German parliament backs far-right ban

Police escort far-right marchers in a recent anti-ban demonstration in Berlin

BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -- Germany's lower house of parliament has backed a ban on a far-right political party.

Outlawing the National Democratic Party (NPD) now has the support of both houses of parliament and the government, but will ultimately be decided by the constitutional court.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government is under pressure to act after a spate of attacks on foreign nationals and far-right crime earlier this year.

The ban attempt has found broad cross-party support despite concerns that evidence linking the NPD to crime appears to be weak.

Conservative Wolfgang Bosbach recalled a NPD march at the start of the year through Berlin's Brandenburg Gate -- a favoured site for Nazi parades in the 1930s -- and said it promoted a terrible picture to the world.

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"Such a procession disgraces not only the capital Berlin, it discredits all of Germany."

The march and subsequent television images showed skinheads in army boots shouting Nazi slogans.

"It damages our image in the entire world and we should no longer allow this," said Bosbach.

Many of the speakers in Friday's parliamentary debate referred to the lessons of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s.

"Things would have turned out better if the Nazi Party had been decisively banned in the 1920s and did not have the chance to bring a racist and anti-Semitic ideology to power successfully," said Gregor Gysi of the reform communist Party of Democratic Socialism.

Germany's postwar constitution allows the state to ban parties deemed undemocratic.

Two parties -- one communist and one neo-Nazi -- have so-far been banned and it could take the top court up to two years before it issues a ruling over the NPD.

Only the liberal Free Democrats spoke against the ban, saying the NPD -- which says its membership has risen by 1,000 to 7,000 in recent months because of the media profile it is getting -- was not a mortal threat to democracy.

"We consider a ban the wrong way to fight far-right extremism," Guido Westerwelle said. "It is well-intentioned, but well-intentioned is often the opposite of well done.

"The NPD is the least successful of all the far-right parties," he said. "The NPD electoral results do not confirm the presence of this danger."

Interior Minister Otto Schily had recently claimed there was increasing evidence that the party was fomenting neo-Nazi ideology and racism, which have been blamed for fuelling brutal attacks on minorities that left at least three people dead this year.

Recent criminal investigations have failed to turn up such a direct link.

On Wednesday, authorities announced they had arrested two young men of Arab descent in connection with an arson attack on a synagogue in Duesseldorf in October.

In another prominent case, an eastern German woman's allegations that a gang of neo-Nazis drowned her son fell apart when she confessed to having paid some of the witnesses.

Similarly, initial suspicions that neo-Nazis were behind a mystery bomb attack in July on a railway station in Duesseldorf that wounded Jewish immigrants have not been confirmed.

Critics fear that outlawing the NPD could boost the party by providing publicity, especially if the judges reject arguments it is seeking aggressively to overthrow democracy.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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