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Following report was published before y'day in the German magazine Der Spiegel:

NEO-NAZIS ON THE MOVE IN GERMANY
How the Far Right Plans to Grow

Germany's far-right National Democratic Party is on the move. After recent successes at the polls in eastern Germany, the neo-Nazis now have their sights set on Bavaria and the national parliament. It's also improving relations with far-right militants.
 

A man is wandering around Schwerin Castle. Short, bald and wearing a dark suit, he tries every door, but most are locked. There is almost no one else in the castle, which houses the parliament (Landtag) for the eastern state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. It is Monday, Sept. 18, the day after the state parliamentary elections in which Germany's far right National Democratic Party (NPD) captured 7.3 percent of the vote.

But the man eventually finds what he is looking for. He enters a room and squints at a group of people wielding champagne glasses and surrounding Landtag President Sylvia Bretschneider, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The visitor amiably greets the group with the words "bottoms up" and asks for the director of the Landtag. He is here to discuss the future assignment of seats in the state parliament. The revelers are amused at the man's question and want to know who could possibly be in such a hurry. They practically drop their glasses at the man's response: "Peter Marx, NPD parliamentary group. We are ready to begin."

The anecdote, which Marx recounts with a smirk, is indicative of his party's self-confidence. It's the same self-assured smirk a number of NPD members had on their faces last Thursday when they greeted a group of journalists at their dilapidated headquarters building in Berlin's Köpenick neighborhood.

At the press conference, NPD leader Udo Voigt was joined by Udo Pastörs, the future head of the party's parliamentary group in Schwerin, Pastörs' campaign manager, Holger Apfel -- whose main job is running the NPD's parliamentary group in the state of Saxony's parliament -- and Gerhard Frey, the head of the extremist right-wing German People's Union (DVU). Surrounded by his supporters, Voigt told reporters about the party's plans for the future. In the wake of its successes in Schwerin and Berlin, where the NPD managed to win seats in four of the region's twelve district parliaments, Voigt said he plans to "strengthen our current bastions" and then "energetically approach the West." Next on the agenda for the NPD, also known in Germany as the "browns," are the Bavarian state elections in 2008 and national parliamentary elections in 2009.

"Germany pact"

The party plans to pursue a strategy of showing up the democratic parties in the respective parliaments and expanding its cooperation with what it calls "unaffiliated groups of comrades" within the neo-Nazi community. The NPD also intends to open citizens' offices and provide social services, which it expects to fund with government subsidies for campaign costs and parliamentary stipends for members' offices. Finally, Voigt plans to integrate the remnants of the struggling far-right party the Republicans into the NPD's and DVU's "Germany pact," which determines who runs for office and where.

The tattoo: "Everything for Germany". On the t-shirt("Combat 18"):

"1" stands for A(in the Latin alphabet), "8" for H = Adolf Hitler

Peter Marx is considered the mastermind behind the right-wing parties' strategy. Marx, who wears many hats -- as the NPD's deputy national chairman, its state chairman in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate and the current head of the NPD parliamentary group in Saxony's Landtag -- will move to Schwerin to manage the party's new six-member parliamentary group and ensure it causes the necessary commotion once its members assume their new positions.

As has already been the case in Saxony, provocation will be the order of the day for the NPD's delegates to the state parliament in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. Two years ago, Marx scored a headline-grabbing coup during the election of Saxony's governor in Dresden. The governor position is elected by the state parliament, and Marx's candidate garnered two more votes than the NPD actually had in parliament. German newspapers wondered for weeks which delegates from the established parties might have defected to the far right.

Marx is already thinking about using the same strategy in Schwerin. "Secret agreements are always good for surprises," he says. And he still has other schemes up his sleeve. For example, the region's branch of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is closely aligned with Erika Steinbach, president of the Federation of the Expellees -- a non-profit organization formed to represent the interests of Germans displaced from their homes after World War II. The Federation has raised eyebrows in Poland, Czech Republic and Berlin with their wish to create a center documenting the fate of Germans forced to leave their eastern European homes at the end of the war. The NPD plans to stir up trouble in the Landtag by proposing a monument in downtown Schwerin to commemorate these expulsions -- and is hoping to get some from other parties to vote in favor of the plan.

