Political foundations in Germany are tasked with educating people on political matters at home and abroad — their activities include organizing events, conducting research, and issuing scholarships. They tend to be named after famous politicians: the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)-aligned foundation is named after Konrad Adenauer, the first German federal chancellor. The foundation linked to the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) is named after Friedrich Ebert, the first president of Germany's Weimar Republic in 1919. For the socialist Left Party, it is Rosa Luxemburg, co-founder of the German Communist Party (KPD). The Greens decided on Nobel Prize for Literature winner Heinrich Böll.

Each year, these and other party-affiliated foundations receive a lot of money from the federal budget. It adds up to a contribution of well over half a billion euros. Only the Desiderius Erasmus Foundation (DES), aligned with the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) and named after the northern Renaissance-era Dutch philosopher, remains empty-handed.

But that must now change — because this week the Federal Constitutional Court has decided that a new law must be made to regulate the state financing of party-linked foundations. The court ruled that not considering the DES when allocating the so-called global grants for socio-political and democratic educational work interfered with the AfD's right to equal opportunities in political competition. "A law passed by parliament is required in order to justify this interference: such a law is lacking here," the judgment read. So far, the federal parliament, the Bundestag, has decided on funding for party-affiliated organizations as part of budget negotiations.

To date, foundations have received taxpayer money when the party they are aligned with was voted into the Bundestag for at least two consecutive elections. The AfD has met this requirement since it was re-elected to the federal parliament in 2021 with a solid 10% of the vote. The most recent organization to benefit from the requirement was the Left Party-aligned Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in the late 1990s.

Alliance warns against increasingly radical discourse

Now it is the turn of the AfD, a party that Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), suspects of being right-wing extremists.

But there has long been resistance to this move. In the "Manifesto for civil society and political education," people from a wide variety of organizations have joined forces: refugee rights group Pro Asyl, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation (which works to eliminate right-wing extremism), the Frankfurt-based Anne Frank Educational Center (Bildungsstätte Anne Frank), the Central Council of Jews in Germany, trade unions and churches.

The metal trade union's Otto Brenner Foundation carried out a study in 2021 entitled "Political education of the far right." It comes to the conclusion that the DES could become a central building block for attempts by the far-right to achieve dominance in the pre-political space in Germany."It is to be feared that with state funding in the tens of millions, DES could create permanent structures to place and anchor anti-human positions of the New Right more strongly in society."

From the CDU to the AfD

The chairwoman of the Desiderius Erasmus Foundation, Erika Steinbach, has repeatedly rejected such allegations. She is a former president of the German Federation of Expellees (BdV) — which says it represents the interests of ethnic Germans who fled or were forced from their homes in central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. During the hearing of the AfD lawsuit before the Federal Constitutional Court in October 2022, Steinbach spoke of an "unjustified stigmatization."

Steinbach left the CDU in 2017 after 43 years of membership, in protest of the refugee policies of the Angela Merkel-led government. She then joined the AfD in 2022. She has said that there was no place in her DES foundation for "radical, racist, and extremist ideas, no matter in what direction."

That is also the view of AfD co-chairman Tino Chrupalla. He sharply criticized the authors of the anti-far-right "Manifesto for civil society and political education" telling DW that they were interest groups "who carry out political work with full-time employees and million-dollar budgets which mostly come from government funding."

With its motto "Not a minute to lose in the fight against the right," the Initiative displayed its problematic understanding, according to Chrupalla: "that an entire segment of the democratic spectrum, namely the so-called right-wing part, is being delegitimized in such an aggressive manner."

The role of the New Right

Antonios Souris takes a different view. The political scientist from Berlin's Free University outlined to DW the long-observed attempts by the so-called New Right "to intellectually underpin their positions and steer the discourse in the direction they want it to go." Journalistic investigations have revealed a network of New Right think tanks and publishers: "Key organizations in this network are classified by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as suspected or confirmed right-wing extremist."

Souris also expressed doubt about what the chairwoman of the DES has said. "Erika Steinbach's credibility when it comes to clearly differentiating herself, as a member of the middle class-conservative camp, from the right-wing extremist end of the spectrum, has been drastically reduced by her statements, especially on Twitter."

To solve the problem according to their own preferences, the other parties in Germany's Bundestag parliament wrote a memorandum on financial grants to political foundations in 2022. According to this, only foundations "who, according to their charters and overall activities, always guarantee that they are committed to the free and democratic basic order in the sense of the Basic Law and advocate for its observance." Only the AfD believes that the DES can be relied on to comply with this.

Following the verdict of the Federal Constitutional Court, the Bundestag must now finally pass a law to regulate how party-affiliated foundations receive public money.

This article was originally written in German.

While you're here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.