Extremism: Constitutional Court: Will the NPD’s money be cut off?

The Federal Constitutional Court is announcing today whether the right-wing extremist NPD will be excluded from state party funding. This would also mean that the tax benefits for the party, which has now renamed itself Die Heimat, and the donations to it would no longer apply. It is the first procedure of its kind in Karlsruhe. The legislature created the option to exclude funding after the second unsuccessful NPD ban procedure in 2017.

The highest German court had rejected a ban on the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) at the time because there was no evidence that it could achieve its anti-constitutional goals. The legislature then created the possibility of exclusion from party financing. The Bundestag, Bundesrat and Federal Government applied to the Constitutional Court to exclude the NPD and possible replacement parties from party financing for six years. The period is specified by law.

How party financing works

According to the party law, parties can receive money from the state for their work. The sum is calculated according to a specific key, where, among other things, votes play a role. To be eligible, parties must achieve minimum shares in the most recent elections at state, federal and European levels.

Since the NPD recently failed to do this, according to Bundestag figures, it has not received any money since 2021. A year earlier it was around 370,600 euros – it received 3.02 percent of the votes in the 2016 state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. For comparison: In 2016, when the party was credited with more electoral successes, it was entitled to more than 1.1 million euros. To put it into perspective: the SPD received the highest amount at that time, almost 51 million euros.

From the perspective of the homeland, the new regulation violates the principle of equal opportunities for parties enshrined in the Basic Law as a core element of the principle of democracy. She considers the change to be unconstitutional and void. However, the party failed in an application to establish exactly that at the Constitutional Court.

Bas: “of great national political importance”

There was a scandal at the oral hearing in July last year because no party representative appeared – according to the court, a one-off event. A party spokesman announced that no one would come to the verdict.

At the time, Die Heimat declared on its website that it would not allow itself to be “made into an extra in a justice simulation.” The negotiation will “degenerate into a show trial”. Since there is no requirement to be present, the court continued the hearing.

According to Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD), the procedure is “of great importance in terms of state policy”. It has never been explained to the population that enemies of the constitution are supported with tax money. Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution Thomas Haldenwang said the agency had provided numerous evidence that the party was still unconstitutional. Steffen Kailitz from the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism explained that the party fundamentally rejects current democracy, makes no secret of its anti-constitutionality and sorely misses the national community.

Transferable to AfD?

If the Constitutional Court excludes Die Heimat from party funding, that could be a blueprint for the AfD. CSU leader Markus Söder, for example, has already mentioned this option in the current debate about a possible AfD ban.

However, in order to exclude it from state party funding, the court would also have to determine that the AfD is unconstitutional – so the criteria are largely the same. The only difference: the so-called potential to eliminate or impair the free democratic basic order, which is necessary for a ban – and which the court did not see in the case of the NPD in 2017.

Compared to a party ban, experts believe that a funding exclusion is a blunter sword because the affected party is allowed to continue to participate in political competition – including elections. And the AfD would also have a platform in the course of the funding exclusion process and could style itself as a victim – arguments that opponents of a ban process such as Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) cite.

Party lawyer Sophie Schönberger told the “Handelsblatt”: “I consider a situation in which a non-banned and comparatively successful actor in political competition cannot operate under the same competitive conditions as the other parties to be highly problematic from a democratic point of view.”

Former constitutional judge Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff told the newspapers of the Funke media group that the requirements for an exclusion from financing were “no less demanding than the requirements for a ban.” The constitutional and administrative law expert Michael Brenner from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena pointed out in the newspapers of the Bayern media group that a process to exclude the AfD from state funding could take years.