Germany’s top court opened a hearing Tuesday on a bid to ban an extreme-right party that security officials suspect is behind a surge in racist violence against recently arrived migrants.
At issue is a plea filed by the German parliament’s upper house to outlaw the ultranationalist National Democratic Party, or NPD, arguing that it espouses neo-Nazi views and is a threat to Germany’s democratic order.
Under German law, freedom of speech doesn’t enjoy the same privileges it does in the U.S. Public displays of Nazi and Communist symbols are banned, as are such positions as Holocaust denial.
Yet in their effort to enshrine political liberties, the founders of Germany’s postwar order made it difficult to ban political parties, making this week’s hearing a historical rarity. Only Germany’s constitutional court can declare a party unconstitutional if it finds that the party’s goals or the actions of its followers aim to undermine democracy or threaten the Federal Republic’s existence.
The NPD—which has strongholds in eastern German states but has never garnered enough votes to enter the federal parliament and has lost voters in recent years—argued in the first of three days of hearings that banning it would itself be incompatible with democracy.
“Should banning ideas even be allowed in a democracy? We believe only the people decide over the correctness of political ideas,” NPD lawyer Peter Richter told the eight red-robed judges in his opening statement.
The bid to ban the NPD, a process renewed in late 2013 after a previous failed attempt, comes before the court just as the country has witnessed a surge in right-wing violence against foreigners.
Fears over how Germany will cope with the more than one million asylum seekers who arrived here last year, in addition to those who continue to stream into the country, have helped revive the country’s far-right scene after years of decline.
Proponents of outlawing the NPD say far-right ideologists, at the very least, should be barred from accessing state funding for parties.
Yet critics warn that a ban could push NPD followers into other organizations, such as the Third Way, a party that calls for the return of pre-World War II territories—making it harder to monitor the far-right scene. “If not banned, the party would get a sort of stamp approval, which could give it a boost,” said Jürgen Falter, a political scientist at the University of Mainz. “But if they’re banned, voters could go underground or organize themselves differently.”
Some also argue that banning a party that has lost much ground in recent years isn’t necessary. After a surge in support in the 1990s, the NPD shrank to around 5,200 members in 2014. It has five members in the regional parliament of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, one seat in the European Parliament, and some 300 municipal representatives across Germany.
Some senior German politicians say the NPD has played a role in organizing anti-immigrant protests, sometimes under the cover of a different name. Security officials have also warned that the party more indirectly helps spread violence through the type of hate speech that underpins right-wing terrorism.
NPD officials have denied any involvement in such attacks. Michael Andrejewski, another lawyer for the NPD, denied the party was racist or intimidated people and said it had still to be proven that the NPD was inciting violence by speaking out against foreigners in Germany.
In his opening speech, Stanislaw Tillich, president of Germany’s upper house of parliament, said the NPD was working “actively and combatively” toward destroying the free democratic order, not just with words but with threats, intimidations and even criminal acts. The party, he said, served as the institutional basis for a network of extremist groups.
“The NPD incites to hatred.…It disrespects human rights of citizens of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, of foreigners, especially asylum seekers, as well as politically engaged of all colors,” Mr. Tillich told the courtroom packed with interior ministers, members of parliament and security officials.
In 2015, the number of arson attempts and other attacks on refugee shelters surged to 1,029 from 199 in 2014, preliminary crime statistics show. In 920 of the attacks reported against such shelters last year, police determined right-wing motives were behind them, the interior ministry said.
The wave of violence accelerated this year. Last month, some 100 people tried to block a bus carrying 20 newly arrived refugees to a small town in the former East German state of Saxony. The incident prompted accusations from moderate politicians that right-wing extremism had been underestimated in some parts of the country.
The judges would also have to consider whether a ban would hold up before the European Court of Human Rights. They have little precedent to fall back on as Germany’s top court has only banned two parties in its history: the far-right Socialist Reich Party in 1952 and the Communist Party of Germany in 1956.
A ruling, which requires a two-third majority, won’t be rendered this week and is expected to take at least several months.
Mr. Richter, the NPD lawyer who is also a member, raised objections to the proceedings. Judges dismissed a motion that argued that two judges had a bias toward a ban.
After hearing hours of evidence that the party was no longer infiltrated by government informants, the court on Wednesday also rejected Mr. Richter’s argument that the procedure should be stopped because the NPD was still being watched from the inside.
During a 2003 attempt to ban the party, the court found that government informants had infiltrated the NPD up to its leadership ranks. The court abandoned the proceedings as it found that it could no longer distinguish which activities were initiated by real party members and which by the informants.
The Wall Street Journal