Small party

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A small party is a political party that has only a relatively small supporters or electorate and whose political influence at parliamentary level is correspondingly low, provided it is represented in a parliament at all. The political science terminology is unclear, in the sense that there is no generally applicable language regulation for the use of the term small party. Some authors use the term small party for all parties below the level of popular parties, while others differentiate between established and non-established small parties. In more recent publications, preference is given to subdivisions in a three-way grid such as popular / large party, smaller party, small party and also popular / large party, small party and micro party . The term splinter party is often used colloquially , but is rarely used in specialist literature due to its negative connotation .

Definitions

In political science , small parties are understood to mean those political parties that have little political influence due to their low membership and low election results. In the election statistics of electoral research , they are often summarized under “other parties” and sometimes also disparagingly referred to as “splinter parties”. The political scientist Dirk van den Boom defines Kleinpartei as “a political party that, due to the legal, financial, personal, organizational and programmatic framework conditions of its work, does not assert itself in the political system in such a way that it is significantly active and creative in the decision-making process and in the Selection of political leaders ”. Accordingly, those parties would be subsumed under this term that only have a small number of active members and correspondingly low membership fees and often have too few staff to fill party offices and political mandates or to carry out effective public relations work and fundraising. However, they differ not only because of lower resources from the larger parties, but often focus on narrowly defined target groups and by the other parties neglected topics and often to not develop a comprehensive framework or party program, could address the larger groups of voters (see. Interested party or One-topic party). Some small parties, such as the regional parties, only focus on regional focuses. The so-called “ town hall parties” are parties that are important primarily because of their local political objectives at the municipal level. Likewise, it is often ideologically motivated parties whose members cannot reconcile their political ideas with those of the major parties, or protest parties whose success is usually limited in time.

The definition of small parties via the low response to elections and the mostly lack of representation in parliaments is widespread in Germany. In explaining their low level of success, however, different perspectives compete, depending on whether organizational or programmatic deficits of the parties themselves are seen as the main reason for their failure or whether this is attributed to external influencing factors, including the electoral system.

Hans-Jörg Dietzsche suggests using the term “smaller party” for groups that are between the endpoints of the people's or large party and the small party. He defines a smaller party as a political party that exists in a party system that is characterized by two major parties, in the legislature, but can only participate in political decision-making processes and in the determination of leadership in subordinate cooperation with a major party.

Olaf Jandura suggests differentiating between big, small and micro parties. In Germany, small parties would include parties that could get 5 to 10% of the vote, small parties those that regularly remained below 5%.

In 1992, the journalist Manfred Rowold and the sociologist Stefan Immerfall suggested using the term small party in addition to small party for parties whose candidates were not elected in at least two federal states in the state parliaments. In the German press, very small parties are often referred to as micro-parties. In the 2017 report on the protection of the constitution, the right-wing extremist group Der III. Way referred to as the smallest party. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation named the right-wing parties The III. Way and The Right Small Parties.

Distribution of mandates in the Austrian National Council in 2008: the two large parties , three small parties and the small parties not represented

In Austria, the term is also used more generally for established parliamentary parties , in contrast to the two major parties SPÖ and ÖVP . It is understood to mean those parties that could not form the government , but would at most be coalition partners . Parties that are below the respective thresholds of the election (National Council election: 4%) are usually called micro-parties , including the numerous parties that are only regionally active.

In Switzerland one speaks of a small party less often. The largest parties are represented in the Federal Council and are therefore called Federal Council parties . The smaller parties that are not represented in the Bundesrat are called other parties or smaller parties .

function

As “advocates of individuals”, small parties can draw attention to interests and topics that are felt to be urgent and force the large parties to deal with them. They also serve as a kind of “democratic pressure relief valve” to give voters within the political system the opportunity to express their rejection. Furthermore, alongside other organizations, they offer the possibility of shaping public life.

Small parties and the right to vote

While majority voting only offers smaller groups greater chances of success in the case of strong strongholds (e.g. regional parties ), pure proportional representation favors the entry of small parties into a parliament , which can make it more difficult to form a government majority. For this reason, there is a blocking clause in the respective electoral laws in various parliamentary systems, including in Germany .

