plan.

The question remains whether hacked emails can even be used legally. Jun distinguishes between criminal proceedings and party ban proceedings. Illegal procurement does not automatically mean that findings are unusable. In 2010, for example, the Federal Constitutional Court approved an apartment search whose initial suspicion was based on purchased tax data from Liechtenstein. Even with tax CDs, the state has already spent money on material that was stolen illegally.

But even if the emails themselves are not used, Jun points to one reason why they are valuable: The emails could provide clues as to which witnesses should be interviewed and which documents should be requested. There are now new opportunities to get to the bottom of suspected cases. “I believe that the things the party has done can no longer be hidden,” AfD expert Jun is convinced. Other lawyers also see it that way. “The AfD is unconstitutional and a party ban procedure would probably be successful,” said lawyer Valentina Chiofalo from the Society for Freedom Rights to the taz on Tuesday. Your organization considered a ban procedure to be promising based on all the facts known about the AfD before the leak. The GFF published an approximately 1,500-page report based solely on publicly available sources.

The AfD leak also brings new momentum to the debate politically. The parliamentary director of the Greens, Irene Mihalic, is of the opinion that the Federal Constitutional Court should be given the opportunity to examine a ban. Lawyer Jun sees the hesitation of those entitled to apply so far as primarily political considerations. But now the moment has come to take a closer look, follow up and draw conclusions.