Towards the end of last year a group of far-right German political leaders gathered in a country hotel on the outskirts of Potsdam.

They included key members of Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party including the personal aide to the party leader Alice Weidel.

The AfD is currently riding high in German opinion polls. It is number one in Germany’s five eastern Lander (states) and placing second or third in several Lander in the Western half.

The meeting was organised to hear a proposal from Austrian Martin Sellner, former leader of the Identitarian Movement. Sellner has been banned from Britain and the US. His Identitarian Movement is a proscribed organisation in Germany.

But the AfD politicians still wanted to hear his ideas, especially Sellner’s proposed “remigration” programme. The plan was simple: Should the AfD come to power it would forcibly deport to an unnamed North African country millions of “non-assimilated peoples” and asylum seekers, even if they had German citizenship or permanent residence visas. Sellner also suggested that people who campaigned against the measure could also be deported.

This is not the first time in German history that such a measure has been proposed. In June 1940 Adolf Eichmann persuaded Hitler that the SS should take over the French colony of Madagascar, turn into an SS-run police state, and deport Europe’s Jews to the island. The plan failed because of the wartime British naval blockade.

When details of the Potsdam meeting were published in the investigative journal Correctiv anti-AfD demonstrations broke out in Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin and Dusseldorf. The demonstrators demanded that the AfD be banned.

This is legally quite possible. The German constitution says that political parties “that seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic order should be deemed unconstitutional.” Advocating the forcible deportation of German citizens could be construed as undermining the democratic order.

And there is precedent for German courts banning parties. Just this week they banned the neo-Nazi party Die Heimat (The Homeland). The Identitarian Movement is also banned. It asserts the superior rights of European ethnic groups and White people in general in the territories claimed exclusively by them.

The Identiarian Movement, with which Martin Sellner is connected, also pushes the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. This argues that liberal elites are working towards replacing White Europeans and European culture with non-Europeans.

Another organisation that has been linked with the AfD is PEGIDA (Pan Europeans against the Islamisation of the West). This organization is supported by White supremacists in America and Europe.

The AfD, Identitarian Movement and PEGIDA are all carefully monitored by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. But the AfD’s popularity, especially in the eastern half of the country makes it almost impossible to ban the party no matter how outrageous its pronouncements and policies become.

The party was founded in 2013 and in its first federal elections failed to reach the five percent threshold required for Bundestag representation. But they quickly improved. After the 2017 elections they held 93 seats in the Bundestag and had secured representation in 14 out of the 16 Lander.

The AfD is particularly strong in East Germany. They have formed the governments in Saxony and Thuringia. Their strong showing in the territories of the former German Democratic Republic has been attributed to East Germany’s history of autocratic politics and the fact that the region continues to lag behind the rest of the country in economic terms.

The party dropped into fifth place nationally after the latest federal elections. But since then Germany has suffered a series of economic setbacks, the repercussions of the Ukraine War and a rather lack-lustre Chancellor in the form of Olof Scholz. The result is that the party is now in second place in the opinion polls, ahead of the SPD and just behind the CDU-CSU.

The respected German Institute for Human Rights said the AfD was implementing “racist and right-wing extremist goals” and “shifting the limits of what can be said so that people can get used to their ethno-nationalist positions.” The Institute concluded that the AfD had reached a “degree of dangerousness” that it should be banned.

Not surprisingly, the leadership of the SPD agrees. The CDU/CSU is more circumspect. Banning established parties, they argue, is difficult. The voting public is split. 47 percent of Germans say ban them and 47 percent say don’t.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain".