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.

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.