Are we seeing a behavior of fringe parties without a chance of meaningful representation or something specific to the right wing? If the former, the argument has just lost validity.

The tendency of far right parties to splinter, or to have their leaders fall out may be a bit closer to a law of nature. Schill is just the latest example. They fall afoul of each other, of one law or another, or just wind up looking like buffoons.

But given some action from the center-right, and given some incompetence from the extreme, this latest bout is likely to fade. As Georg implies, this won’t happen on its own, but people’s interests will compel them to take the actions that will sap the support of the extreme.

More here:

http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000807.php#6270

Maybe admission to the EU would be good for Turkey, but its not good for mainstream party politics in Europe. Make your choice.

So I would order them.

I think we need to draw a distinction between Sch?nhuber/Frey/Apfel and their like on the one hand and Schill, Fortuyn and (possibly even) Le Pen on the other. The latter are godawful, yes, but they are not the same thing as the former.

There is the old line, basically “if you are on the right of Alfred Dregger you are a fascist”
If redrawing the line is to make sense, somebody has to switch sides after redrawing it. Mr. Schill is a discredited egomaniac. Unfortunately the voters select their organ of protest and nobody else. We can hope that somebody will arise and ignore the NPD for now. That might work, but time works for the neofascists. The strategy of ignoring depends on them disgracing themselves every time. Such strategies eventually are bound to fail. It seems to me that reforming what is there makes more sense then simply hope for the future.

And, you have to consider the damage done in the mean time. In Saxony the formation of the government will now proceed exactly contrary to the vote. In Brandenburg it is already impossible to vote out the prime minister. Whoever gains the nomination of the SPD is virtually certain to become prime minister.

I would agree that one can place Reps, DVU and NPD along a spectrum of nastiness, in that order. But I am not persuaded that the Reps are ‘merely’ right-wing xenophobes. With the very utmost in charity, they would have to be classed as ’sneaking regarders’. And the DVU are not simply germanophone Le Pens. Their patron, Gerhard Frey, has a long career as a whitewasher of nazi crimes and stirrer-up of nostalgia for ‘damals’.

What can be said of the DVU and, especially, the Reps is that they have been much more careful than the NPD to avoid waving the old Reich flag, using bands of skinheads as ’security forces’ at rallies and other outward, ‘cosmetic’ German fascist behaviours. (I don’t know enough about Austrian politics to speak with anything like authority, but bad as Haider is, he always struck me as less bad then the Reps, let alone DVU or NPD. I always thought his emphasis was much more on crass populism than on a return to fascism.)

I think we need to draw a distinction between Sch?nhuber/Frey/Apfel and their like on the one hand and Schill, Fortuyn and (possibly even) Le Pen on the other. The latter are godawful, yes, but they are not the same thing as the former. (Well; maybe Le Pen is. Perhaps I am just especially sensitive to this sort of thing in a specifically German context; wehret den Anfang and all that.) I was pleased as punch to watch Schill self-destruct, but I could wish that somebody more responsible and constructive could have given voice to the concerns his supporters had. And, pro-Europe though I be, I certainly agree it’s a shame that there is no party of committed democrats in Germany that can take the antifederalist side in the public debate. It’s a debate that I hope they would (on many if not all points) lose; but the political health of the country would be improved if the debate could be had.

David is absolutely right, BTW; I should have been clearer for the sake of readers in the USA that ‘Republican’ in Germany has a meaning of its own.

However, there are not enough to dominate a party that has a membership typical of a 10% party. They’d be a minority.
Looking at the Italian example we see a neofascist, even in name, party reforming itself. It is possible.

The NPD got about 10% of the vote. That’s the problem, not a few thousand people in all Germany that form the present party. There will always be a lunatic fringe. They are well under control. The likelihood of a coup is essentially
nil and will stay there. Engaging a party will either reform it or expose its solutions as folly. Ignoring it will allow it to grow on discontent.

“It seems to me that the best option left is to engage the NPD nevertheless and wean it from neofascism.”

And how successful do you think it would have been to attempt to “wean” Adolf Hitler from his beliefs? Not everyone spouts policies simply for the sake of power-grabbing, you know; some really do believe in what they’re trying to accomplish with every ounce of their person, and are unwilling to sacrifice an iota of their “principles” for the sake of politics. You seem to imagine that these NPD types aren’t willing to play a long-term game to attain their objectives, even though that is just what Hitler did, toning down the antisemitism as the 1930s approached, and waiting until 8 years into his rule to implement the “Final Solution” he’d been promising for more than 20 years.

No, there cannot be any talk of “weaning” monsters from their beliefs. Semi-closeted Nazis may not be in the Osama bin Laden league, but that’s just a question of degree, and it makes as much sense to work with them as it would to invite him into a parliamentary cabinet.

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Germany, like many countries in Europe, as Ronald Schill has demonstrated, has a sizeable voting potential for a nationalist, populist, law and order, anti-immigrant, anti-EU, stronge state, protectionist party. But you cannot infer from that that the people willing to vote that way would vote for an overthrow of the constitutional order, if they were given the choice.
But there is no such choice. In the distant past the CDU filled much of that niche. It no longer does, hasn’t done so for a long time and offers little hope of doing so in the future. Elections are won in the center and the CDU has learned the lesson well.
Eg. there was no political home for the eurosceptics throughout the 1980es and 1990es. That there’s no such vote in Germany is simply unbelievable.

Yes, there is a limit of what is acceptable and what is not. Full neofascism is not acceptable. But drawing the line sharp at the right of the CDU is too far left.
It would have been better had Ronald Schill’s party or the Republikaner party survived, but complaining after the fact won’t help.
Now the true neofascists of the NPD have captured that vote and it seems to me that they are likely to keep it. It seems to me that the best option left is to engage the NPD nevertheless and wean it from neofascism. That’s not pretty, but ignoring the problem won’t help.