Extremist Parties in West Germany Got One Percent of Total Votes Cast in Sunday’s General Elections

West Germany’s oldest established neo-Nazi political group, the National Democratic Party (NPD), won 0.6 percent of the popular vote in Sunday’s general elections, enough to qualify for State financial aid but far below the five percent needed for representation in parliament.

Nevertheless, the NPD, which garnered about 250,000 votes, performed better than in the last Bundestag elections in 1983 when it drew only 0.2 percent.

The combined vote for the NPD and all other extreme rightwing factions Sunday amounted to one percent of the total votes cast.

“The Patriots,” the European branch of the Lyndon LaRouche group in the U.S., the “Courageous Citizens” and similar groupings on the radical right drew 0.4 percent between them.

NOT A POLITICAL FORCE OF CONSEQUENCE

Although the NPD achieved one percent in the elections to the Strasbourg-based Parliament of Europe two years ago — mainly because of a poor turn-out — neither it nor any other faction on the far right has emerged as a political force of any consequence in West Germany.

One reason is that they are ideologically divided and split the extremist vote between them. Another is that the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) headed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), made a strong bid for rightwing votes during the election campaign.

Franz-Josef Strauss, leader of the CSU, campaigned on the premise that it is time for Germans to “step out of Hitler’s shadow” and develop “normal” national feelings. He also publicly supported the thesis of those historians who maintain that the Holocaust, as bad as it was, was no worse than other catastrophic events in recent history.

The CDU, and its junior coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) won Sunday’s elections with 53.4 percent of the popular vote which translates into 266 of the 496 seats in the Bundestag. But Kohl’s party, which achieved 44.3 percent Sunday compared to 48.8 percent in the 1983 elections, registered its poorest performance since the Federal Republic was founded in 1949. The centrist FDP and the anti-NATO, environmentalist Green Party chalked up the largest gains. The former increased its share of the vote to 9.1 percent, from seven percent in 1983. The Greens won 8.3 percent, up from 5.6 percent four years ago.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) remains the largest opposition faction in parliament. It drew 37 percent of the popular vote, down from 38.2 percent in 1983, but better than predicted by the pre-election opinion polls.

JEWISH VOTE IS MARGINAL

It is not possible to determine how Jews cast their votes. There are 30,000 Jews in West Germany, more than 20,000 eligible to vote. Observers here assume they supported the CDU or the FDP. But the Jewish vote is too marginal to play any role in national politics.

The Jewish community is scattered, most living in West Berlin and Frankfurt. But West Berliners do not participate in the national elections because of the special status of the city which is governed by the three Allied powers.