The world comes down in favour of a ban: 62 % believe a political party can be banned, against 38 % who refuse. No undecided voters: on a question touching the foundations of democracy, nobody sits it out.
Gender splits clearly: men divide into two strictly equal halves, while women lean towards a ban. The global result therefore rests entirely on the female vote.
Age produces a stark opposition: the 45-54s and the 55-64s unanimously approve a ban, the 18-24s support it by a majority, the 25-34s split in two, and the over-65s reject it as a bloc.
This is one of the richest debates in the archive, and above all one of the few genuinely contradictory ones: two full threads in which arguments answer each other rather than pile up. The supportive camp holds a line of responsibility: a party can reach power, so it must be exemplary; democracy does not mean collective suicide; accepting an anti-democratic party amounts to letting the wolf into the sheepfold.
The opposing camp never defends the ideas at issue. It contests the means: you can condemn racism or antisemitism without banning the party that carries them, and it is better to fight them through public debate by showing why they are false. Its strongest argument is strategic. Banning does not make the ideas that made a party popular disappear; they will continue to exist but become harder to confront, and a ban risks driving even more voters away from the polls.
The historical reference took up much of the thread, and it was corrected live: to the claim that Hitler was legally elected, a reply counters that he was appointed by Hindenburg before destroying democracy from within, with the other camp noting that his party did reach power through the vote, and that the German parliament voted him full powers. That is where the reference to the 1949 German constitution comes from, which provides for banning a party seeking to destroy democracy.
The thread also contains a genuine change of position: a participant from the refusal camp revisits their own phrase, « they are only ideas », judging it too reductive, and concedes that an ideology has concrete consequences once it reaches power. By the end, the disagreement is no longer about the danger of the ideas, on which everyone agrees, but about whether a democracy protects itself better by excluding or by fighting.