Coordinating tactics

The NPD also has plans to make a laughing stock of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) -- which also captured seats in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania's Landtag for the first time and made its opposition to a proposed increase in Germany's value-added tax a central element of its campaign platform. They want to launch an initiative in the Bundesrat, the upper house of the German parliament, to repeal the increase. "The FDP will hardly be able to vote against it," Marx gloats -- and will thus be in the uncomfortable position of allying itself with the far right.

Marx plans to coordinate his state organization's tactics with those of the NPD parliamentary group in Saxony in the future. Holger Apfel, who also heads the NPD parliamentary group in Saxony, is already boasting about what he calls a "Dresden-Schwerin axis."

Pastörs also stresses that the NPD's new delegates to the Mecklenburg-West Pomerania Landtag will hardly make working with parliamentary committees much of a priority. If one adds the NPD's 7.3 percent of the vote to the roughly 40 percent of the electorate that shunned the polls, says Pastörs, it becomes obvious that "we are dealing with a clear rejection of the current system." Pastörs plans to devote his "full efforts to continuing to motivate and integrate the non-parliamentary national opposition" in the future.

He is referring to the so-called "unaffiliated groups of comrades," loose-knit collections of neo-Nazis in Germany's northeast sporting names such as the National Germanic Brotherhood and the Aryan Warriors. These groups had been critical of the NPD for years. They considered the party too tame and too old -- that is, until neo-Nazis like Thomas Wulff, nicknamed "Steiner," brought the troops to Voigt's more sedate colleagues.

Offering jobs to rowdy skinheads

"For the first time, the concept of a right-wing peoples' front has been fully realized in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania," Marx raves. An attempt to form a similar alliance failed in Saxony, where combative young would-be storm troopers were incensed over the NPD's parliamentary delegates in their business suits and official cars. But, according to Marx, the composition of the new parliamentary group in Schwerin shows that the NPD has learned from these squabbles. This time around, he says, the party plans to placate its rowdier members with official positions and money.

Tino Müller, an extremist who launched a citizens' initiative against a planned residential facility for asylum-seekers, is the deputy head of the NPD's parliamentary group in the new Landtag. Birger Lüssow, a member of the radical "Action Group for Fortress City Rostock," will represent the movement's violent wing in the state parliament, while others can look forward to well-paid jobs as staff members within the NPD parliamentary group.

The NPD also expects to involve its young Nazi members in its planned offensive into communal politics. According to Voigt, the party will establish "social guidance offices" in Berlin and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, mainly to lure voters away from the post-communist Left Party. Voigt, in an absurd take on the NPD's plans, says: "The social question will be resolved nationally or not at all."

"There is no doubt," says Hubertus Buchstein, a professor of political science at Greifswald University -- which is located in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania "that the NPD has become more successful since it abandoned its claim to be the sole representative (of German right-wing extremists) and has opened its doors to the comrade groups." But whether this balancing act between thugs and loudmouths will last is questionable.

"We'll get to the Bundestag"

NPD leader Voigt is optimistic. In eastern Pomerania, where the NPD captured more than 30 percent of the vote in several villages, he plans to "take a shot at the first mayoral positions" during the next round of communal elections -- a lofty goal, given the right-winger's apparent aversion to work.

A study recently published by Greifswald University, titled "The NPD in the Mecklenburg-West Pomerania Communal Elections," points out the wide rift between the party's claims and reality, especially at the communal level. So far the NPD has only managed to capture ten seats on municipal councils in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, and its delegates have in fact been "present at virtually all council sessions and have even stayed to the end of each session." But, say the authors of the study, the NPD's representatives have not managed to gain seats on regular committees in any of these four municipal councils, and the right-wingers have also failed to make a splash during plenary sessions. "In (the Baltic seaside town of) Stralsund," the authors write, "it took almost half a year before one of the two NPD council members even managed to find his way to the podium."

Marx, the NPD's man in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, clearly has his work cut out for him. But Marx already has his sights set beyond Schwerin, with plans to penetrate the Bavarian Landtag in that state's 2008 parliamentary election. "(Bavarian premier Edmund) Stoiber is getting older, and I see a lot of potential there," he says. "If we can make it in Bavaria, we'll get into the Bundestag."