German landmark case seeks to ban far-right party

Germany will Tuesday launch a landmark case to ban the far-right and openly racist National Democratic Party (NPD), a decade after a first attempt failed, officials said. Chancellor Angela Merkel supports the case, a spokesman said, although her government has not formally joined the high-stakes legal gamble spearheaded by the upper house of parliament. Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert on Monday labelled the NPD "an anti-democratic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-constitutional party which we all must decisively fight politically". He said the government "respects" the push by Germany's 16 states, represented in the upper house or Bundesrat, to outlaw the party, and that it had helped the states build the legal case. However, Seibert added that the executive itself saw no need to launch its own legal case before the Federal Constitutional Court. NPD activists have this year angrily protested against a refugee center in Berlin and mailed condoms to "foreigners and select Germans", including politicians who promote a multicultural society. The latest push to ban the NPD came after shock news that a small extremist group with links to the NPD, the self-styled National Socialist Underground, murdered 10 people, most of Turkish origin, between 2000 and 2006. Constitutional experts are divided over the chances of success in the new case, citing the high legal hurdles for outlawing any political party, which has not been done in Germany in more than half a century. To make their case, the states have to convince the judges that the NPD represents an active threat to the democratic order and holds an "aggressive and combative attitude". The NPD, with around 6,000 members, scored just 1.3 percent in September 22 elections and has never entered the national parliament, but is represented in two eastern states' legislatures and therefore receives official campaign funding. Lawyers must cleanse their case of any evidence that was provided by undercover state informants hiding within party ranks, after their role was seen as muddying the first case against the NPD in 2003. The states voiced confidence that this time around their case is solid. Police and the domestic intelligence service had a year ago deactivated all undercover sources within the NPD, said the interior minister of Schleswig-Holstein state, Andreas Breitner. The minister said that "the NPD, with their biological-racist ideology, are intellectual arsonists promoting hatred of foreigners, including violent attacks against foreigners and migrants". Critics of the case say it could turn the NPD into martyrs for their followers and that Germany, like other democracies, should keep combating them through the political process and open debate, not a legal ban.