Members of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) are authoritarians who pose a threat to the country's democratic order, German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck said in an interview published on Wednesday.
"The right-wing authoritarians are attacking the essence of the republic," Habeck, a Green Party leader, told Stern magazine. "They want to turn Germany into a state like Russia."
Habeck's comments come a week after news reports revealed that AfD politicians held a meeting with far-right extremists in November in Potsdam that included Martin Sellner, the founder of the far-right extremist Identitarian Movement Austria.
The revelations have helped fuel a controversial debate in Germany about whether the AfD should be banned. German law allows for suppressing political parties deemed hostile to the country's democratic and constitutional order.
Participants at the Potsdam meeting have acknowledged that they discussed how to encourage, or force, immigrants and other groups to leave Germany.
Sellner told dpa that he discussed "remigration" with the group, a term frequently used in far-right circles as a euphemism for the expulsion of immigrants and minorities.
Anti-AfD demonstrations have taken place in several cities in the week since the investigative news outlet Correctiv first reported on the meeting. In Cologne on Tuesday night, tens of thousands of people marched to denounce the far right.
Habeck told the magazine that people on the far right are systematically preparing for their attack on Germany's republic.
Habeck, however, demurred when asked about a potential legal ban against the AfD, saying that Germany's Constitutional Court would ultimately decide and that democratic political parties would need to win back AfD supporters either way.
He said the banning is not a political but a legal question and that damage from a failed case would be massive.
The Werteunion, a right-wing group within the conservative CDU/CSU opposition bloc, also confirmed on Tuesday night that two of its members attended the Potsdam meeting "as private guests and not as representatives of the Werteunion."
The Werteunion attacked Correctiv's reporting about the meeting, claiming that discussions were not the "mass repatriation of Germans with a migration background" but focused instead on deporting foreigners without full legal status in Germany or legal immigrants who have committed crimes.
Lars Klingbeil, the chairman of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD), also denounced the AfD in an interview on Wednesday with the RND news agency.
"We will not allow our country to again be divided into 'them' and 'us,'" Klingbeil said. "We will not allow right-wing extremists to decide who is German and who is not."
Katharina Dröge, who leads the Green Party's faction in parliament, called the mass demonstrations against the AfD encouraging.
"These people show that a loud minority on the far right cannot rely on the democratic majority to remain silent," Dröge said.
A petition demanding that firebrand AfD politician Björn Höcke be stripped certain basic rights, including the right to vote or stand for elected office, has gained momentum in recent days with more than 1.1 million signatures.
Another petition to revoke Höcke's basic rights has been submitted to parliament and would be reviewed, according to Petitions Committee chairwoman Martina Stamm-Fibich.
Höcke leads the AfD's particularly radical state-level party in the eastern state of Thuringia. He is also currently facing criminal charges for having allegedly quoted the slogan of the Nazi Party's paramilitary SA stormtroopers during a speech.
Leaders of the SPD's left-wing youth organization, the Jusos, spoke out in favour of revoking Höcke's basic rights.
"The Nazi Björn Höcke has been proactively campaigning for years for these paragraphs to be applied to him," Philipp Türmer told the Tagesspiegel newspaper on Wednesday, referring to the provisions of German law allowing extremists to be denied rights.
Legal expert Ulrich Battis told the broadcaster RTL that Höcke's particularly extreme conduct made the possibility of stripping him of his rights "rather greater than I would ever have judged in the past."
The left-wing Die Linke party on Wednesday argued that the government should first move to ban the AfD's far-right youth organization, Young Alternative.
Katina Schubert, deputy leader of Die Linke, told dpa that outlawing the Young Alternative would be "much easier and quicker" than outlawing the entire AfD, since the youth wing lacks protected party status and a ban could be enforced with "a simple ministerial decree."
