West Germany’s Parliamentary leaders are considering three steps to prevent the extremist National Democratic Party from entering the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament, when national elections are held in the fall of 1969, the American Jewish Committee reported today on the basis of information from its European office. One of the measures would be dissolution of the current ruling coalition of the Christian Democratic Union and the Socialist Democratic Party in the hope that one of the two major parties would then be able to attract votes of malcontents now veering toward the neo-Nazi NPD, A second proposal calls for adopting election rules to bar smaller parties from the Bundestag. The third would be outlawing the NPD.
The AJC report commented on the election in Baden-Wuerttemberg in which the NPD collected almost ten percent of the vote, its largest victory in a series of provincial elections, and said there was "no doubt" that the results had shaken "the confidence of West German political leadership." He said it had persuaded them that 23 years since the destruction of Hitlerism had not made changes in the German outlook "that would guarantee the future of a democratic system" in West Germany. The report noted that economic reasons cited for previous NPD election successes were no longer valid because the West German recession has been fading since formation of the coalition government. Recent student unrest which brought panic among some Germans was given as one of the reasons for the NPD successes.
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