Archive/File: fascism/germany reuter.040395g
Last-Modified: 1995/04/17 

Bavaria ranks far-right party as extremist
    MUNICH, Germany, April 3 (Reuter) - Bavaria has classified
 the far-right Republicans party as extremist and can now bar its
 members from the civil service, the German state's interior
 minister said on Monday.
    Guenther Beckstein told journalists an investigation into
 the party, which has slumped badly in recent years after
 successes in local polls in the early 1990s, showed it was
 aggressively nationalist, xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic.
    About 80 civil servants had been questioned about their
 membership in the party but most said they did not share its
 extremist positions, he said, presenting a report on internal
 security in the southern state.
    Once seen as a significant threat from the far-right, the
 Republicans lost public support after Germany tightened laws on
 granting political asylum in 1993.
    Its former leader, one-time SS officer and Bavarian
 television journalist Franz Schoenhuber, was ousted by rivals in
 an internal coup last year.
    Beckstein said far-right parties in general were losing
 members and that the number of politically motivated acts of
 violence in Bavaria had dropped from 172 in 1993 to 92 last
 year.
    The rich southern state has traditionally been home to
 right-wing groups, and the Republicans have usually scored
 higher in local polls there than in other states.
    Bavarian authories were now more concerned about Association
 of the New World in Europe, a group that wants to found a
 fundamentalist Islamic state in Germany.
    Its membership rose from 3,400 in 1993 to 5,450 last year,
 he said.

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