Court blocks attempt to outlaw party saying it presents insufficient threat to democracy despite similarities with Nazis

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Germany’s constitutional court has said the far-right National Democratic party resembles Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, but ruled against banning it because it presents no threat to democracy.

The country’s 16 federal states had pressed for the ban amid rising support for rightwing groups that has been stoked by popular resentment over the influx of large numbers of migrants.

Critics, including Jewish groups, condemned the court ruling, saying it sent a signal that legitimised the spread of hatred.



While the court said the party’s aims – described by Germany’s intelligence agency as racist and antisemitic and revisionist – violated the constitution, it ruled that there was insufficient evidence it would wield power. Under German law, there must be hard proof that a party puts democracy at risk for it to be banned.

“The NPD intends to replace the existing constitutional system with an authoritarian national state that adheres to the idea of an ethnically defined ‘people’s community’,” the court said in its ruling.

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“However, currently there is a lack of specific and weighty indications suggesting that this endeavour will be successful.”

The tough conditions for banning a political party are in part a legacy of the crushing of dissent in the Nazi era and in communist East Germany.

The NPD has been largely overshadowed by the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose support has soared to 15% in polls, and it has failed to capitalise on the refugee crisis.

The NPD has never won enough support to win seats in the federal parliament and in elections in September lost its last seat in a regional assembly. However, it is represented on local councils and in 2014 won a seat in the European parliament.

“It appears to be entirely impossible that the NPD will succeed in achieving its aims by parliamentary or extra-parliamentary democratic means,” said the court.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said the NPD, established in 1964, had about 5,000 members in a country of 82 million, and was linked to violent neo-Nazis.

Several senior NPD figures have been convicted of Holocaust denial or incitement, but the party denies any involvement in violence.

“Identification with leading personalities of the [Nazi] party, the use of selected National Socialist vocabulary, texts, songs and symbols, as well as revisionist statements with regard to history, demonstrate an affinity … with the mindset of National Socialism,” said the court.

Welcoming Tuesday’s ruling, the NPD said it would now rebuild. “The stain has gone, the party is not banned. Now we can start again politically,” said the NPD leader, Frank Franz.

Some politicians have argued that allowing the fringe NPD to exist would legitimise it and send a signal that its rightwing views are acceptable. Others say a ban could be counterproductive and push its members underground.

Only two parties have been banned since the second world war – the Socialist Reich party, a successor to Hitler’s Nazis, in 1952, and the Communist party in 1956 in West Germany.

The International Auschwitz Committee said the ruling sent a “fatal signal to Europe, where rightwing extremism overlaps with rightwing populists and tries to turn people’s fears and insecurities into hatred and aggression”.

The former head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Charlotte Knobloch, said the country’s history and current strength of rightwing populism had made it crucial to outlaw the NPD.

Others argued a ban would not change people’s minds.

“Now we must concertedly fight rightwing extremism ... in people’s heads. The discussion about a ban will no longer distract us,” said the Greens MP Volker Beck.

An attempt to ban the NPD in 2003 collapsed because some of the party officials used as witnesses turned out to be government-paid informants.