The German parliament voted overwhelmingly Thursday to cut off federal funding to the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) party Thursday, only months after the country’s Federal Constitutional Court declined to ban the movement.
Josef Schuster, Central Council of Jews in Germany president and a WJC vice president, welcomed the legislation, saying, “It is high time that the money tap is turned off for unconstitutional parties like the NPD.” It is “intolerable” for parties to use tax money to spread “Nazi propaganda,” Schuster said, adding that he hoped the new law would help facilitate the NPD’s slide into insignificance. 
The NPD is widely considered a Neo-Nazi party and has minimal popular backing in Germany, with around 70 percent of respondents in a 2006 poll indicating that they believed its existence caused damage to Germany’s standing abroad. Only 1.3 percent of Germans voted for the NPD in 2013, according to the Associated Press,
The new measure, which was passed 502 to 57, prohibits the federal government from funding parties whose goal is to “combat the democratic freedom of the democratic order or the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and thus to promote the elimination of order from which they benefit,” Spiegel Online reported. NPD received more than one million Euros in state funding last year alone.
Celebrating the measure, Justice Minister Heiko Maas said that the funding had constituted “government direct investment in right-wing rabble.”
In a recent interview with German newspaper Die Welt, World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder called for Germany to outlaw the Alternative for Germany party, another minor far right faction, whose leader recently called a Berlin Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame.”
Calling the AFD a “disgrace for Germany,” Lauder asserted that it must be outlawed. "Not only this statement but the entire AfD is a disgrace for Germany. This party must be outlawed. Some people say it’s too weak and to isolated within the German party system to cause any real damage. But let me remind you that when Hitler started his National-Socialist party, there were only nine people in the room. The size doesn’t mean anything.
And while he said that Jews are safe in Germany, he said that he believes that Berlin “could do more to fight anti-Semitism.”
