The NPD may have lost some of its self-confidence over the past few years. When the right-wing extremist party took part in the oral hearing before the Federal Constitutional Court in March 2016 in the proceedings on the application for a party ban, they had previously spread that they had a real bombshell in their luggage. A revelation that would shatter the proceedings.
The announcement turned out to be overly optimistic, the bomb went off the rails and the process took its course. This Tuesday, the Federal Constitutional Court negotiated the successor question of whether the party, which was classified as anti-constitutional but not banned at the time, can at least be deprived of state funding. The card that the NPD played as their strongest trump card this time was – their absence.
Two empty rows of benches to the right of the judges’ bench testified that the NPD, which recently called itself “Die Heimat”, considers the Karlsruhe trial to be unfair. At 7:59 a.m., she announced her cancellation “by fax,” as Senate Chair Doris König said. Reason: Your organ complaint against the new Basic Law article on the funding exclusion of anti-constitutional parties was recently dismissed as inadmissible for the formal and understandable reason that this is the wrong type of complaint. The NPD court informed the NPD “by fax” by return mail that they would then negotiate without them.
Only 0.1 percent in the last federal election
After all, the abstinence of the NPD in the Karlsruhe meeting room illustrated that it has also lost considerable visibility in the shadow of the AfD. It has 3,150 members, and the trend is falling. It achieved 0.1 percent in the last federal election and 0.3 percent in the European elections. It achieved its current peak value of 0.8 percent in the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
This means that it has never jumped the relevant hurdle to state party funding, the withdrawal of which the Bundestag, Bundesrat and Federal Government have now applied to the Federal Constitutional Court. Peter Müller, the rapporteur responsible for the proceedings in the Second Senate, briefly pondered: “Isn’t the NPD already dead? Is it still a party?”
The Karlsruhe trial stands at the provisional end of an almost never-ending story. The first attempt ended in disaster almost exactly 20 years ago. It turned out that there were a number of informants from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution on the boards of the NPD. So many that one no longer really knew whether the Office for the Protection of the Constitution itself was running the party. In March 2003, the court – divided internally – finally canceled the process, the informants were an “unremovable obstacle to the process”. That means you can’t infiltrate and ban a party at the same time.
In 2012, the Federal Council dared to try again. The informants in the ranks of the NPD were switched off early. At the beginning of 2017, the court announced its verdict: no ban, no dissolution, the NPD was allowed to continue. From the point of view of the court, the party was clearly anti-constitutional. She strives for the elimination of the free democratic basic order, her concept of an ethnically defined “national community” disregards human dignity, and she is also “related in nature” to National Socialism. But she was too tiny to be banned – she didn’t even begin to have the power to implement what she had in mind.
At the same time, however, the court brought up the withdrawal of state funding, a ball which the legislature gratefully took up. The Basic Law was amended, and in 2019 the Bundestag, Bundesrat and Federal Government submitted the corresponding application.
On her behalf, the Berlin constitutional lawyer Christian Waldhoff made it clear that for the NPD it was still about money. Because they still benefit from tax breaks. The tax exemption for several inheritances in 2020 and 2021 amounts to around 200,000 euros. That’s a lot of money if you don’t have any.
Nevertheless, the question naturally hovers over the proceedings as to whether the real threat from the right has a completely different acronym. But the procedure has not yet allowed any real conclusions to be drawn about how to deal with the AfD, and the protagonists from Berlin politics spoke in pleas only about NPD – Die Heimat. Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD) recalled the principle of well-fortified democracy: “The protection of parliamentarianism from its enemies was a concern of the Basic Law in 1949 and will be so in 2023.”
Hamburg Mayor Peter Tschentscher (SPD), President of the Bundesrat, called it “extremely contradictory and unacceptable” to give financial support to a party that the Supreme Court had declared anti-constitutional. And Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) was convinced that the ongoing anti-constitutionalism could be proven with the material from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
This was also confirmed by the experts. Christoph Kopke from the Berlin University of Economics and Law drew the picture of a neo-Nazi party characterized by racism, glorification of Nazi greats and fantasies of a coup. The Dresden extremism researcher Steffen Kailitz confirmed that the NPD still adheres to the idea of an ethnically homogeneous state people, which consistently denies people with a migration background the same rights, regardless of their nationality. The party is fully aware of this; He quoted party leader Frank Franz as saying: “We’d rather be anti-constitutional than anti-people.”