Germany: Far-right unites as state attacks anti-fascists
01 November 2004
After the success of the German National Democratic Party (
Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD) and the German Peoples' Union (
Deutsche Volksunion, DVU) in regional elections, the far-right parties have formed a pact (that incorporates nazi skinheads) to maximise their chances of winning seats in the 2006 general elections. At last September's regional elections the NPD gained 12 seats (9.2 per cent of the vote) in the eastern state of Saxony; in Brandenburg near Berlin, the DVU increased its seats from five to six (6.1 per cent of the vote).
At an NPD party gathering in Leinefelde, Thuringia on 1 November, NPD chairman Udo Voigt and DVU chairman Gerhard Frey said that they would not compete with each other at elections. They would stand on a single list under NPD leadership at the 2006 general election and under DVU leadership at the European Parliamentary elections in 2009. The parties will also not stand against each other at the forthcoming regional elections in North-Rhine Westphalia and Schleswig Holstein in 2005.
The NPD has ceased to distance itself from the nazi skinhead scene and has started actively recruiting among them. At the Leinefelde gathering, the NPD voted Thorsten Heise onto their national executive with over 64% of the vote. Heise has convictions for serious bodily harm, coercion and breach of the peace for which he spent one and a half years in prison. He leads the right-wing
Kameradschaft (comradeship)
Northeim, which is active in Lower Saxony and initiated a recruitment drive involving 60 far-right groups and production and distribution companies that targeted schoolchildren with CDs of far-right music and propaganda (see
Statewatch Vol. 14 no. 3 & 4).
The NPD survived a crisis of sinking party membership in 1996 and steadily became more powerful through recruitment drives and links to the fascist skinhead scene. The government attempted to ban the party last year but failed because it infiltrated the party leadership with informants to such an extent that it became unclear what was initiated by the party and what by the informants (see
Statewatch Vol. 12 nos. 1 & 3 and Vol. 13 no. 2).
Norman Bordin, who was convicted for a racist attack a few years ago and founded the militant
Kameradschaft Süd (whose members are currently on trial for planning a bomb attack against a synagogue in Munich, recently joined the NPD. He wrote on the internet site "Free Resistance" (
Freier Widerstand):
I would welcome more revolutionary forces joining this party...This is precisely what the system fears. A legal structure which is practically impossible to ban.
The far-right's electoral success while recruiting from the skinheads, appears to have shocked the mainstream media and political parties. However, anti-fascist activists and research groups have long pointed out ongoing nazi violence, the failure of the state to prosecute the perpetrators and the presence of far-right ideologies within mainstream society. In the face of the far-right's success and its competition with the mainstream parties' for votes, it is all the more significant that anti-fascists continue to be harassed and prosecuted for trying to counter violent nazi demonstrations and recruitment drives.
After the
Kameradschaft Northeims schools recruitment drive, anti-fascist groups started the
Schöner leben ohne Naziläden (Life is better without nazi shops) campaign. As one of the strengths of the far-right lay in its promotion of "alternative" youth culture, an anti-fascist group in Chemnitz held a protest outside two nazi shops (
Backstreetnoise and
PC Records), demanding that their landlords, (the German Federal Property Office,
Bundesvermögensamt), end their rental contracts. The protest led to an end to the contracts in late 2004. While the closure of the shops is seen as a success, the 400-strong demonstration was