Follow-up to our previous article on the Compact ruling: Sometimes a glance at Telegram is enough to grasp how far the republic has fallen. Martin Sellner, convicted right-wing extremist, chief ideologue of “remigration,” and symbolic figure of digital ethno-nationalism, proclaims his own legal interpretation on the day of a ruling by the Federal Administrative Court - and no one laughs. On the contrary: the right rejoices. The left falls silent. And a German high court has turned itself into an enabler of a dangerous normalization that knows only one direction - regression. Because the ruling that declares the Interior Ministry’s ban on the far-right COMPACT magazine unlawful is not a victory for press freedom but a capitulation. A judicial bankruptcy in the garb of neutrality. The court stated it had indeed found “proximity to the remigration concept” but no “defining orientation.” What sounds like an assessment of the temperature in a gulag is, in truth, the judicial relativization of a dehumanizing ideology. Not bad enough, not dangerous enough, not quite Nazi - just semi-Nazi. And therefore, apparently - permitted.
The reasoning is damning. The court boldly declares that association law can indeed be applied to media companies. Only to immediately concede that it prefers not to in this particular case. Not defining enough. Too much gray area. Too much political cowardice. Anyone who rules this way accepts that extremists will in the future swap prosecutable slogans for watered-down headlines - and be able to cite the Federal Administrative Court as precedent. No surprise then that COMPACT and the comment sections of Telegram and X (formerly Twitter) are already popping champagne. At last they have hijacked press freedom - with the seal of the German judiciary. Particularly bizarre: even AfD figures like Krzysztof Walczak and René Springer understand what the ruling really means. Walczak calls the reasoning “highly dangerous” - because it makes future bans politically contestable. What he means, of course, is that the court is no longer seen as reliable. And rightly so. Because anyone who seriously distinguishes between analysis and endorsement in evaluating the remigration concept - as if Sellner’s racist project were merely an op-ed in the culture section - has already lost all sense of proportion. Even more absurd: the court argues that COMPACT’s content was “not defining enough” for a ban. One has to imagine it like a Molotov cocktail thrown only halfway - and therefore legally acceptable. Because the flames didn’t engulf the entire house. And the family on the ground floor survived.
That it is precisely the right-wing extremist Martin Sellner himself who interprets the ruling on Telegram and claims media authority in doing so is no trivial matter. It is a confession of failure. When a neo-Nazi rises to become the legitimate interpreter of a supreme court ruling and no one objects, that is not a scandal - it is the new normal. And when a court called the “Federal Administrative Court” ennobles a constitution-hostile, racist, conspiracy-driven propaganda outlet like COMPACT by granting it protective rights, one must ask - who is actually being protected here - democracy or its enemies? No, this ruling is not a victory for freedom - it is a slap in the face to those who fight for it. It is not a ruling - it is a political capitulation. And it carries - no matter how much one tries to wriggle out of it - the stale stench of historical repetition. Ruling with greetings from Braunau.
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