Germany Set to Ban Far-Right NPD over Suspected Neo-Nazi Links

Germany is poised to ban the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), which has been linked to a neo-Nazi cell accused of nine racially motivated between 2000 and 2006 and the murder of a policewoman.

Hans-Peter Friedrich, minister of the interior, has called on the government to bar NPD from politics. "The NPD is a party that is an enemy of the constitution. We want to start a process to ban it," he said.

A report released in Germany in the aftermath of the investigation on the Nationalist Socialist Underground (NSU), an extremist cell believed to be responsible for a series of terrorist bombings and ethnic killings over the past decade, revealed that that the country's far-right NPD may have formed close links with violent gangs.

The report renewed bids to outlaw the NPD, a move sought by a number of MPs and experts on far-right activities in the country.

"NDP always had a fluid relationship with the more confrontational and provocative side of far-right movements, especially on a local level," Dr Matthew Goodwin, an expert on extremism at Nottingham University, told the International Business Times UK.

"The latest developments may show that the party had more links to banned neo-Nazi groups, which would be further grounds towards banning the party."

Goodwin said that previous attempts to ban the organisation failed because the prosecutor did not have the hard evidence to back up its claims and witnesses were exposed as intelligence agency informants.

But the German government recently said it wanted to pull undercover informants out of the party in a first step toward banning the far-right group.

News magazine Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence agency has more than 130 active informants in the party, who risk exposure if the government moves to ban the NPD.

The NPD, which has a strong presence in the former East Germany, was established in 1964 and garnered 1.5 per cent of the vote at the last federal elections in 2009.