Weidel and the Organized Deception

You would have to be blind not to see it: the headline writes itself while it lies to you. Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution loses - that sounds like a final defeat, a legal collapse, a game that is over. But an emergency ruling is not a game. An emergency ruling is a pause in the game. The confusion is no accident. It is deliberate. The Administrative Court of Cologne did not comment on the ideological status of the AfD. It did not say: The party is not right wing extremist. It did something far more mundane, far more procedural. It prohibited the domestic intelligence service from making a public claim while it is still being examined whether that claim is sustainable. That is not an acquittal. That is quiet. That is: wait.

An emergency application functions like a temporary lock. You close the business until the judge has decided whether it should have been allowed to open in the first place. No one constructs from that a final victory for the managing director. And yet: with the AfD, that is exactly what is happening. The process is being sold as a victory. The interim status is being staged as a final result. The truth is less dramatic and therefore less useful for headlines: the court does not say that the domestic intelligence service is wrong. It says that it should wait until all arguments have been heard. It says: review ongoing. Decision open.

Anyone who constructs from this a clean bill of health for the AfD or an acquittal or a triumph of democracy is manipulating. They take a procedural interim status and give it the form of a political message of salvation. That is not information. That is performance. That is dramaturgy in legal costumes. The claim that the AfD may no longer be classified as a confirmed right wing extremist organization suggests that it may never be classified that way again. But that is false. It may simply not be said now, while the review is ongoing. That is a temporally limited condition, not a new reality.

Anyone who sells legal interim positions as political victories does not necessarily lie with words. But they lie with form. They lie with emphasis. They lie with what they leave out. And that is sometimes the most brutal form of lying: not what is invented, but what is essential and omitted. Procedural law is unglamorous. That is why it is read like a chess move instead of reality. But that is precisely where reality lies: in the gray stacks of paper, in the clauses, in the distinction between provisional and final. Anyone who does not read that will be read by those who do.