Situation in the Federal Republic of Germany

Threshold clause, five percent hurdle

A party in the Federal Republic of Germany must have at least five percent of the second votes or receive three direct mandates in order to be represented in the Bundestag with the corresponding number of members based on its share of the vote (see basic mandate ). Direct mandates that a candidate receives through an initial majority of votes in an electoral district are not affected by this threshold clause. During the 15th legislative session, this related to two members of the PDS in the Bundestag, which in the 2002 general elections were elected in Berlin constituencies directly to the Bundestag, even though the party had received nationwide less than five percent of the second votes. In state elections in Bavaria , the candidate with the most first votes in the constituency only receives the direct mandate if his party has overcome the five percent threshold. Some federal states, e.g. B. Brandenburg, also know the basic mandate clause, which in 2014 led to BVB / FW moving into the state parliament with 2.7% of the valid votes due to a direct mandate.

An exception to the five percent threshold in state and federal elections applies to parties that represent national minorities in the population . Currently, this only affects the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament with the South Schleswig voter association (SSW), which represents the interests of the Danish and Frisian minorities of German citizens in northern Schleswig-Holstein .

The admissibility of the threshold clause in elections in Germany is controversial. It is only permissible if it is necessary for the formation of a government and thus for the functioning of the respective parliament or representation. According to the Federal Constitutional Court, small parties are also granted an important function in democracy. In local elections and elections to the European Parliament, threshold clauses have now been viewed by the competent courts as inadmissible and declared unconstitutional. In the European elections in May 2014 , which took place for the first time without a threshold clause, seven small German parties with a share of votes between 0.6 and 1.5 percent, each with one member, made it into the European Parliament.

Further competition hurdles for parties

In addition to the five percent hurdle, the provisions of electoral and political party law provide for further restrictions that prevent non-established parties from really finding a level playing field.

Another hurdle is the quorum that must be achieved in order to benefit from the reimbursement of election campaign costs : parties that achieve 0.5 percent of the vote (Bundestag or European elections) or one percent (state elections) receive in the legislative period following the respective election, state subsidies, which are derived from the number of votes received and the company's own donations and contributions. Small and new parties that fail to meet these hurdles remain dependent on their own resources.

The candidacy of a small party can fail not only for financial, but also for formal reasons. The nominations of non-established associations that are usually not yet represented in the body to be elected must be accompanied by a certain number of supporting signatures, the number of which varies depending on the type of election and the size of the electoral area.

Even if the supporters' signatures are available, the candidacy can still fail because the responsible election officer or election committee does not recognize the party status of the organization applying. According to Section 2, Paragraph 1 of the Political Parties Act, an association is only to be regarded as a party "if it has a sufficient guarantee according to the overall picture of the actual circumstances, in particular according to the scope and strength of its organization, according to the number of its members and according to its appearance in public for the seriousness ”of their claim. However, these criteria leave room for interpretation and are not the same or verifiable for every applicant through precise specifications.

For this reason, more recent studies, with different emphasis, advocate checking the validity and effectiveness of the relevant regulations and partially liberalizing them or making them more transparent and binding. The fact that the Federal Constitutional Court (until 2012) could only deal with decisions of the Federal Electoral Committee with regard to admission to elections as part of an election review was described by commentators as a “legal protection gap” or “denial of legal recourse”. In April 2012, the German Bundestag and Bundesrat decided by a two-thirds majority to introduce legal protection for parties before the Bundestag election. If the Federal Electoral Committee rejects the recognition of an association as a party, a complaint can be lodged with the Federal Constitutional Court.

Organizations that consider themselves qua name or statutes as parties, but whose party status is not recognized, may not have their own regional lists submitted to the Bundestag (§ 18 para. 1 BWahlG ). For the European elections they can run as “other political association” (Section 8 (1) EuWG ) with their own list. In many federal states they can also take part in local and in some cases also in state elections.

German small parties

In today's Federal Republic of Germany there were and are several hundred small parties, between which there are considerable differences in terms of degree of organization, lifespan and political orientation.

