After reviewing a plan by the far-right nationalist NPD and DVU parties to join forces on a common ticket and thereby garner more votes in the upcoming parliamentary election, a Bundestag committee decided that "multiple-party polling lists are not allowed under the German Voting Law."

In October, chairmen for the National Democratic Party (NPD) and German People's Union (DVU) put aside decades of rivalry and approved the plan for a joint voting list in 2006.

Udo Voigt (NPD) and Gerhard Frey (DVU) apparently hoped that by joining forces rather than standing against one another, they could garner the 5 percent of votes needed to win a seat in the lower house of parliament. They planned to sign the pact at an NPD party congress this week.

The nine-page official ruling is not legally binding, but it is a "helpful component in the political argument," according to Social Democrat parliamentarian Sebastian Edathy, who called for the official examination of the situation.

"I assume that the German election supervisor will not allow an alliance of the sort that the DVU and NPD are planning," Edathy said.

Indeed, the ruling appears to clarify that the NPD and DVU, both of which have close ties to neo-Nazis, will not be allowed to stand together on the Bundestag ballot in 2006.

"It is comforting to think that the plans these two right radical men had won't be put into action," said Edathy, who is the spokesman for the SPD parliamentary party's committee on right extremism and violence.

After reunification, there was a discussion of creating multiple-party voting lists, but the German Constitutional Court decided in 1990 that these would be anticonstitutional.

In September, the NPD and DVU shocked the mainstream political parties by winning 9.2 and 6.1 percent of the votes in regional elections in the economically-depressed eastern states of Saxony and Brandenburg.