The exclusion of the Desiderius Erasmus Foundation, which is close to the AfD, from state funding in 2019 violated the party’s right to equal opportunities. This was announced by the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe on Wednesday. The judges declared AfD applications for other budget years inadmissible, and for 2022 a separate decision should be made at a later date.
Unlike the other six party-affiliated foundations, the Desiderius-Erasmus Foundation (DES), which is close to the AfD, has so far received no money from the federal budget. The AfD saw itself indirectly disadvantaged by this and had sued in Karlsruhe on behalf of the DES. With a total of more than 650 million euros a year that are available, the foundations of the CDU, CSU, SPD, Greens and Left Party finance, for example, political education work, offices abroad and student grants.
The verdict was eagerly awaited because the funding criteria for the foundations have not yet been regulated by law. A Karlsruhe judgment from 1986 serves as a guideline. It states that it must be ensured that “all permanent, important political trends in the Federal Republic of Germany are adequately taken into account”. Another clue is the “repeated representation” of the relevant party in the Bundestag. Since then, politicians have been guided by this when they decided on the budget during the budget negotiations.
In 2021, the AfD entered the Bundestag for the second time after 2017. Your party-affiliated DES still gets no money. Because since 2022 there has been a new passage in the budget law that binds the grants to the commitment to the “free democratic basic order within the meaning of the Basic Law”.
The traffic light factions SPD, Greens and FDP had already decided in their coalition agreement to provide better legal protection for the funding of the foundations. But so far that hasn’t happened. Organizations such as the Campact citizens’ movement and the Anne Frank educational institution accuse politicians of having postponed the issue, even though the DES poses a risk of strengthening right-wing extremist tendencies in society.