Germany on course to ban far-Right NPD The interior ministers of the country's 16 states were on Wednesday night expected to recommend outlawing the NPD on the grounds that it promotes a racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic agenda in violation of the constitution established after the Second World War.
Banning political parties is an especially sensitive matter in a country still haunted by memories of the Nazi regime's brutal silencing of dissent, but Germany's past has also heightened sensitivities about a lingering extremist minority.
Simmering talk of prohibiting the NPD became widespread following claims last year that a senior NPD official had aided a cell of neo-Nazis calling itself the National Socialist Underground had waged a racist killing spree over nearly a decade.
[The NSU is suspected of killing nine men of immigrant background and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007.]
[Lorenz Caffier, the conservative interior minister of Mecklenburg Vorpommern who chairs the interior ministers' meeting at the Baltic resort of Warnemuende, said he was "very optimistic" that the recommendation would be passed.
"The material we have collected as proof is good and watertight," he told the Ostsee Zeitung daily.]
The opposition Social Democrats have pushed for the ban despite reservations from some conservatives, including Chancellor Angela Merkel.
She wants to be sure that any case is legally sound after an attempt to ban the NPD in 2003 collapsed because government informants were used as witnesses. Supporters of the ban have said most materials for the legal case will be drawn from the public record.
If approved by the ministers, the motion then requires approval from state governors and the upper house of parliament. It would then head to the constitutional court, where the NPD has pledged to oppose it vigorously.
Mrs Merkel has said she is worried the NPD could be strengthened if a second bid failed. Other opponents argue that a ban could push the NPD underground and make it more dangerous.
Otto Fricke, a senior member of the Free Democratic Party, a coalition partner of Mrs Merkel's CDU, told the Daily Telegraph: "My party's view is that will not work. If you force them underground they are going to fight in a different way, you have to fight them on a proper political playing field.
"We say fight extremists with strong arguments, fight them by showing how stupid they are, but don't fight them by forbidding them and pushing them underground."
Mr Fricke, a government whip, was not convinced that it could be proven that the NDP promoted an "anti-constitutional subversive agenda", as required by law for it to be banned.
[Josef Joffe, publisher of the Die Zeit weekly newspaper, said: "I am not sure you can prove a subversive agenda. We know they are nasty guys, but that's not enough."]
More radical than populist anti-immigrant parties in France, Britain and the Netherlands, the NPD has seats in two state assemblies in eastern Germany and receives around 1 million euros per year in taxpayers' funding.
Opponents of a ban note that its membership has however fallen to 6,300 in 2011 and remains marginalized at a national level. In the most recent federal elections in 2009, the party won only 1.5 percent of the vote, well below the 5 percent needed to sit in parliament.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/9725237/Germany-on-course-to-ban-far-Right-NPD.html
