The 16 German state (Länder) governments are launching a second attempt to have an extreme-right and anti-Semitic party banned that many regard as similar to Hitler's Nazi party. An application to proscribe and disband the National Democratic Party (NPD) will be lodged at the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe in December, German media report. It seeks to prove that the NPD is actively seeking to undermine or overthrow the free democratic order and should therefore be proscribed according to Art. 21 of the German constitution.
The move comes exactly a decade after a first attempt to have the party outlawed failed.
At the time, the Constitutional Court refused to rule on the case after learning that a lot of material in the application relied on witnesses in the NPD that were government-paid informants.
Now, the 16 German states reportedly want to guarantee that none of the evidence submitted to the court comes from informants planted by the intelligence agencies. About 100 such informants in the NPD leadership were ‘deactivated’ over the past three years.
Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the Munich Jewish community, welcomed the decision to launch a second attempt for a ban of the NPD. Referring to the country’s history, she said, there “can be no place for an extreme-right party in Germany.”
Germany’s outgoing center-right federal government has not joined the application, mainly out of fears that a second dismissal by the court could boost the NPD’s position.
The NPD was established in 1964 and merged with the German People’s Union (DVU) in 2011. It has no representation at the federal level but sits on two of Germany’s 16 state legislatures.
Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution said about the party: “Statements of the NPD document an essential affinity with National Socialism; its agitation is racist, anti-Semitic, revisionist, and intends to disparage the democratic and lawful order of the constitution.” The party also holds to other familiar neo-Nazi themes such as a twin rejection of liberal-democratic capitalism and socialism, as well as visceral hostility to non-white immigrants and their descendants.
