Germany's Supreme Court on Tuesday stripped a neo-Nazi party of its right to government funding and the tax breaks normally awarded to political organizations, a decision that could provide a blueprint for the government's efforts to stem a resurgence of the far right prevent.

Although the party Die Heimat, meaning “The Homeland,” was already too small to receive public funding, the case was closely watched because it could have implications for countering the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, a much more popular far-right party.

“Today's decision by the Federal Constitutional Court sends a clear signal: our democratic state does not finance enemies of the constitution,” German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in a statement.

The government had tried to ban Die Heimat, formerly known as the National Democratic Party (NPD), but failed as the court ruled that the party did not have enough support to have any significant influence. procedure that culminated in the financing ban on Tuesday.

In recent months, scholars and politicians have argued that the AfD should be banned because the party poses a threat to democracy. However, others have warned that the approach, which would take years to overcome all political and legal obstacles, could backfire by making the party even more popular.

Some experts have said that a ban on government funding, as the court did with Die Heimat, could be an effective middle ground: It would hinder the AfD, without banning it outright.

Which party is central to the court's decision?

The NPD was a notorious far-right party with established ties to the neo-Nazi scene. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the original Nazi generation was still alive and voting, it managed to send delegates to seven different state houses.

The party narrowly missed sending representatives to federal parliament in 1969, when it received 4.3 percent of the vote.

In recent decades, the party's popularity and importance have declined, and last year the party was renamed. The government estimates that it will have only 3,000 members in 2022. Less than 65,000 people voted in favor of the last national elections in 2021.

That figure represents far less than 0.5 percent of all votes cast, which is the threshold to receive state funding. But the successful attempt to deny state money sends a message nonetheless, and the ruling, which is valid for six years, also means that potential donors can no longer give money to the party tax-free.

How can far-right parties exist in Germany?

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which can use intelligence tools to monitor extremism, had previously determined that the NPD was fundamentally right-wing extremist, prompting the German government to try twice in recent decades to prohibit.

Before a party can be declared an outlaw, the government must prove that the organization is actively and aggressively against the Constitution.

In Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court has the final say on whether to ban parties, and such action is very rare. In the history of modern Germany, this has happened only twice: with the Socialist Party of the Reich (renamed Nazi Party) in 1952 and with the Moscow-funded Communist Party in 1956.

In two rulings on the NPD – one from 2003 and one from 2017 – the court refused to ban the party. In the 2017 ruling, the court ruled that while the party was extremist, it was not popular enough to pose a real danger to German democracy.

Germany uses public party funding to reduce the power of private donations. Parties receive funding from the state based on their performance in the most recent elections. For major parties, this means millions of euros in campaign funds from the government.

“The forces that want to undermine and destroy our democracy should not receive a single cent of government funding for this purpose – either directly or indirectly through tax breaks,” Ms Faeser said in her statement.

Why is fear of the extreme right increasing?

The AfD is poised to make big gains this year as three eastern states go to the polls, prompting nearly a million people to take to the streets in towns and cities across Germany this weekend to show their opposition .

The trigger for the wave of protests was news of a secret meeting involving representatives of the AfD, members of the right wing of the main conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union; known neo-Nazis; and business people. The meeting was revealed by Correctiva small, crowdfunded investigative news site.

At the meeting, which took place in a small hotel not far from where the Nazis planned the final stages of the Holocaust in 1942, participants discussed the mass deportation of foreigners and even some German citizens with foreign backgrounds.

Two neo-Nazi podcasters who called for Prince Harry’s execution were sentenced to prison in London on Thursday.

The podcast hosts, Christopher Gibbons, 40, and Tyrone Patten-Walsh, 36, both from London, were convicted on all charges against them in July.

Mr Gibbons, who was convicted of encouraging acts of terrorism and the dissemination of terrorist publications, was sentenced to eight years in prison. Mr Patten-Walsh was jailed for seven years for encouraging acts of terrorism.

A police statement described the men’s views as “homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and misogynistic.”

“The material Gibbons and Patten-Walsh shared is exactly the kind of material that has the potential to lure vulnerable people – especially young people – into terrorism,” Cmdr. Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command.

Police said the men produced 21 episodes of their podcast, initially titled “Lone Wolf Radio” and later renamed “Black Wolf Radio,” which had about 125 subscribers. Mr. Gibbons also created an online library of far-right material, police said, with about 1,000 subscribers.

“The evidence shows that you wish to live in a world dominated by white people, purely for white people,” said the judge who handed down the sentences, Peter Lodder. according to the Associated Press.

