Germany's lower house of parliament voted on Thursday for funding to be cut off to the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) after the country's top court ruled in January its aims violated the country's constitution.
Germany's lower house of parliament voted on Thursday for funding to be cut off to the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) after the country's top court ruled in January its aims violated the country's constitution.
The vote on such a cutoff, which would itself require a change to the constitution, comes three months before a federal election and was welcomed by Jewish groups. The lawmakers voted in favour of the required constitutional change.
The Constitutional Court said in January the NPD's aims, viewed by Germany's intelligence agency as racist, anti-Semitic and revisionist, violated the constitution.
"The NPD intends to replace the existing constitutional system with an authoritarian national state that adheres to the idea of an ethnically defined 'people's community'," the court said.
But it said there was insufficient evidence that it could succeed, and that meant the party could not be banned.
It said a clause would have to be added to the constitution if parties that breached the constitution were to be prevented from receiving taxpayers' money. Existing rules give any parties with elected representatives the right to funds.
The NPD has never won a seat in the federal parliament and has lost all its seats in regional assemblies. But it has representatives on local councils, and so receives about 1 million euros ($1.12 million) a year from the German state. In 2014, it also won a seat in the European Parliament.
Reacting to the Thursday vote in parliament, the NPD said on its website: "The Bundestag takes an axe to the principle of democratic freedom."
Several senior NPD figures have been convicted of Holocaust denial or incitement.
"It is high time that we turn off the financial tap to unconstitutional parties like the NPD," said Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
"It is intolerable that parties can use taxpayers' money to spread their anti-democratic, inhuman or, in the case of the NPD, propaganda linked to National Socialism," he added.
(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
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