Court rules German public TV must air neo-Nazi campaign ad

BERLIN, Germany — A German neo-Nazi party won a bid Wednesday before the country’s highest court to force a public broadcaster to show one of its TV campaign advertisements for European Parliament elections on the network.

The Federal Constitutional Court ruled that broadcaster ARD must air the advertisement by the right-wing extremist National Party of Germany (NPD) on free speech grounds.

After earlier court defeats for the NPD, it found there no firm evidence that the group’s reworked TV spot was illegally inciting racial hatred, as claimed by ARD’s Berlin regional broadcaster RBB.

In its latest commercial, the NPD asserts that Germans had become “victims almost daily” because of the “uncontrolled mass immigration.”

A demonstration by the German National Democratic Party. (screen capture: YouTube/RuptlyTV)

The NPD has seats in many town halls in Germany’s ex-communist east but negligible poll ratings at the national level.

Germany’s upper house of parliament lost a bid in 2017 to ban the NPD, as the Constitutional Court ruled the xenophobic fringe group was too insignificant to pose a real threat to the democratic order.

The far-right AfD party, which has also railed against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow in more than one million asylum-seekers during a 2015-16 influx, is polling around 10 percent ahead of the European Parliament elections.