Members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), their Bavarian sister party the CSU, and opposition centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) want the right-wing extremists off the country’s political playing field, daily Bild reported on Monday.“The NPD follows clearly anti-constitutional goals and must disappear from the political landscape,” Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) told the paper. “I am working on a new case for an NPD ban.”
To strengthen his case, Herrmann encouraged the country’s domestic intelligence agency to disengage its top spies in surveillance of NPD leadership. The 2003 ban request reportedly failed because the constitutional court believed that domestic intelligence agents from the Verfassungsschutz could have influenced the actions of the neo-Nazis under their watch.
“For a successful ban we don’t need the information from (them),” Herrmann told the paper. “There is enough material that proves the NPD is an enemy of the constitution.”
SPD member and Berlin Interior Minister Ehrhart Körting agreed.
"According to my estimation the NPD is an anti-constitutional party that should be banned," he told the paper. "This is open to see. For this I don’t need any (Verfassungsschutz) people."
Meanwhile Interior Minister for the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Lorenz Caffier (CDU) told the paper that existing evidence shows the right-wing extremist party to be aggressively attempting to attack Germany democracy and replace it with Nazi ideology.SPD interior expert Sebastian Edathy also supported the disengagement of intelligence agents to further the case against the neo-Nazi party.
The Local
The NPD
The National Democratic Party of Germany (German: Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD), is a pan-German nationalist political party. The party was founded in 1964 as a successor to the German Reich and is often classified as being on the far right of the political spectrum. The party bills itself "Deutschlands stärkste Rechte" (Germany's strongest right-wing party). Udo Voigt has led the Party since 1996.
The mainstream media and the NPD’s political opponents often label the party as a Neo-Nazi organization. The German Federal Agency for Civic Education, or BPB, has criticized the NPD for working with members of organizations which the federal courts later found to be unconstitutional and were disbanded. The party rejects this depiction, calls it an attempt to discredit the NPD's politics and states that the party stands for the interests of the German people and for the German state. The German federal intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, classifies the NPD as a "threat to the constitutional order" because of its platform and philosophy, and the party is under their observation.
In recent years, the Party has focused on broad social issues such as unemployment and economic problems. The Party currently is represented in two of Germany's sixteen state parliaments with no seats at the federal level.
Wikipedia
