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Democracy is dead! - Long live these Our Democracy! - Candidate excluded from mayoral election


The election committee of the city of Ludwigshafen has not admitted the AfD candidate, Joachim Paul, to the election for the office of mayor.



Denial of Legal Protection

The Administrative Court of Neustadt an der Weinstraße rejected the urgent application filed by Joachim Paul against this decision on August 18, 2025.

The reasoning is as follows:
- Anyone wishing to challenge the legality of an election must, in principle, first allow the election to take place and can then raise objections afterwards in the election review procedure.
- The only exception would be if, even before the election, it was already clear without major effort that the election process suffered from an obvious error.
- No such obvious error exists. There are doubts about Joachim Paul’s loyalty to the constitution. These are based on the fact that the AfD – as confirmed by court rulings – is classified by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a suspected right-wing extremist organization, and that Joachim Paul is mentioned by name in the report of the Rhineland-Palatinate state intelligence service. Whether Joachim Paul can be relied upon to uphold the free democratic basic order must be examined in a complex procedure.

In plain language, this reasoning means: the election is to take place without Joachim Paul, and by the time he has proven his loyalty to the constitution in two stages of the election review process, the term of office of the newly elected mayor will already be over. Even if his appeal were ultimately successful, Joachim Paul would gain nothing from it.

This handling comes into clear conflict with Article 19 (4) of the Basic Law. That provision requires the state to grant not just any, but effective legal protection.

One could argue that Article 19 (4) of the Basic Law is inherently limited in the context of election admission decisions by the requirement to protect the free democratic basic order from candidates who do not stand on its ground: one must not allow candidates to run whose anti-constitutional attitudes can already be foreseen or at least reasonably feared.

Parties decide on the elimination of a competitor

Such an argument, however, faces considerable difficulties. These begin with the question of who decides on the admission of candidates to the election. The Ludwigshafen election committee consists of members appointed by the parties represented in the city council (§ 8 para. 1 sentence 3 of the Rhineland-Palatinate Municipal Election Act). Thus, in the end, the other parties decide on the elimination of a competitor. The competitors or the parties behind them become referees. That is about the same as Thomas Müller refereeing a football match between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund.

A flaw in the Municipal Election Act

Here we are dealing with a flaw in the Rhineland-Palatinate Municipal Election Act. The correct approach would instead be to entrust the decision on election exclusion exclusively to the courts from the very beginning. The right to file such an application should then be regulated in such a way that either the election supervisor or competing candidates could request the exclusion of a candidate.

By what right may the domestic intelligence service spy on the political opposition?

A crucial contribution to the decision of the Ludwigshafen election committee came from an intelligence service dossier on Joachim Paul. The Neustadt/Weinstraße Administrative Court also relied on sources from intelligence agencies for its decision. This again raises the question of by what right the domestic intelligence service is allowed to spy on the political opposition – and what role any informants may have played.

Partial disenfranchisement of the electorate

The exclusion of an election candidate due to allegedly lacking loyalty to the constitution ultimately results in a partial disenfranchisement of the electorate. The citizens called to vote are not trusted to recognize for themselves the anti-constitutional mindset of a candidate. In connection with Article 5 (1) sentence 1 of the Basic Law (freedom of expression), the Federal Constitutional Court has aptly stated that the Basic Law tolerates even anti-constitutional expressions of opinion, because it relies on the fact that such positions will not prevail in the democratic contest of opinions. This guiding principle should also apply to candidate exclusions: they should remain the absolute exception.

Author: AI-Translation - Martin Schwab  | 

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