Most of the attention in the media and in the political discourse found and continues to be small parties that are active either on the left or right fringes of society and that are in some cases observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution . Some extremist or exotic small parties are also attracting public attention.

Regardless of the mentioned associations present in the media, the majority of the small parties that have appeared in recent decades are groups that accept the democratic rules of the game of this state and initially only differ from the established parties because of their organizational weakness and a lower response from the Distinguish voters. While a considerable part of these forces would like to address the broadest possible spectrum of interested parties, there are other parties who limit themselves to the representation of particular interests . In relation to the overall system, these are more or less accepting the role of a small party, but by concentrating on certain sub-areas, they can sometimes achieve a certain relevance there.

The particular orientation can refer to different areas:

  • Parties that only represent the interests of a particular social group may be referred to as "interest parties", unless one assumes that it is part of the essence of any party to represent certain interests more or less explicitly. These social groups can be specific age groups ( e.g. Gray Panthers , the youth parties like future! Or PETO , but also the party Die Grauen - Graue Panther , which was dissolved in 2008 ) or genders and families (including the German family party , feminist The women and the former women's party ), but also groups with a certain social status such as the unemployed ( PASS ), pensioners or medium-sized companies (former medium-sized party and others). In the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany, parties played a certain role which, like the BHE , later the All-German Party , primarily represented the interests of the displaced, but these lost their importance in the 1960s. Many of the associations listed below also belong to this type of small party. The more narrowly defined the group represented by the party or the interest it articulates, the closer a party approaches the third category:
  • Parties that only focus on one topic or one demand and usually also take this into account when naming them (such as the motorist party or, to a certain extent, the Human Economy Party and some predecessor organizations) are often referred to as “ single-issue ” in research -Parties ". If they take up the right topic at the right time, they can achieve short-term electoral successes, but are then often faced with the alternative of either dealing with other policy areas or disappearing again into insignificance. The Pirate Party Germany and the party Mensch Umwelt Tierschutz are therefore - at least in the meantime - no longer regarded as a one-topic party.
  • Parties that devote themselves to very specific and not in the narrower sense political issues can hardly be distinguished from the so-called fun or anti-parties, whose “seriousness” there are at least legitimate doubts. They can often not be classified in a certain ideological direction (like Die PARTTEI and the German Beer Drinkers Union ).
  • Spiritually oriented parties can also be found among the small parties, such as Die Violetten .

Another possibility of typifying small parties is their formation or origin. Some of them were founded as a split (for programmatic or personal motives) from an already existing, often already established party. Several such dissociations can be identified in the history of the FDP : Here are the Free People's Party , founded in 1956 and merged with the DP in 1957 , the National-Liberal Action and the German Union that emerged from it , which were brought into being by opponents of the social-liberal coalition , as well as the Liberal Democrats , who split off in 1982 after the FDP's coalition change . Except for the FVP Berlin (there FDVP) none of these parties received mandates in a supraregional election. The Democratic Socialists Party , which emerged in opposition to the NATO double decision supported by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt , represented a split from the SPD that also remained meaningless . More recently, the Liberal Conservative Reformers (LKR) and The Blue Party were founded as splits of the also relatively young Alternative for Germany (AfD). Another group arose in situations where social forces or social movements have decided to adopt the status of a party in order to be able to have an impact in the parliamentary area as well, if possible. The most prominent representatives of this type are the Greens . In addition, there are always party foundations "at the green table", that is, by small groups without reference to socially relevant forces; However, these were mostly just as marginal as they were short-lived.

Although the small parties have little influence on legislation and government due to their lack of presence in parliaments, party research assigns them various specific functions in the political process, including:

  • A signal or indicator function for the established parties by drawing attention to thematic deficits and interests that have not been taken into account,
  • an integration function through the inclusion of radical positions in the political decision-making process,
  • an enriching function for political discourse, which can range from “stimulating competition” and “keeping intra-party communication open” in the established parties to “preserving political traditions”.