During the men’s trial the court was told that they hated mixed-race relations; that they had called for Prince Harry, whose wife, Meghan Markle, is biracial, to be “judicially murdered for treason”; and that they had made snide comments about the couple’s son, Archie.

“They are committed and unapologetic white supremacists,” said prosecutor Anne Whyte said in court during their trial, according to media reports. “They thought that if they used the format of a radio program, virtually in plain sight, they could pass off their enterprise as the legitimate exercise of their freedom of expression.”

One of the anti-Kremlin groups responsible for an armed incursion into Russia this week, the Russian Volunteer Corps, is led by a far-right extremist described by German officials and humanitarian groups as: including the Anti-Defamation Leagueas a neo-Nazi.

The Volunteer Corps, made up of Russians opposed to Vladimir V. Putin’s war, has no public ties whatsoever with the Ukrainian army. But the group’s claims of fighting for Ukraine’s cause pose an uneasy situation for the Kiev government. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has falsely claimed that his country is fighting the Nazis as a pretext for invading his country, a consistent theme of Kremlin propaganda.

The corps commander – Denis Kapustin, who has long gone by the alias Denis Nikitin but usually goes by his military call sign White Rex – is a Russian citizen who moved to Germany in the early 2000s. He associated with a group of violent football fans and later became, according to officials in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, “one of the most influential activists” in a neo-Nazi splinter of the mixed martial arts scene.

He has been blocked of entering Europe’s visa-free Schengen zone with 27 countries.

The Volunteer Corps, known by its Russian initials RDK, also claimed credit for two incidents in the Russian border region of Bryansk in March and April. Ukrainian authorities have publicly denied any role in the fighting on the Russian side of the border.

The Russian Volunteer Corps was one of two groups of Russian fighters to carry out a cross-border attack on Monday in the Belgorod region of southern Russia, attacking Russian troops during two days of clashes. The purpose of the raids, the groups say, is to force Russia to redeploy soldiers from Ukraine’s occupied territories to defend its borders as Ukraine prepares for a counter-offensive.

The second group was the Free Russia Legion, which operates under the umbrella of the Ukrainian International Legion, a force that includes American and British volunteers, as well as Belarusians, Georgians and others. It is overseen by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and commanded by Ukrainian officers. Several hundred Russian fighters have been deployed to the front lines in eastern Ukraine, officials said.

At a joint press conference with the Free Russia Legion on Wednesday, Mr. Kapustin said his group was not under the control of the Ukrainian army, but that the army had supported his fighters with information, gasoline, food and medical supplies, along with the evacuation of wounded personnel. That claim could not be independently verified.

Andriy Chernyak, a representative of the Ukrainian military intelligence service, said he had no information about possible material support that the Ukrainian army may have provided to members of the RDK, but said that “Ukraine certainly supports all those who are ready to face the Putin regime.”

“People came to Ukraine and said they want to help us fight Putin’s regime, so of course we let them in, like many other people from abroad,” Chernyak said.

Ukraine has called the raids an “internal Russian crisis” as the members of the group are Russians themselves, and the episode plays on a Ukrainian military goal of forcing Russia to redeploy troops from the front lines to defend its borders.

Michael Colborne, a Bellingcat researcher who reports on the international far right, said he was hesitant to even call the Russian Volunteer Corps a military unit.

“They are largely a far-right group of neo-Nazi exiles who are making these incursions into Russian-occupied territory and seem much more concerned about creating social media content than anything else,” Mr Colborne said.

Some of the other members of the Russian Volunteer Corps photographed during the border raids have also publicly espoused neo-Nazi views. A man, Aleksandr Skachkov, was arrested in 2020 by Ukrainian security services for selling a Russian translation of the white supremacist manifesto of the gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand, who killed 51 mosque worshipers in 2019.

Another, Aleksei Levkin, who filmed a selfie video wearing the RDK badge, is a founder of a group called Wotanjugend which started in Russia but later moved to Ukraine. Mr. Levkin also hosts a National Socialist black metal festival, which started in Moscow in 2012 but was held in Kiev from 2014 to 2019.

Photos posted online earlier this week by the fighters of members of the volunteer corps posing in front of captured Russian equipment showed some of the fighters wearing Nazi-style patches and gear. One patch shows a hooded member of the Ku Klux Klan and another shows a black sun, a symbol of strong ties to Nazi Germany.

Mr Colborne said the images of Mr Kapustin and his fighters could damage Ukraine’s defenses by making allies wary that they might support far-right armed groups.

“I’m afraid something like that could backfire on Ukraine, because these are not ambiguous people,” he said. “These are not unknown people and they are not helping Ukraine in any practical way.”

Thomas Gibbons Neff contributed reporting from London and Oleg Matsnev from Berlin.