The Future of Rightist Extremism in West Germany

Abstract

The rapid growth of the National Democratic Party (NPD) since its establishment in 1964 and its entry into the Landtag of Hesse, Bavaria, Schleswig-Holstein, Rhineland-Palatinate, Lower Saxony, Bremen, and Baden-Wuerttemberg had been a source of embarrassment to the West German government until the recent Bundestag election. Both domestically and internationally, the NPD had been branded as neo-Nazi; its appearance and successes had been compared to the NSDAP during the Weimar Republic; and questions had been raised as to whether the German government and voters had the will, the means, and the judgment to contain it. Consequently, the first reaction to the NPD's failure to obtain the necessary five percent of the vote in the 1969 election was one of relief, since it indicated that German voters were capablethrough open political competition-of denying seats in the national legislature to an extremist party of the Right. In spite of this outcome, on analysis the electoral results were somewhat unclear. On the one hand, they showed that the NPD's share of the national vote had doubled since the Bundestag election of 1965.1 In 1965, only one year after its establishment, the party received 2.1 percent (664,193) of the second votes cast as opposed to 4.3 percent (1,422,106) in September 1969 (Table 1). In every Land there was a net increase in the number of votes cast for the NPD between the 1965 and 1969 elections. In addition, the NPD increased its share of first votes in every electoral district, doubling or tripling its share in the majority of districts (Table 2). Although the party received no direct or indirect mandates in 1965 and 1969, in the latter year it crossed the five percent barrier in Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate, Bavaria (where it received the highest number of second votes), and the Saar (where its votes rose from 1.8 percent to 5.7 percent).