NPD On The Move In Germany

[James Hawthorne]

Hot on the heels of their recent successes at the polls in eastern Germany, the pro-White National Democratic Party (NPD) of Germany now have their sights set on Bavaria and the national parliament.

A man is wandering around Schwerin Castle. Short, bald and wearing a dark suit, he tries every door, but most are locked. There is almost no one else in the castle, which houses the parliament (Landtag) for the eastern state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. It is Monday, Sept. 18, the day after the state parliamentary elections in which Germany's National Democratic Party (NPD) captured 7.3 percent of the vote.

But the man eventually finds what he is looking for. He enters a room and squints at a group of people wielding champagne glasses and surrounding Landtag President Sylvia Bretschneider, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The visitor amiably greets the group with the words "bottoms up" and asks for the director of the Landtag. He is here to discuss the future assignment of seats in the state parliament. The revelers are amused at the man's question and want to know who could possibly be in such a hurry. They practically drop their glasses at the man's response: "Peter Marx, NPD parliamentary group. We are ready to begin."

The anecdote, which Marx recounts with a smirk, is indicative of his party's self-confidence. It's the same self-assured smirk a number of NPD members had on their faces last Thursday when they greeted a group of journalists at their headquarters building in Berlin's Köpenick neighborhood.

At the press conference, NPD leader Udo Voigt was joined by Udo Pastörs, the future head of the party's parliamentary group in Schwerin, Pastörs' campaign manager, Holger Apfel -- whose main job is running the NPD's parliamentary group in the state of Saxony's parliament -- and Gerhard Frey, the head of the German People's Union (DVU). Surrounded by his supporters, Voigt told reporters about the party's plans for the future.

In the wake of its successes in Schwerin and Berlin, where the NPD managed to win seats in four of the region's twelve district parliaments, Voigt said he plans to "strengthen our current bastions" and then "energetically approach the West." Next on the agenda for the NPD, also known in Germany as the "browns," are the Bavarian state elections in 2008 and national parliamentary elections in 2009.

The NPD also intends to open citizens' offices and provide social services, which it expects to fund with government subsidies for campaign costs and parliamentary stipends for members' offices. Finally, Voigt plans to integrate the remnants of the struggling far-right party the Republicans into the NPD's and DVU's "Germany pact," which determines who runs for office and where.

Peter Marx is considered the mastermind behind the right-wing parties' strategy. Marx, who wears many hats -- as the NPD's deputy national chairman, its state chairman in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate and the current head of the NPD parliamentary group in Saxony's Landtag -- will move to Schwerin to manage the party's new six-member parliamentary group and ensure it causes the necessary commotion once its members assume their new positions.

As has already been the case in Saxony, provocation will be the order of the day for the NPD's delegates to the state parliament in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. Two years ago, Marx scored a headline-grabbing coup during the election of Saxony's governor in Dresden. The governor position is elected by the state parliament, and Marx's candidate garnered two more votes than the NPD actually had in parliament. German newspapers wondered for weeks which delegates from the established parties might have defected to the pro-White side.

Marx is already thinking about using the same strategy in Schwerin. "Secret agreements are always good for surprises," he says. And he still has other schemes up his sleeve. For example, the region's branch of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is closely aligned with Erika Steinbach, president of the Federation of the Expellees -- a non-profit organization formed to represent the interests of Germans displaced from their homes after World War II. The Federation has raised eyebrows in Poland, Czech Republic and Berlin with their wish to create a center documenting the fate of Germans forced to leave their eastern European homes at the end of the war. The NPD plans to stir up trouble in the Landtag by proposing a monument in downtown Schwerin to commemorate these expulsions -- and is hoping to get some from other parties to vote in favor of the plan.

The NPD also has plans to make a laughing stock of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) -- which also captured seats in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania's Landtag for the first time and made its opposition to a proposed increase in Germany's value-added tax a central element of its campaign platform. They want to launch an initiative in the Bundesrat, the upper house of the German parliament, to repeal the increase. "The FDP will hardly be able to vote against it," Marx gloats -- and will thus be in the uncomfortable position of allying itself with the NPD.

Marx plans to coordinate his state organization's tactics with those of the NPD parliamentary group in Saxony in the future. Holger Apfel, who also heads the NPD parliamentary group in Saxony, is already boasting about what he calls a "Dresden-Schwerin axis."
Pastörs also stresses that the NPD's new delegates to the Mecklenburg-West Pomerania Landtag will hardly make with parliamentary committees much of a priority. If one adds the NPD's 7.3 percent of the vote to the roughly 40 percent of the electorate that shunned the polls, says Pastörs, it becomes obvious that "we are dealing with a clear rejection of the current system." Pastörs plans to devote his "full efforts to continuing to motivate and integrate the non-parliamentary national opposition" in the future.

He is referring to the so-called "unaffiliated groups of comrades," loose-knit collections of pro-White militants in Germany's northeast sporting names such as the National Germanic Brotherhood and the Aryan Warriors. These groups had been critical of the NPD for years. They considered the party too tame and too old.

"For the first time, the concept of a right-wing peoples' front has been fully realized in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania," Marx says.

NPD leader Voigt is optimistic. In eastern Pomerania, where the NPD captured more than 30 percent of the vote in several villages, he plans to "take a shot at the first mayoral positions" during the next round of communal elections.

Marx, the NPD's man in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, clearly has his work cut out for him. But Marx already has his sights set beyond Schwerin, with plans to penetrate the Bavarian Landtag in that state's 2008 parliamentary election. "(Bavarian premier Edmund) Stoiber is getting older, and I see a lot of potential there," he says. "If we can make it in Bavaria, we'll get into the Bundestag."

Spiegel Online

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