BERLIN (AP) – Germany’s supreme court is scheduled to announce its verdict Tuesday on lawmakers’ bid to outlaw a far-right party accused of promoting a racist and anti-Semitic agenda. It would be the first ban of its kind since 1956.
The German parliament’s upper house, which represents the country’s 16 state governments, applied for the ban at the end of 2013. It’s the second attempt to ban the National Democratic Party, better known by its German acronym NPD.
Officials maintain the party violates the German Constitution and are keen to cut off NPD’s state funding, to which all political parties are entitled.
The Federal Constitutional Court, which held three days of hearings last March, has not indicated which way its verdict will go, and experts differ on whether the NPD poses enough of a threat to justify a ban. Only two parties have been outlawed in West Germany and reunited Germany – the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party in 1952 and the German Communist Party in 1956.
The constitution states: “Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.”