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The National Democratic Party ( German: Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD) is a far-right political party in Germany that was founded in the early 1960s.
In 2003, the federal government, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat jointly attempted to ban it in a trial before the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the highest court in Germany and the only institution that has the power to ban parties, if it considers them anti-constitutional. However, the case was thrown out when it was discovered that a large percentage of the leadership were in fact undercover agents sent by the German secret services, to the point that the court found it impossible to decide which moves by the party were based on genuine party decisions and which were controlled by the secret services in an attempt to further the ban. Horst Mahler, former member of the left-wing terrorist organisation Red Army Faction, defended the NPD before the court.
The party has never managed to win the minimum 5% of votes in federal elections that allows a party to send delegates to the Bundestag, but it was represented in several state parliaments in the 1960s and won 9.2% (or 12 representatives to the state parliament, the Landtag) in the 2004 state elections in Saxony, after coming into a non-competition agreement with its major rival on the far right, the DVU, which states that only one of the two parties will compete in any given election. The third German far-right party, Die Republikaner, which is not quite as extremist as the other two, has so far refused to join this agreement.
See also: Neo-Nazism