Brussels (Brussels Morning) Germany’s Federal Election Committee, having begun vetting minor parties seeking to register for the September federal election, has disqualified two fringe parties on administrative grounds.
The Committee, which consists of a chairman, eight representatives from the main political parties and two federal judges, received 87 applications from minor parties seeking to run on 26 September. The vetting process is repeated ahead of each major election.
Parties which hold more than five seats in the Bundestag are automatically exempt. This provision means that parties such as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which currently holds 88 seats in the Bundestag, or the left-wing The Left, which holds 69, are certain to be allowed to run again, provided they satisfy other criteria.
On Thursday, two parties were barred from participating in a vetting process scheduled to continue on Friday. The Committee excluded the German Communist Party (DKP) and the Anarchistic Pogo Party of Germany (AAPD).
The communists were rejected for failing to submit the necessary paperwork on time, prompting the party chairman Patrik Köbele to announce plans for a court appeal, as he proclaimed that the “attempt to ban” the party from the election would fail.
The party, which managed only 11,500 votes in the 2017 election, came nowhere near winning a seat, but also garnering less than half the votes of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLDP), which won 30,000 votes. However, the party has consistently run in the federal elections since its founding in 1968.
The AAPD were also rejected because of not filing its paperwork. The party submitted its application in digital form only, whereas the strict German regulations still require the documents to be printed out and mailed to the Committee. The Pogo Party last ran in 1998, when it promised free beer to all voters. This year it planned to run again on a slogan describing the necessity of human labour as excremental.
