Contrary to their own information, the “old parties” are a good role model for the AfD. This is the only way to explain the fervor with which the right-wing party is pursuing its equality goals. Especially when it comes to the most important thing, money. Now she has failed again before the Federal Constitutional Court to push through a project: the procurement of state subsidies for her foundation, for which she hijacked the name of the humanist enlightener Desiderius Erasmus.
The rejection of the most recent urgent application (Ref.: 2 BvE 3/19) means little. The reason given by the court for this is rather poor. The date announced at the same time for the hearing of the AfD organ lawsuit in October says more: Even the published structure shows that their arguments will not be wiped off the table. This in turn is not due to the strength of the AfD, but to the weakness of the “old parties”.
The so-called party-affiliated foundations are the elephant in the party finance discussion. They are named after political leaders, only the Greens fall back on a writer (Heinrich Böll) and the AfD on the Dutch scholar. The legal form of a foundation is only offered by the FDP, the others are associations. What they have in common is that all of them – except for the AfD – have been receiving increasing sums of tax money for years, the so-called global grants. It is currently said to be more than 600 million euros a year, while the upper limit for state party funding is around 200 million euros.
The foundations are the superstructure and substructure of the parties. They train and educate, they encourage and teach. you archive. All for and with the party they are close to and recognizes as close. Approved by a judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court in 1986, which allows all this as long as the association and the party are clearly separated from each other in legal and organizational terms.
But while the partial state financing of the parties is regulated on a small scale, for the foundations there is only the decision of the budget legislator and the guiding principle from Karlsruhe, according to which “all permanent, important political trends in the Federal Republic of Germany” are to be appropriately involved. In state practice, this boils down to the foundations reporting their financial needs, which may or may not be met. It was never particularly transparent, and when you consider that the representatives of the foundation have some of the most lobbyist ID cards for the Bundestag, “party-affiliated” is to be taken literally.
With the non-disappearance of the AfD, this tradition has also become precarious because there are no material criteria for excluding a party from state funds. It is ruled by the principle of majority. So that this doesn’t look too thin, the draft budget emphasizes that subsidies may not be granted “if there are reasonable doubts as to whether organs or employees are loyal to the constitution”. Does the AfD Foundation have one? The draft says nothing about this. Instead, those who have always received money are expressly assumed to use it constitutionally.
A nice trick to evade the question of whether Erasmus von Rotterdam is serving as the namesake of a right-wing extremist front organization. But that has to be decided, otherwise the plan to cut off the flow of money for the AfD will not work. Because if this cannot be proven, the principle of equality beats the principle of majority. Therefore, clear principles are needed, i.e. a law. Hardly anyone in politics wants to force this discussion. It would raise the question of whether the foundations are worth what they cost.