When a right-wing extremist political party appeals to European integration and a constitutional court takes the national perspective…A comment on the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands judgment BVerfG, 2 BvB 1/13

Abstract

With Regulation 1141/2014, the EU has inaugurated a truly transnational political party system as well as a potential conflict between national and European governance – or so the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands has recently argued when faced with party ban proceedings before the German Federal Constitutional Court. The party contended that its representation in the European Parliament and membership in a political party at European level established exclusive European governance and denied the competence of the Federal Constitutional Court for national proceedings. The court, by contrast, summarily dismissed the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands’s arguments, maintaining its own exclusive authority, and failed to engage in a substantive legal assessment of recent developments in European party law. In this paper, I argue that precisely such a thorough analysis of the newly emerging intertwinement between national and European law as a consequence of Regulation 1141/2014 would have been in order. The Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands’s arguments need to be taken more seriously than the Federal Constitutional Court allows, despite, or perhaps more accurately because, of their highly strategic invocation of European integration: the European argument cannot rest with the extremist party alone, who, elsewhere a most imminent opponent of the European idea, now uses it to challenge national law.