Right and right-wing extremist small parties

Small parties on the right edge of the political spectrum are, for example, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), the parties Dierechte and Der III. Way . A party that has since merged with the NPD was the German People's Union . Further examples of right-wing or right-wing extremist parties are the citizens 'movement pro NRW , which has now been converted into an association, and the citizens' movement pro Germany, which was dissolved on November 11, 2017 . As a right-wing populist parties, among others, are the Republicans (REP) or the freedom to look at. The German Party is also to be classified as national conservative, and the German Conservative Party as at least conservative .

The mentioned small parties from the right-wing spectrum have not been able to gain a foothold in any state parliament in the long term and so far have never moved into the Bundestag, some at times exceeded the five percent threshold in state elections. At the end of the 1960s, for example, the NPD made it into some state parliaments , but could not hold out there for long. In 2004 she was able to move into a German state parliament for the first time after 36 years with 9.2 percent in Saxony and did so again in 2009 , so that she remained there until 2014 , when she only just missed the move with 4.9%. From 2006 to 2016 she was also represented in the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with 6 mandates. After the elimination of the threshold clause in 2014, the NPD moved into the European Parliament and appointed a member there until 2019.

The German People's Union (DVU) achieved its best result in the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt in 1998 with 12.9 percent and was represented in the state parliament of Brandenburg from 1999 to 2009 . In western Germany she made it into the Bremen citizenship several times and in 1992 into the state parliament of Schleswig-Holstein , where her faction soon fell apart.

The republicans, some of which were founded by former members of the CSU , were able to move into the Berlin House of Representatives and twice into the Baden-Württemberg state parliament and were represented in the European Parliament for five years , but repeatedly failed to meet the five percent threshold in federal elections.

The success of the Rule of Law Offensive party in Hamburg in the 2001 state elections , which after a sensational 19.4 percent of the vote even led this party to participate in the government in the Senate of Beust I (Hamburg), was short-lived. After a falling out between Mayor Ole von Beust and the then Second Mayor Ronald Schill , the party fell apart. In the subsequent early elections, neither the Rule of Law Offensive party nor the Pro DM / Schill list could jump the five percent threshold. In 2007, these two parties dissolved again.

Left small parties

After the KPD ban in 1956, the German Peace Union (DFU) , founded in 1960, was the first noteworthy attempt to gather political forces on the left of social democracy. Communist, socialist and neutralist circles joined forces with Christian-oriented pacifists to primarily support a To implement a policy of détente, which preferred an understanding with the neighboring states to the east to an increasing western integration of the Federal Republic of Germany. The DFU received 1.9 percent of the vote in the federal elections in 1961 and 1.3 percent in 1965. Some state election results were better, but in no case were they enough for a parliamentary entry. After the founding of the DKP in 1968, the DFU largely renounced its own candidacies and gave up its party status in 1984. In the following years it took part in the peace list and after 1989 hardly appeared in public.

In West Berlin , the SED initially continued to exist and took part in the elections to the Berlin House of Representatives, renamed itself the Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin in 1969 , but only achieved shares of less than 5 percent in these elections ( 1954 : 2.7%; 1989 : 0.6%).

At the end of the 1960s, with the waning of the student movement ( APO ), several small parties that competed with one another and oriented themselves towards different directions of communism emerged , the so-called K groups .

Over a longer period of time , the German Communist Party , which was founded in 1968 and was oriented towards the SED of the GDR , proved to be the most stable and regarded itself as the successor to the anti-constitutional Communist Party of Germany , which was banned in 1956 . However, it was unable to gain a foothold in parliament at the federal or state level. It was only represented in a few local parliaments (for example in Tübingen , Marburg , some cities in the Ruhr area and Mörfelden-Walldorf / Hessen, where it achieved 13.8 percent in 2016) and is still partially represented to this day. After the end of the GDR and with it the SED, many members left the DKP.

Other small communist parties in the Federal Republic of Germany formed various alliances with one another between the 1970s and 1990s, then often split up because of ideological trench warfare or re-established under different names until many of them split up in the 1980s and 1990s Years finally broke up. These parties included the Communist League of West Germany , from which the Bund West German Communists split off, and the Maoist Communist Party of Germany / Marxist-Leninists (KPD / ML). GIM, a Trotskyist grouping (see next section), and KPD / ML merged in 1986 to form the United Socialist Party , which existed until the late 1990s.

The Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) founded in 1982 is one of the longest-lived small communist parties and regularly runs for elections at all parliamentary levels. In the Trotskyist segment, there are small groups that have been running for elections under different names since the 1990s: Group International Marxists (GIM), Socialist Equality Party (formerly the Party for Social Equality ), Revolutionary Socialist Federation / Fourth International , whose election results all remained in the per mille range.

Christian small parties

The German Center Party was to 1933, representing the Catholic Germany one of the major parties of the Empire and the Weimar Republic. With the CDU as a non-denominational gathering party, the center lost its electoral and membership base and has been a small party since the mid-1950s. In 1987, the Christian fundamentalist wing split off from the center under the name Christian Center. The Christian People's Parties also belong to this category, but are at the same time regional parties due to their regional restrictions.

In 1989 the Party of Biblical Christians (PBC) was added as a small Christian conservative party with evangelical influences. In 2008 another small Christian German party was founded, the AUF - Party for Work, Environment and Family . 2015 merged PBC and ON to party alliance C .

Ecological parties

At the beginning of the 1980s, supporters of the new social movements such as the peace movement or the anti-nuclear power movement as well as the New Left , but also some right-wing populist and sometimes right-wing extremists , joined the newly founded party Die Grünen (today Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen ) Blood-and-soil ecologists and some former supporters of the K groups came together to form a parliamentary leg of the hitherto extra-parliamentary movement . The eco-conservatives separated from the Greens early on and founded the ecological-value-conservative ÖDP , which has not got beyond the status of a small party to this day .

Since 1983 the Greens were able to overcome their extra-parliamentary status with the election to the Bundestag and established themselves as another parliamentary party. Since then it has not been counted among the small parties.

At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, a relatively large number of so-called eco - socialists resigned in protest against the party's increasingly realpolitical course , including a co-founder of the Greens in 1991, Jutta Ditfurth , who founded the Ecological Left party in Frankfurt but had to continue as a small extra-parliamentary party. After the Greens agreed to the war in Yugoslavia , there were further attempts to found a new ecological left party from among disappointed former supporters, such as the Rainbow Group in Hamburg or the Democratic Left in Berlin.

