Heads of German states ban extreme right-wing German party

11:54 07/12/2012

BERLIN, December 7 - RAPSI, Semyon Nekhoroshkin. At their meeting in Berlin, the heads of the 16 German states unanimously decided to request the Bundesrat of Germany to submit a lawsuit to the Constitutional Court on banning the extreme right-wing National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), the German media reported.

The interior ministers of all Germanys 16 states had previously approved this recommendation for heads of all regional governments.

The NPD was set up in 1964. It has about 6,000 members and the number of party members has been growing recently. The party is relatively strong in the east of the country, with the NPD represented in Landtags in states such as Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The party has never been elected to the Bundestag. During the last federal elections, held in 2009, it got 1.5 percent of the vote. The threshold to get into parliament is 5 percent.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is following the party closely. Many experts say that it is ideologically similar to National Socialist German Workers' Party. There were several attempts to ban the party at various levels previously, but without success.