There was chaos last week in the parliament in Erfurt, in the eastern German state of Thuringia, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the biggest group in the state parliament following its election victory in early September.

Last Thursday, AfD politician Jürgen Treutler, by virtue of being the parliament's oldest member at 73, was entitled to chair the first session of the new legislative period. Treutler performed this duty by refusing to allow motions to be passed and votes to be taken, essentially blocking the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and other parties from nominating a candidate for the speaker's job.

The CDU objected to this performance at the Thuringian Constitutional Court and was successful. When the session resumed two days later, CDU politician Thadäus König was elected as the new state parliament president.

Now that parliament is able to function once again, it is debating how to deal with the AfD in the coming term. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Thuringia, which tracks domestic extremist movements in Germany, classified the party as "right-wing extremist" in 2021.

Georg Maier, leader of the Thuringian Social Democrats and still acting interior minister, spoke out on Thursday in favor of proceedings before the Federal Constitutional Court to ban the AfD.

"Today's events in the Thuringian state parliament have shown that the AfD is aggressively and combatively taking action against parliamentarism," he said on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. "I think that this means the preconditions for a ban have been........

© Deutsche Welle