The leaders of the far-right German National Democratic Party (NPD) must have felt both relief and anger at the January 2017 verdict of Germany’s Constitutional Court to not ban their party. After four years of weighing up the evidence, the judges found the NPD anti-constitutional and unmistakably wedded to Nazi ideology – but they also decided that the party did not have the ‘potential’ to pose a threat to Germany’s democratic order and therefore would not merit a ‘preventive ban’. This judgement put an end to the second attempt by Germany’s Bundesrat, the Upper House of Parliament, to eliminate the NPD from electoral competition.
The court decision highlights the difficulties that Germany, as a liberal democracy, has encountered in its dealings with political parties which stand in opposition to its constitutional order. As a self-declared ‘militant democracy’, already in the 1950s the Federal Republic banned the Communist Party and took measures to cleanse the public-sector workforce of Communists. In the 1970s, the controversial Radikalenerlass decree widened the scope to include employees with far-right convictions. The NPD, since its foundation in 1964, has always escaped a ban – despite its significant electoral success in the late 1960s under a leadership cadre dominated by people with a past in the Nazi Party and despite its roots in Nazi Party successor organisations. By 1968, the NPD had gained seats in seven out of eleven Land (state) parliaments and saw itself on the way into the federal parliament, the Bundestag. Despite economic crisis and a Grand Coalition government seen to be stifling parliamentary democracy, the NPD surprisingly failed to gain seats in the 1969 federal elections and descended into internal fights over leadership, strategy and programme. Against the ‘Old Right’ wing, the national conservative faction of the party gained the upper hand so that the party now found itself in direct competition with the mainstream centre-right Christian Democrats while losing support to other emerging – but consistently marginal – far right parties.
In 1991 a new leader, Holocaust-denying Günter Deckert, took the NPD onto a programmatic and organisational journey which attracted a younger neo-Nazi followership looking for a new home after many neo-Nazi non-party organisations had been banned in the mid-1990s. However, only amidst highly unpopular workfarist labour market policy reforms could the NPD gain electoral representation again. In particular, in the East of Germany the party’s stance against these reforms paid off and allowed the party to gain seats in Land parliaments in 2004 and in 2006 for the first time since the 1960s. The NPD also sought to minimise competition with other right-wing parties through electoral pacts – however, further electoral success has largely eluded the party with few exceptions. Its 2010 programme – titled ‘Work, Family, Fatherland’ – mixes popular demands for a comprehensive welfare state with plans for a ‘Europe of nations’ in place of the EU, natalist family policies to boost ‘German birth rates’, mercantilist economic policy, and demands to limit ‘finance capitalism’. The programme is based on the premise Americanisation, globalisation, immigration and multi-culturalism were brought over the country by a ‘system elite’ seeking to eliminate the German nation. Insisting on the ‘natural inequality’ of people, the NPD’s policies are set to exclusively benefit the ethnic ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ on the basis of ‘national solidarity’ and ‘social justice for all Germans’. Even this shortlist of programmatic stances gives an indication of why Parliament has sought the ban. The connections between NPD and the small right-wing terror group National Socialist Underground (NSU) which, until 2011, committed ten murders, mostly of immigrants, were not considered in the verdict.
The more recent story of the NPD therefore appears like a string of failures. The court decision to not ban the party because it is currently unable to implement its anti-constitutional ideology in any meaningful way implies that any potential future rise of the party’s popularity could result in the ban of the party. Following the verdict, the discussion has now turned to the question of whether a party that is opposed to the constitution can be cut off from public funds – the German party funding system distributes money according to the share of vote.
Is this the end of the far right in Germany, at least in its political party form? Certainly not. The focus on the NPD seems somewhat misdirected, an observer of current German politics might say. While the NPD has largely been unable to appeal to middle-class supporters because of its origins in and links to the ‘Old Right’, others on the right and far right have flourished recently. Amongst them is the ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ party (AfD), but also organisations and movements on the ‘dirty side of civil society’ such as PEGIDA and the ‘Reichsbürgerbewegung’. The former are the ‘movement of indignation’ of the ‘Patriots against the Europeanisation of the Occident’ while the latter are a militant group which claims that the German Reich, after the Second World War, was never superseded by the new Federal Republic and thus rejects the authority of the German state. There is also a growing network of right-wing think tanks, journals, debating platforms and policy circles. Many of these sit somewhere in between mainstream conservatism and the far right. Referred to as the ‘New Right’, they occupy what Wolfram Gessenharter has called a ‘hinge function’ between respectable conservatism and far-right positions such as those embodied by the NPD, linking both and thus lending credibility and legitimacy to the latter.
In party politics, the AfD has been successful at targeting people who have long abandoned faith in mainstream parties and harbour resentment against the political system and its elites – but who could not identify with the NPD which also somehow failed to leverage the ‘migrant crisis’ of 2015/16 and fears about ‘islamisation’. With the AfD holding seats in ten out of 16 Länder parliaments and the European Parliament, Germany has now fallen in line with many other countries in Europe which have electorally successful right-wing anti-immigration and anti-EU parties. The AfD troubles the established parties from right to left and now even makes ‘grand coalitions’ between Social Democratic Party and Christian Democrats arithmetically difficult. After a string of strong showings at Land elections, the AfD has every chance of entering the Bundestag in 2017, particularly given the electoral dynamics stemming from a ‘grand coalition’ government in Berlin and its constituent parties’ likely focus on the median voter.
Are there parallels between the political and economic conditions in which the NPD thrived in the 1960s and the current situation in Germany? In both contexts, grand coalitions made it easier for anti-establishment parties to gain a voice, and current high unemployment levels both in large parts of East Germany and in some parts in the West make the situation look somewhat similar. Add to this the views of many on immigration and immigrants, the impact on public opinion of the terror attacks in France, Belgium and then in Germany – and the conditions for the AfD to succeed long-term are far better than those for the NPD in the 1960s when both economic crisis and grand coalition were over quickly.
With this in mind, protracted discussions about the ban of a political party already on the verge of collapse should have been the last thing on the political agenda. However, while the Constitutional Court’s rejection of demands for a ban could be interpreted as a demonstration of the strength of Germany’s liberal democracy, the challenges to this order should not be underestimated. They come from very different quarters, most importantly from civil society where bans can possibly only achieve very little.
Hartwig Pautz is Lecturer in Social Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland. He is also co-convenor of the PSA’s German Politics Specialist Group. The author would like to thank Lisa Borchardt for her helpful comments on the blog post.
Image: Wikimedia (AF666 at German Wikipedia) CC BY-NC-ND
