I believe there is a bit of a miscommunication between @Anselm and the rest of the forum here.
What you are hearing is him advocating for engaging fascists in debate, which you rightly point out normalises them. That normalisation is indeed happening to a frightening degree in places like France, Denmark or Austria, all of which have fascist parties close to government or have had them in government in the recent past. And of course it has already happened in Poland and Hungary.
This normalisation is not, however, happening in the same way in Germany. The AfD has been trying their darnedest to appear like a legitimate party but they were completely stonewalled by all the other parties. They literally had to change the seating arrangements in parliament because no party wanted to sit next to them. Even laws that have nothing to do with their agenda sponsored by the AfD caucus were not endorsed by other parties, even if they brought forward changes those parties wanted. There have been some breakaway state offices of the conservative party that were willing to go into local coalition with the AfD but they were immediately disciplined by the federal party.
If I understand @anselm correctly within this context, that is what he is talking about. We have to allow them to be a part of the system as long as they are legally elected but that doesn’t mean we can’t and shouldn’t shun and block them at every turn. And of course there are efforts to ban them. They are already being watched by the internal intelligence service as a potential security threat against the constitution. Which would be a lot more reassuring if the internal intelligence service wasn’t riddled with far right sympathisers.
So far this system works and it has weathered even the stress of the refugee “crisis” of 2015. But that doesn’t mean we can drop our guard and become complacent. This only works because this country’s political system was designed primarily to guard exactly against this eventuality and we need only look at Austria to have a control study where that isn’t the case. And there is no guarantee the wall is going to hold forever. If they manage to get seen as a normal party like all the others it’s all over.
What I am trying to say is that in a German political context “engaging them in debate” doesn’t mean taking them seriously or compromising with them as if they were real politicians rather than smug agents provocateurs, it means shouting them down on TV and in parliament as well as on the street. And that, I think, is the crux of the linguistic and cultural misunderstanding here.
