Attacks on refugees prompt renewed effort to ban German neo-Nazi party

770 attacks on asylum homes and individual refugees reported in 2015

1.3% of voters chose the NPD in 2013 (Reuters)

Germany’s Constitutional Court has launched a new attempt to ban the country’s small but virulently racist neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, after a dramatic increase in attacks on refugees and asylum hostels since the onset of Europe’s refugee crisis.

The fresh bid to outlaw the NPD has been prompted by the governments of Germany’s 16 federal states, which claim to have amassed new evidence that it has created an “atmosphere of terror” in eastern Germany, where it commands the most support. An initial bid to ban the party in 2003 failed for legal reasons.

Politicians and Jewish community leaders welcomed the court’s decision “Banning the NPD would be a very important step in the fight against right-wing extremism and help stabilise our democratic system,” Josef Schuster, president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, said.

The NPD polled just 1.3 per cent of the vote in Germany’s last national election in 2013 and currently holds a mere five seats in the parliament of the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania. All mainstream parties agree, however, that the NPD actively encourages and instigates violence.

Police statistics show that there have been 770 attacks on asylum homes and individual refugees since the beginning of 2015 – compared with 199 during all of last year. In the eastern town of Tröglitz an asylum home was destroyed by fire and the town’s mayor admitted that NPD intimidation had forced him to resign. In their 270-page report to the Constitutional Court, the 16 federal states outlined ideological similarities between the NPD and the banned National Socialist Party of Adolf Hitler. They said the NPD was bent on destroying democracy.

In 2003, the Constitutional Court abandoned its first attempt to ban the NPD following revelations that most of the incriminating evidence had been supplied by paid secret service “moles” who had infiltrated the party. Their use has since been stopped.