PDS, WASG, Linkspartei.PDS, Die Linke

The SED , state party of the GDR , appointed in December 1989 SED-PDS and in February 1990 in PDS and stood under that name since 1990 in West Germany, where she assumed the status of a small party until the mid-2000s and votes shares mostly around one percent in all state elections failed at the five percent hurdle. After another name change to The Left Party and the gradual integration of members of the Labor and Social Justice - The Electoral Alternative ( WASG ) since 2005, officially in a fusion with the WASG in 2007 and opening out of another name change to The left connected got The party gained momentum, especially through the admission of the former SPD chairman Oskar Lafontaine in West Germany, and in the second half of the 2000s it also moved into the majority of West German parliaments. While it was able to repeat its entry into the city and small states of Hamburg, Bremen and Saarland, it fell back to the status of a small party with a share of the vote between two and four percent in several western German states in the early 2010s in state elections. In East Germany, on the other hand, it has remained consistently above ten percent in elections since 1990 and can occasionally overtake the SPD or CDU in state elections and win electoral districts. Since 2009, together with the SPD, it has provided the state government of Brandenburg , and since 2014, with Bodo Ramelow, the Prime Minister of Thuringia . The PDS / Left has been continuously represented in the Bundestag since 1990, although it fell below the five percent hurdle several times. In 1990 she moved in due to separate five percent hurdles for East and West Germany, and in 1994 due to four direct mandates won, each in group size . In 2002 it received 4.0% of the second vote and two direct seats and was only represented by two MPs. In the following federal elections, it jumped the five percent hurdle and in 2009 even reached 11.9%. In the 2013 federal election , Die Linke received 8.6% of the vote, making it the largest opposition faction after the formation of a government by the CDU, CSU and SPD. The 2017 federal election further strengthened the party in the old federal states.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Burkhard Gutleben: Small parties on the rise? . University of Duisburg-Essen 2008, p. 5.
  2. ↑ Tagesspiegel: What do the small parties want in the federal election? .
  3. ^ Julian Burgert: Small parties, one-topic parties, non-parties - the wide range of others .
  4. ↑ Regine Roemheld: minoritization as securing power. On the innovative ability of the West German party system . Frankfurt / New York 1983, p. 54 ff.
  5. ↑ Dirk van den Boom: Politics on this side of power? On the influence, function and position of small parties in the political system of the Federal Republic of Germany , Opladen 1999, p. 21.
  6. ↑ Julia Simoleit: What are “small parties”? , Federal Agency for Civic Education from August 28, 2009
  7. ↑ Olaf Jandura: Small parties in the media democracy, Springer-Verlag, 2008, p. 20 [1]
  8. ↑ Olaf Jandura: Small parties in the media democracy . Wiesbaden 2007, pp. 19/20. Melanie Haas: Effects of the grand coalition on the party system . In: From politics and contemporary history 35–36 / 2007, p. 24. Sabrina Schwigon: Small parties in Hessen , in: Wolfgang Schroeder (Ed.): Parties and party system in Hessen. From four to five party system? , Wiesbaden 2008, pp. 243-255. She also uses the term “U-five percent party” in the text (p. 243 and more). Uwe Kranenpohl and Oskar Niedermayer ( small parties . In: Oskar Niedermayer (Hrsg.) Handbook on Political Party Research , Wiesbaden 2013, p. 668) differentiate between "small parties" that represent members of state parliaments or the European Parliament or were represented there or in the Bundestag, and “micro-parties” that have not made it and may have municipal mandates.
  9. ↑ See for example Westdeutsche Zeitung: EU adopts threshold clause against German micro-parties .
  10. ↑ - Report on the Protection of the Constitution 2017 , p. 78.
  11. ↑ Neo-Nazi micro-parties: "The Right" and "The III. Way " , kas.de
  12. ↑ about: Seven small parties in portrait . In: Wiener Zeitung , August 17, 2006;
    Small parties in the final sprint before the election     , kaernten.orf.at, February 28, 2013
  13. ↑ http://www.bpb.de/politik/grundfragen/pektiven-in-deutschland/42190/was-sind-kleinpektiven?p=all
  14. ↑ In detail, Jan Köhler: Parties in competition. On the competitive chances of non-established political parties in the legal system of the Federal Republic of Germany . Baden-Baden 2006, pp. 78-227
  15. ^ Quote from Jan Köhler: Parties in competition. On the competitive chances of non-established political parties in the legal system of the Federal Republic of Germany . Baden-Baden 2006, p. 80
  16. ↑ Wiebke Wietschel: The concept of party. On the constitutional and political function of the concept of party with special consideration of the problem of prohibition . Baden-Baden 1996, ISBN 978-3-415-01542-5 , p. 174 ff.
  17. ↑ Cf. u. a. Ulrich Wenner's dissertations: Blocking clauses in the electoral law of the Federal Republic of Germany , Frankfurt / Main a. a. 1986, Ernst Becht: The 5% clause in the right to vote. Guarantee for a functioning parliamentary system of government? Stuttgart u. a. 1990, Wiebke Wietschel: The concept of a party. On the constitutional and political function of the concept of party with special consideration of the problem of prohibition . Baden-Baden 1996, ISBN 978-3-415-01542-5 , or Jan Köhler: Parties in competition. On the competitive chances of non-established political parties in the legal system of the Federal Republic of Germany . Baden-Baden 2006.
  18. ↑ Ursula Knapp: No chance for the little ones , Frankfurter Rundschau from August 26, 2009 ( Memento from September 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  19. ^ Jan Köhler: Parties in competition. On the competitive chances of non-established political parties in the legal system of the Federal Republic of Germany . Baden-Baden 2006, p. 119
  20. ↑ http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2012/39131399_kw21_de_rechtsschutz_wahlrecht/index.html
  21. ↑ Wiebke Wietschel: The concept of party. On the constitutional and political function of the concept of party with special consideration of the problem of prohibition . Baden-Baden 1996, ISBN 978-3-415-01542-5 , p. 96
  22. ↑ Between 1969 and 2016, a total of 524 political associations submitted documents for registration to the Federal Returning Officer, cf. The Federal Returning Officer : Selected data from political associations , as of December 31, 2016 , pp. 8–35.
  23. ↑ Cf. Alf Mintzel: The accepted party state , in: Martin Broszat (Ed.) Caesuras after 1945. Essays on the periodization of German post-war history , Munich 1990, p. 91
  24. ↑ Ibid. See Jan Köhler: Parties in competition. On the competitive chances of non-established political parties in the legal system of the Federal Republic of Germany . Baden-Baden 2006, p. 40, who sees a “system-compliant possibility of expressing political protest potential”.
  25. ^ Köhler: Parties in competition. On the competitive chances of non-established political parties in the legal system of the Federal Republic of Germany . Baden-Baden 2006, p. 38 and 40.
  26. ^ Jan Köhler: Parties in competition. On the competitive chances of non-established political parties in the legal system of the Federal Republic of Germany . Baden-Baden 2006, p. 42; more detailed Dirk van den Boom: Politics on this side of power? On the influence, function and position of small parties in the political system of the Federal Republic of Germany , Opladen 1999, p. 270f.
  27. ↑ Andreas Schulze characterizes the DFU in his history of small German parties as a “communist substitute or cover organization” ( small parties in Germany, rise and fall of non-established political associations , Wiesbaden 2004, p. 118), the presentation by Rolf Schönfeldt is more differentiated and detailed in: Richard Stöss [Ed.] Party Handbook , Special Edition Opladen 1986, Vol. 2, pp. 848–876.

