Constitutional Court cuts off state funding for the party

The Federal Constitutional Court has handed down its verdict: The Heimat party, formerly known as the NPD, will not receive any state subsidies for six years.

The right-wing extremist NPD, which now calls itself Die Heimat, will be excluded from state party funding for six years. The Federal Constitutional Court decided this on Tuesday in Karlsruhe.

The party was not banned in 2017 because, according to the court, it could not achieve its anti-constitutional goals due to a lack of influence. In 2019, the federal government, Bundestag and Bundesrat submitted an application for exclusion from party financing. (Ref. 2 BvB 1/19)

Parties receive subsidies if they receive enough votes in elections. That was no longer the case with the NPD or Heimat recently. But she still benefited from tax breaks. Parties hostile to the constitution can have state funding cut off for an initial period of six years. The Federal Constitutional Court has to decide – on Tuesday for the first time ever. The verdict is also eagerly awaited with regard to the AfD, because it is being discussed whether such proceedings would also be possible against the AfD.

There was a scandal at the oral hearing in July last year because no party representative appeared – according to the court, a one-off event. A party spokesman announced that no one would come to the verdict.

At the time, Die Heimat declared on its website that it would not allow itself to be “made into an extra in a justice simulation.” The negotiation will “degenerate into a show trial”. Since there is no requirement to be present, the court continued the hearing.

According to Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD), the procedure is “of great political importance”. It has never been explained to the population that enemies of the constitution are supported with tax money. Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution Thomas Haldenwang said the agency had presented numerous evidence that the party was still unconstitutional. Steffen Kailitz from the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism explained that the party fundamentally rejects current democracy, makes no secret of its hostility to the constitution and sorely misses the national community.

If the Constitutional Court excludes Die Heimat from party funding, that could be a blueprint for the AfD. CSU leader Markus Söder, for example, has already mentioned this option in the current debate about a possible AfD ban.

However, in order to exclude it from state party funding, the court would also have to determine that the AfD is unconstitutional – so the criteria are largely the same. The only difference: the so-called potential to eliminate or impair the free democratic basic order, which is necessary for a ban – and which the court did not see in the case of the NPD in 2017.

Compared to a party ban, experts believe that a funding exclusion is a blunter sword because the affected party is allowed to continue to participate in political competition – including elections. And the AfD would also have a platform in the course of the funding exclusion process and could style itself as a victim – arguments that opponents of a ban process such as Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) cite.

Party lawyer Sophie Schönberger told the “Handelsblatt”: “I consider a situation in which a non-banned and comparatively successful actor in political competition cannot operate under the same competitive conditions as the other parties to be highly problematic from a democratic point of view.”

The former constitutional judge Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff told the newspapers of the Funke media group (Tuesday) that the requirements for an exclusion from financing were “no less demanding than the requirements for a ban.” The constitutional and administrative law expert Michael Brenner from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena pointed out in the newspapers of the Bayern media group (Tuesday) that a process to exclude the AfD from state funding could take years.