Far Right Parties In Germany.

 The 1990’s brought about a revival of kind for the party: The NPD tried quite effectively to attract skinheads and other violent right-wingers, especially in the Eastern Länder. This period saw the NPD virtually relinquish its status, although rather disreputable, as a party and become more or less a backbone organisation for neo-Nazi fighters. However, due to its residual status as an official party it still received all its benefits and privileges which parties are entitled to, such as a portion of the public campaign fund and the freedom to march in German cities. This, together with the wave of hate crimes, prompted the cabinet of Chancellor Schroeder, the Bundesrat and the Bundestag to apply to the Federal Constitutional Court to declare the NPD unconstitutional which would therefore lead to it being dissolved and banned. However, in March 2003, the Federal Constitutional Court rejected a request to outlaw the NPD, deeming not that the party was in fact constitutional but that the case could not proceed, after it emerged that the government's case against the NPD was based partly on provocative speeches made by police informers. ‘The presiding judge Winfried Hassemer said the decision was not a judgement on whether the NPD was unconstitutional…it reflected dissatisfaction with the government's methods.’ As a result, although the NPD can retain its official status as a political party, it has no relevant role to play in electoral politics in Germany today.

The Republican Party (REP)

The Republican Party, known natively as Die Republikaner (REP), was founded in 1983 two former Christian Democratic MPs who disagreed with the CDU/CSU’s soft line on the German Democratic Republic. It was initially founded as a right-wing conservative party but in 1986 when Franz Schönhuber, a journalist and television presenter who was sacked for the espousing of his extremist views, became chairman of the REP, he sought to establish the REP as a modern far-right wing populist party, inspired by the electoral success of the French FN.

 The primary ideological feature of the party is and always has been nationalism. The REP are a strongly nationalist party and have, according to Mudde, a stringent definition of what constitutes a German national which is that they must have been born and bred in Germany, ‘…only when one is born into it, is raised in it and so from childhood on identifies with it’. Furthermore the REP has often criticised the alleged ease with which German nationality is given to foreigners. The REP defends the existence of a welfare state but wants to limit its benefits to native Germans. It vehemently supports the notion that Germany’s immigration levels are much too excessive and this can be seen in its party manifesto of 1985 in which it declares that ‘Germany is not allowed to become an immigration country’ and also in their slogan ‘Deutschland den Deutschen’ which means Germany for Germans. This political concept was symbolised by the almost iconic image of a crowded lifeboat representing Germany that has played a prominent role in their propaganda for many years. The party sees itself as a protector of German culture and lifestyle and therefore rejects a multicultural society and deems that foreign immigration should be restricted in terms of both the number of people and the length of stay, thus supporting the Swiss model of foreign labour in which only jobs that it is ‘impossible to employ Germans’ be given to foreigners and only according to a temporary contract and without family members’. Furthermore, it advocates that any foreigners that are accepted into the country should be treated as guests and therefore restricted from such liberties as the right to vote.

 The party also rejects the idea of accepting political asylum seekers claiming that they should ‘seek refuge in their own cultural environment’ and therefore eliminates the possibility of legitimate asylum seekers in Germany. The party were even opposed to the welcoming of refugees from the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnia and Kosovo crisis’. In its attempts to appear more legitimate and moderate, the REP usually avoids making openly hostile statements against foreigners (in the party literature it often uses rhetorical questions which infer xenophobic messages such as ‘is there a foreigner problem in the FRG?’ for example), as this could result in a lawsuit or even raise the question as to whether or not the party is acting within the constitution. Despite their best efforts however, the REP was put under the surveillance of the Federal Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution (BVS) on the orders of the Federal Home Secretary, the same agency which undertook an investigation on the NPD and found them to be unconstitutional.

The REP’s first electoral experience in the Bavarian state elections of 1986, despite not being an overwhelming success at the ballot office, provided the party with much needed publicity that allowed them to further strengthen party membership. This doubled in size to 8 000 members between December 1986 and December 1988, yet despite this increase membership, the election results remained fairly tame, polling behind the other two recognised extreme right parties in various state elections. 1989 however proved to be a breakthrough year for the REP gaining seats in both the West Berlin Senate and the European Parliament with results as high as 14.6 per cent.  The 1990’s was a period of ups and downs for the REP in terms of successful elections. Of the fourteen elections it contested in 1990 and 1991, it failed to overcome to 5 percent hurdle needed to gain representation in the parliament in any of them. However, by April 1992 the party scored its biggest election success to date gaining as much as 10.9 percent of the votes in the state election of Baden-Württemberg, although this result, according to some, simply added weight to the theory that the REP are nothing more than a southern Germany phenomenon as the party failed to deliver equally impressive electoral results elsewhere in the country. The year 1994, known in political circles in Germany as Superwahljahr (super election year), did not prove to be a very ‘super’ year at all for the REP. It contested both the parliamentary and European elections, eight state elections and local elections in ten states, yet gained minimal electoral success from any of these. Despite some of its success at European and Land elections the REP failed to ever overcome the five percent hurdle at national level. The late 1990’s witnessed a decline in the party and from 1996 onwards they have failed to pass the threshold of parliamentary representation in all elections, although often they gained between three and four percent of the vote. 