literature

  • Richard Stöss (Ed.): Party Handbook. The parties of the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1980 . 2 vols. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1983–1984.
  • Manfred Rowold, Stefan Immerfall: In the shadow of power. Not established small parties . In: Alf Mintzel, Heinrich Oberreuter (Ed.) Parties in the Federal Republic of Germany. 2nd Edition. Opladen 1992, ISBN 3-8100-1052-9 , pp. 362-420.
  • Peter Autengruber : Small parties in Austria 1945 to 1966 . Studien-Verlag, Innsbruck 1997, ISBN 3-7065-1172-X .
  • Dirk van den Boom: Politics on this side of power? On the influence, function and position of small parties in the political system of the Federal Republic of Germany . Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1999, ISBN 3-8100-2510-0 .
  • Kai Oliver Thielking: Between the Bible and the Basic Law. Small Christian parties in the Federal Republic of Germany . Tectum Verlag, Marburg 1999, ISBN 3-8288-8007-X .
  • Guido Hoyer: Non-established Christian parties. German Center Party, Christian Center, Christian Party of Germany and Party of Biblical Christians in the party system of the Federal Republic of Germany . Lang, Frankfurt / Main a. a. 2001, ISBN 3-631-38203-0 .
  • Hans-Jörg Dietzsche: The smaller parties in the two-force field of the German people's party system. A functionalist typology compared to the United Kingdom . Lang, Frankfurt a. M. u. a. 2004, ISBN 3-631-52215-0 .
  • Andreas Schulze: Small parties in Germany. The rise and fall of non-established political associations. Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-8244-4558-1 .
  • Uwe Jun u. a. (Ed.): Small parties on the rise. To change the German party landscape . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 2006, ISBN 3-593-38015-3 .
  • Jan Köhler: Parties in competition. On the competitive chances of non-established political parties in the legal system of the Federal Republic of Germany (Writings on political parties, vol. 30). Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2006, ISBN 3-8329-1679-2 .
  • Olaf Jandura: Small parties in the media democracy . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2007, ISBN 978-3-531-15018-5 .
  • Uwe Kranenpohl / Oskar Niedermayer: Small parties . In: Oskar Niedermayer (Ed.) Handbook on political parties research , Wiesbaden 2013, ISBN 978-3-531-17698-7 , pp. 663–681.
  • Oskar Niedermayer: Newcomers, relegators and eternally “others”: small and small parties in the 2013 federal election , in: Journal for Parliamentary Questions, vol. 45 (2014), no. 1, pp. 73–93.

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