The extreme-right, anti-Semitic German National Democratic Party (NPD) cannot benefit from state funding for the time being, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany has ruled. The NPD could now facing bankruptcy.
In a ruling, the court said that the administration of the German parliament (Bundestag), which distributes state money to all parties based on to their electoral results in national and state elections and the amount of private donations that raise, was entitled to withhold subsidies to the party because it had submitted an inaccurate financial report for the year 2007. The Bundestag had imposed a fine of 1.27 million (US$ 1.7 million), which the NPD was unable and unwilling to pay.
Initially, Bundestag Speaker Norbert Lammert had imposed a fine of € 2.5 million which was later reduced by the Federal Administrative Court to € 1.27 million.
The Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe now rejected on technical grounds a request by the NPD to delay the payment of the fine. However, the judges still have to pronounce themselves on the question of whether the fine imposed on the NPD is fair and reasonable.
Earlier this year, the NPD was forced to send termination notices to all its seven staff members at headquarters in Berlin, for lack of financial resources.
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.