Yeah. Previously it would have been seen as banning an extremist party. Now it would be seen as election tampering.

Do the Murdoch's have their media empire setup there too? If so Lachlan is your problem and the solution is an Italian plumber. Really the crux of any solution is almost certainly a plumber.

Banning thought never works. Find why people are upset. Analyse it. Find a solution.

Edit. Downvoted for the idea of analysis, and solutions. Awesome. Is this Reddit?

Exactly. This is a bandaid / plaster.

Deal with the real problem. Be honest about why people are upset. Let them actually speak their minds without judgement. Then, analyse it. Find solutions.

Banning a social movement of this scale is madness.

those thoughts are prevalent enough to cause this problem.

Can take people out of the soviet, but can't take soviet out of the people (1).

Sadly it's a system of thought that isn't concerned with observable reality. It's a sentiment I recognise in most (political) extremists: the idea that your problems must be someone else's fault (the brown, women, billionairs, ... pick your poison).

And, as you noticed, banning it will indeed only validate that sentiment.

(I grew up in DDR, luckily left in early 90s. A solution is therapy, as those people are stuck in generational trauma, which is known to lessen or completely void you of empathy. But that doesn't scale to halve a country).

The capitalist class can't make the machine run without unnecessary suffering and death. They used to be able to keep it out of sight in the global South and Asia. Through greed, they kept bringing more and more to the global West. Too many westerners still handwave it away and bury their heads, but as population, and thus unnecessary suffering and death increases, so too the population that doesn't look away and entertain themselves to stop thinking and talking about it. We are a threat, so expect worsening conditions to be rapidly escalated. That said, hold hope and keep working for a more equitable day.

I think most of us are struggling with this issue, but I'm really not sure what to do about it. Is banning them outright bad? Maybe? I just don't know.

We're all stuck in a planet scale tolerance paradox, and I don't think any current solution is particularly convincing or palatable.

A sentiment that wants to end democracy has no right to participate in that democracy. Yes, that sentiment has to be fought with ideas as well. But Germany knows too well from history that a democracy can be ended through democratic means. That is why these instruments were implemented in the first place.