National Democratic Party (Austria, 1967–1988)
The National Democratic Party (NDP) was a small party in Austria that existed from 1967 until the party statute was withdrawn and the association was officially dissolved due to National Socialist re -activity in 1988 .
Party history
The party emerged as a split from the FPÖ. The reason for the split was the dissatisfaction of right-wing extremists with an attempt by party chairman Friedrich Peter to strike a balance between liberal and conservative forces in the party. In 1966 the NDP was registered as an association in Innsbruck . The constituent assembly as a nationwide organization took place in February 1967 in Linz . The party was founded by Norbert Burger , who remained the decisive person during its existence, Herbert Fritz and a number of " South Tyrolean activists" (see History of South Tyrol ), modeled on and as a sister party of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). The first chairman was Rudolf Watschinger. The majority of the members came from the FPÖ .
Burger, former federal chairman of the Ring of Freedom Students (RFS, the FP student organization), member of the Freedom Academic Association and old man of the Vienna fraternity Olympia , was previously a member of the South Tyrol Liberation Committee (BAS) founded in 1957 , an organization classified as terrorist in Italy. and was arrested in Klagenfurt in 1961 because of his connections to violent attacks in South Tyrol. This was followed by a stay in Germany, from where he was expelled in 1963 and returned to Austria. In the same year he resigned from the FPÖ, whose South Tyrol speaker he was. In 1971 he was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia for terrorist activities in Italy.
In the National Council election in 1970 , the only one in which it participated in the course of its existence, the NDP received 2,631 votes (0.06%).
After the Political Parties Act came into force on July 1, 1975, the NDP sought to achieve the legal form of a political party within the meaning of this Act by depositing a statute with the Federal Ministry of the Interior on August 8, 1975 (Section 1, Paragraph 4 of the Political Parties Act).
The party newspaper Klartext appeared for the first time on January 15, 1976 . National Politics Newspaper . Other periodically appearing publications of the NDP were National Democratic Information (since 1969) and Weather Lights: Signs of European Rebirth (1987 to 1988).
Programmatically the NDP sought including the connection of Austria to Germany. In addition to requirements such as the reintroduction of the death penalty especially the advocacy against the threat was " foreign infiltration " or "biological infiltration" of Austria by foreign workers is a central focus of her work. The Federal Assembly of the NDP decided on November 8, 1974 in Krems to organize an "anti-guest worker referendum". For this purpose, a group called “People's Initiative for Limiting Foreigners” was founded to take over the preparations. The referendum did not materialize. Supporters of the party handed out leaflets with the demand: " Foreign workers get out !" . When Burger stood as an NDP candidate in the election for Austrian Federal President in 1980 and received 140,741 votes (3.1%), he had also included the topic in his election campaign, his election slogan was: "Against foreign infiltration - for a German Austria" .
As a result, the NDP made another attempt in 1982, via a “citizens' initiative to carry out a referendum against foreign infiltration from Austria”, which also included the Action New Rights (ANR) and Gerd Honsik's Ausländer-Halt movement , a “referendum for protection Austria against foreign infiltration and infiltration ”, which failed again.
In 1986 the NDP supported Otto Scrinzi's candidacy for the election of Federal President.
The NDP was stripped of its legal personality as a political party by the Constitutional Court in 1988 on the basis of the Prohibition Act and with reference to Article 9 of the Austrian State Treaty ( dissolution of Nazi organizations ) . The finding of June 25, 1988, Gz B 999/87 had the complaint of the first federal spokesman of the NDP, Dr. Burger, against a criminal ruling by the Lower Austrian state government of August 13, 1987 for violating the Lower Austrian Announcement Tax Act 1979 (first authority of the city of Krems). Since the NDP spread National Socialist ideas, it is not entitled to the tax exemption for political parties provided for in the aforementioned law. In the preamble to the constitution Court noted that the "Policy and demand program" the NDP on a "biologically-racial people term" is based and in connection with its "large German [n] propaganda [...] in the core points with locations of Nazi" agree (the German nation was seen as "part of the white race," it was a will to "conservation" demanded and the habitat of the German people as of "Afro-Asiatic races and peoples [n] " threatened considered). To "under Article 4 of the Treaty of Vienna in 1955 banned large German [n] propaganda," reckoned the Court the demand of the party after the "return of the 1,945 stolen and occupied German territories east of the Oder and Neisse and in the Sudetenland " . As further evidence of the close of the party to the Nazi party , the Court saw her advocacy against " degenerate art ", their advocacy of eugenics and the use of "otherwise uncommon [r] terms" which had used the Nazis (such as "comrades" ), on. In contrast to the party's argument that its demand for the annexation of Austria to Germany was covered by the peoples' right to self-determination , the court stated that the Prohibition Act “forbids any large-scale German propaganda (even if it is not accompanied by other National Socialist ideas), so that any propaganda aimed at restoring a large German state is forbidden, even if it does not reach the level of National Socialist re-activity ” , which is why the right to self-determination cannot be used with this demand. As an association, the NDP was officially dissolved by decision of November 21, 1988. After the dissolution of the NDP, Burger founded the Bürger-Rechts-Movement (BRB), from which the magazine Klartext was published until shortly before his death . Journal for the protection of life, freedom and human rights was published.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Brigitte Bailer-Gallanda: Party instead metapolitics. New rights and FPÖ in Austria. In: Wolfgang Gessenharter , Thomas Pfeiffer (ed.): The new right: a threat to democracy? VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften: 2004, p. 168
- ↑ a b c d Decision text VfGH decision June 25, 1988 B 999/87
literature
- DÖW (ed.): Handbook of Austrian Right-Wing Extremism , Deuticke, Vienna 1993 (2nd edition), ISBN 3-216-30053-6