The German State of Rhineland-Palatinate has banned members of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD) from running for mayor.
As first reported by newspaper Junge Freiheit today, the party figures prominently on a list compiled by the State interior ministry of “extremist organisations” whose members are banned from becoming public servants or judges.
The list is part of a legal push to purge the State’s administration from AfD members and other supposed extremists, spearheaded by interior minister Michael Elbing, of the Social Democratic Party (SDP).
The ban also applies to many mayoral positions in the western German State, including in Nieder-Olm, a municipality of 35,000 inhabitants near the State capital of Mainz.
Candidates for the March 2026 election for mayor are required to “guarantee that they will always uphold the free democratic basic order as defined in the Basic Law [Germany’s Constitution]” and sign an affidavit attesting to this”.
Candidates also need to declare that they have not been a member of any of the organisations on the interior ministry’s list during the past five years.
Based on this rule, the municipality has now banned Roberto Kiefer, an AfD member, from running for the office of mayor.
Kiefer, a 57-year-old German-US double citizen, told Junge Freiheit: “This is tantamount to banning a political party.”
Other AfD representatives were similarly outraged. Joachim Paul, a State MP for AfD, wrote on X: “This is the newest idea of the Red Extremists and enemy of the constitution, interior minister Michael Elbing (SPD)”.
Joachim Paul was himself banned from running for mayor of the city of Ludwigshafen also in Rhineland-Palatinate in September 2025. That was not, though, under the new extremism legislation but by decision of a panel made up of his party’s political opponents.
The interior ministry’s list includes more than 100 organisations from the right-wing and left-wing spectrum as well as Islamist groups including Al-Qaeda and Hamas and several militant Indian and Palestinian movements.
As news site Nius notes today, militant left-wing group Antifa Ost (Antifa East), some of whose members are currently in court for alleged attempted murder, did not make it onto the list.
AfD is Germany’s main opposition party and achieved 21 per cent of the vote at the February 2025 general election.
