What was supposed to be a decisive blow against right-wing extremism ended up as yet another setback for the German government — the latest in a long line of judicial defeats that have badly damaged its credibility.
Germany’s interior minister Nancy Faeser last month banned Compact, a controversial nationalist magazine she called a “central mouthpiece of the extreme right-wing scene”.
But on Wednesday a top court overturned the ban — and Compact was allowed to resume publication.
The ruling is an embarrassing blow for a government that has identified far-right extremism as the greatest threat to German democracy — and is determined to root it out. Wednesday’s judgment, by the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig, has discredited those efforts.
Faeser was unrepentant on Thursday. “We will not let up in our fight against the enemies of the constitution,” she said.
The interior minister, who is a leading light in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic party, quickly came under a hail of criticism. Many saw the government’s legal setback as a gift to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which had spoken out forcefully against the ban.
The verdict came just weeks ahead of critical regional elections in three eastern states that are AfD strongholds.
“The worst thing is she’s performing as the best campaigner for the AfD,” said Wolfgang Kubicki, deputy leader of the FDP, the smallest party in Scholz’s coalition. “Frau Faeser should go and think about whether she really wants to continue campaigning for the Alternative for Germany.”
Jürgen Elsässer, Compact’s founder and editor-in-chief, said the ruling was a “victory of David over Goliath, it was a victory of democracy over dictatorship and it was a victory of the people over the regime”.
This is not the only defeat Scholz’s government has suffered in the courts. Last year the constitutional court struck down its budget, saying it violated Germany’s strict rules on debt. Last month the court scrapped part of Scholz’s reform of the country’s electoral laws.
The cabinet also remains locked in conflict over the budget for 2025, with huge financing gaps that ministers cannot agree how to plug.
But Faeser’s travails point to a wider problem: the difficulty democratically elected governments have in striking a balance between cracking down on extremist views and protecting fundamental rights enshrined in their constitutions.
The EU is stuck on the horns of just such a dilemma. Last month the European Commission charged Elon Musk’s X with allegedly ignoring EU law by allowing disinformation and illegal hate speech on the platform. Brussels has also begun proceedings against Meta and TikTok.
But internal market commissioner Thierry Breton came under fire this week after he posted a letter online ahead of Musk’s interview with US presidential candidate Donald Trump, threatening the “full use” of sanctions if Musk failed to curb “illegal content” on X.
Critics said the letter, which was not agreed with other commissioners in advance, played into claims made by Musk and the Trump campaign that Brussels was trying to meddle in the US election.
When Faeser banned Compact in mid-July, hundreds of policemen raided its offices and impounded documents and computers. The homes of its editors and publishers were also searched.
Faeser said at the time that authorities were targeting the “intellectual arsonists that incite a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and migrants and want to overthrow our democratic state”.
Interior ministry officials said the magazine spread “conspiracy theories and content that was antisemitic, racist, historically revisionist and anti-minority”, and claimed several Compact employees had links to the far-right extremist party “Die Heimat” (Homeland) — a successor to the neo-Nazi NPD.
However, Faeser was widely criticised at the time for banning the association of the same name that publishes Compact rather than the magazine itself — an approach some legal experts said was questionable and could backfire.
But things got much worse for her on Wednesday when the Leipzig court issued an interim injunction suspending the ban until a final verdict is reached in the case.
The judges expressed doubts about whether the move against Compact was proportionate. Some of the articles it published were clearly unconstitutional, they said, but a lot were “unobjectionable”. Faeser could have taken “less severe measures” than banning it outright, the judges added.
The interior ministry has maintained that the material it presented to the court had proven that Compact was “anti-constitutional, aggressive and militant” and said it would “substantiate its claim” in further proceedings.
Free speech advocates have been dismayed by the injunction. “It’s a double defeat,” Miko Beuster, head of the German Journalists Association, said on German radio. “It’s a defeat because the people who actually want to abolish our democracy are the ones celebrating. And it’s also a defeat because it’s destroyed trust [in the system].”
“If you ban something like this, it has to hit home — but this ban missed its target,” he added.
Prior to the ban Compact was available online, in newsagents and in bookstores and had a circulation of about 40,000. But the magazine has long been in the crosshairs of Germany’s law enforcement agencies.
With its mixture of salacious gossip, diatribes against immigrants, climate denial and Covid-19 scepticism, the magazine is seen as a mainstay of Germany’s Neue Rechte or alt-right.
It carried columns by Martin Sellner, an Austrian ethno-nationalist ideologue who held secret meetings with AfD officials late last year to discuss the mass deportation of migrants.
During the refugee crisis of 2015-16, during which many Syrians came to Germany, one Compact writer accused the government of “systematically flooding Germany and mixing its genes with foreign cultures in order to reduce the general IQ of the population”.
A recent cover story was titled “War criminals: how German generals are planning an attack on Russia”. Another praised Maximilian Krah, the AfD politician accused of close ties to China and Russia, with the headline: “How patriots are slandered as traitors”.
Editor-in-chief Elsässer wrote on Compact’s website in June 2023: “We simply want to overthrow the regime.” He later claimed his aim in doing this was to “restore Germany’s liberal democratic order”.
He has also written about the alleged existence of a “globalist moneyed aristocracy” of “bloodsuckers” linked to the Rockefellers and Rothschilds — claims seen by experts as classic antisemitic tropes.
Once considered by many a dangerous radical, Elsässer is now revelling in his newfound fame: “Before Faeser’s attack, maybe 2mn Germans knew us — now it’s 60mn,” he said. “Everyone wants a copy.”
