A statue of Vladimir Lenin is soon to be erected in the German city of Gelsenkirchen following a longstanding battle between a leftist party and city authorities.

Gelsenkirchen, in the centre of the Ruhr valley, once Germany’s industrial heartland, will be the first western German city with a statue of the founder of the Russian communist party.

While statues of Lenin once graced squares of the towns and municipalities across the communist east, the GDR, it is thought none has ever been erected in a public space in western Germany.

A court has now given permission for the Marxist-Leninist party of Germany, the MLPD, to place the metal statue outside its headquarters. The city authorities had tried to stop the statue, ordering a halt to the building of a concrete pedestal on which it is due to stand. It argues that the statue will “disturb the view” of a neighbouring listed building, a 1930s building society branch. The statue’s presence, it said, would also contravene historical monument preservation rules. It would, the city argued, “mean that the view of the observer of the historic building would no longer be unrestricted”.

The local council for the district of West Gelsenkirchen said Lenin was an inappropriate figure to be commemorated in the city. “The communist leader Lenin is representative of violence, suppression, terror and immense human suffering. All this makes him incompatible with the free democratic constitutional order in Germany, and means he is a symbol of the fight against and the abolition of our democracy,” it said in a statement.

But the MLPD, which owns the building society, fought the restrictions and called the court’s decision to let it go ahead and erect the statue, “a fantastic victory for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”.

The MLPD’s head, Gabi Fechtner, told German media: “We are really happy. Gelsenkirchen is a workers’ city and Lenin fits in here very well.”

A city spokesman said that the city authorities “will be contending the court’s judgment”.

The statue – in which Lenin holds out his right arm – is due to be unveiled on 14 March in a ceremony that is expected to attract leftist supporters from across the country. The MLPD had been at pains to erect it ahead of the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, on 22 April.

The cast-iron 2.15 metre effigy was made in the 1930s in the Soviet Union. It was acquired by the MLPD from a city in the Czech Republic for an undisclosed fee, following an online auction.

The MLPD was founded in 1982 and is under observation by German intelligence, which considers it extremist and unconstitutional.