A series of internal disputes within the party led to Franz Schönhuber’s retirement from the party and he was replaced as chairman of the party by the less radical, more conservative Rolf Schlierer. Following the conflicts within the party and Schlierer’s appointment as chairman, party membership dropped and currently stands at around the 14 000 mark. Despite Schlierer’s attempts to loosen the REP’s association with the far right and any far right parties, they are still officially registered as an extreme right party and their activities continue to be under surveillance from the BVS.

German People’s Union (DVU)

The German People’s Union, known in Germany as Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), is an organisation that has been clearly dominated by its founder and uncontested leader Gerhard Frey for more than 30 years. So much so in fact, that some observers are uncertain as to whether the DVU should be termed a party at all. Frey is a right-wing publisher who made a fortune with war novels, brochures on the he considered to be ‘the truth’ about concentration camps, weekly newspapers, video tapes, flags and Nazi memorabilia. He is one of only three people in the whole history of the Federal Republic of Germany who has ever been accused of misusing their constitutional right to freedom of speech to provoke hate between nations and to undermine democracy, and actually risked losing this right (but was not convicted). In 1971 Frey founded the DVU as a kind of club for marketing his publications. It was not until 1987 that Frey formally transformed the club into a political party. Even today the party’s organisational structures are hardly separable from Frey’s publishing company. Basically, the party members are still identical with the hardcore of those who subscribe to Frey’s papers. The DVU owes large amounts of money to Frey’s company, which gives Frey even more control over the party.

From the official party manifesto (which is only six pages long, including an oath on the constitution and democracy in general) it is difficult to tell what the party actually stands for. The articles in Frey’s newspapers are more revealing however. They suggest that primarily, the DVU is a welfare chauvinist party that claims to protect the threatened interests of Germans in general, and workers and small farmers in particular. Compared to the REP, there are more references to Germany’s past as well as more subliminal racism and xenophobia in speeches and publications. The whole appearance of the DVU can be described as more aggressive than that of the REP.

The party, although the largest of the three official extreme right parties with over    17 000 members, only becomes politically active before elections. It has had somewhat limited success in its time. They did not field candidates in the general elections of 1990 and 1994 and received only about a one percent in the general election of 1998, but won about 6 percent of the vote in the Land elections of Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein in the early 1990’s. It failed to overcome the five percent hurdle in the Hamburg Land election of 1997 by only some 120 votes. It’s biggest triumps so far has been the election of 1998 in the east German Land of Sachsen-Anhalt where the DVU received almost 13 percent of the vote after a very expensive campaign. However, in the months following this election the DVU did rather poorly in a couple of other eastern Lander, failing to gain parliamentary representation. 

The DVU’s relative lack of success has been down to, by some commentators, a lack of political experience. If the party has managed to acquire parliamentary representation, its MP’s have often been unable to cope with their duties and responsibilities as politicians. Scandals, internal quarrels and even lawsuits are common problems of their parliamentary factions. In Sachsen-Anhalt, for example, a conflict between those MPs who were loyal to Frey and those who are not grew so intensive that 9 out of 16 DVU representatives left the party to form a political sect of their own.

FAR RIGHT APPEAL

The appeal of the far right in Germany can be seen in that it offers seemingly simple solutions at times when political situations seem to be getting increasingly complicated. That is, the parties simplify the solution to the social and economic problems that the public are faced with, a policy which strikes accord with a certain minority of the electorate. Their simple solution is to find scapegoats and blame them for the difficulties of those whose economic, social and cultural status appears to be threatened. Foreigners, immigrants and asylum seekers who appear to be taking the jobs of native Germans who ‘have worked all their lives’ are therefore an easy target at which to lay blame. That the policies ‘lack the differentiation required to arrive at effective policies’ is irrelevant as they meet the desire of the clientele for an orderly world with a straightforward set of rules. Furthermore, because the extreme right parties, for the most part (perhaps with the exception of the NPD), continue to play the democratic game and use populist language, they manage to appeal to some who would usually not even contemplate pledging electoral support with extremist parties, i.e. the ‘floating voters’.

The ‘floating voter’ has a considerable impact on the success of the far right parties. This is the voter whose electoral choice reflects responses to current events, such as the short-term economic climate, rather than long-term allegiances to a particular party. Although the major parties loyal voters far outnumber those voters who are likely to change their preferences, even a small shift in electoral preferences can have a significant impact. This is because surveys have indicated that electoral preferences for smaller parties are influenced more directly by the current political situation, therefore it is these floating voters that primarily vote for extreme political parties in situations of dire economic and political circumstance. This demonstrates that the extreme right do not currently have a major support base of their own, but they get their support largely from frustrated former supporters of the two main people’s parties who feel they have been by-passed. Thus they only achieve electoral success when the main parties fail to deal satisfactorily with topical domestic concerns. Whether or not the far right can, in time, turn this floating support into a core support base in order to become established in the German party system is open to debate.

In the following section I shall attempt to delve into the issues surrounding this debate as to whether the far right can establish itself within the German party system and gain further electoral success.