The German State of Rhineland Palatinate said it would cease to allow members of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD) into the civil service.
On July 10, State interior minister Michael Elbing (Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD) announced he was tightening regulations on civil servants’ “loyalty to the constitution”.
In the future, applicants for the civil service would have to declare in the course of the hiring process that they did not adhere to any extremist organisation and had not been a member of any such organisation in the past five years.
The list of outlawed organisations would also include the AfD – Germany’s second-largest political party, which received almost 21 per cent of the vote in the February 2025 general election.
“Loyalty to the constitution is not a wish, a recommendation or lip service. It is the unalterable duty of every civil servant in our country”, Elbing told journalists in Mainz, the State’s capital. Extremism was incompatible with working as a civil servant, he stated.
The new rules also related to policemen and teachers.
For people already working as civil servants in Rhineland Palatinate, AfD membership could constitute a disciplinary offence, which might result in removal from the civil service.
AfD representatives criticised the plan sharply. The party’s deputy chairman in Rhineland Palatinate, Sebastian Münzenmair, accused Elbing of using anti-democratic means.
“Instead of specific accusations, every AfD member is now under general suspicion”, Münzenmair said and demanded the State’s Prime Minister Alexander Schweitzer (SPD) “immediately call off his crazed minister”.
Jan Bollinger, the AfD’s State chairman, said his party was being “systematically harassed”.
Bollinger added: “The AfD parliamentary group will offer political and legal resistance and defend the free and democratic basic order against its enemies.”
Gordon Schnieder, a speaker for the Conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, in a government coalition with the SPD at the federal level, accused the SPD of “show politics” and said he suspected Elbing was driven by the SPD’s recent resolution to push for a total ban of the AfD.
In May 2025, the German Federal Agency for Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had issued a report in which it asserted that the AfD was “definitely right-wing extremist”.
The report may serve as the basis for a ban of the party, experts said. After heavy criticism for partisanship and shoddy work as well as legal challenges by the AfD, though, the BfV retracted its report barely a week after publication.
