Germany Takes on Neo-Nazis

Germany has been grappling with this issue for many years and may have a new solution to their problems.

What's shocking to me is the fact some of these extremist groups have apparently been receiving state funding.

How crazy is that?

For four years, ever since a 2003 push to ban the neo-Nazi party NPD failed in Germany's high court, political leaders have been looking for a strategy to combat the country's extremist right wing. But ideas -- most of them centering on a renewed attempt at prohibiting the party -- have been wanting, and action has been virtually non-existent.

On this Thursday and Friday in Berlin, though, interior ministers from Germany's 16 states will discuss a plan to weaken the NPD by eliminating state funding from foundations and organizations that espouse the party's right-extremist views. It is time, many believe, to move beyond a commitment to banning the party and begin looking for ways to make the lives of Germany's neo-Nazis more difficult.

"We have to publicly stigmatize people who fund the NPD and the associations that support it," Schleswig-Holstein Interior Minister Ralf Stegner (SPD) told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. "We should name by name the trade organizations that recruit using their right-extremist ideology and that prefer to give apprenticeship positions to young neo-Nazis. We should not stand back and be polite about this."

The problem, say many, is that the NPD, as a legal political party in Germany, receives federal and state funding based on election results. NPD representatives in the state parliaments of Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, for example, got a combined €1.38 million for campaign costs in 2006.

Germany's Social Democrats are still in favor of a second attempt at banning the NPD, but have not pushed hard for the idea at the federal level. The Christian Democrats under Chancellor Angela Merkel fear that a second failure in German courts could give the NPD a boost and are against pursuing a ban.

"If we wage a second attempt, we have to be sure that we're going to accomplish our goal," Saxony's Interior Minister Albrecht Buttolo (CDU) told Deutschlandradio Kultur on Thursday.

There are numerous ideas on the table for cutting funds to the right. In Saxony, for example, the law requires that subsidies be paid to foundations and organizations if the party they are affiliated with has been represented in the federal or state parliament for two legislative periods. Since 2004, NPD has held seats in Saxony's state assembly and has founded an "Educational Institute for Homeland and National Identity."