GERMANY: On a gloomy, drizzly Monday morning, Germany's neo-Nazis took the general election to the schoolyards.
Members of the far right National Democratic Party (NPD) assembled in front of schools in Berlin and around the country yesterday morning, giving bleary-eyed teenagers CDs containing extreme right songs - a last-minute push for the support of these first-time voters.
"Young people read so little, this is a way of reaching them through music," said Stella Palau, spokesperson for the NPD in Berlin. "Of course, anything that has an air of the forbidden about it is so much more attractive to them."
The Berlin NPD concentrated its efforts on young voters in the neighbourhoods of Hellersdorf and Marzahn - areas with high rates of unemployment and voter abstention.
In a few minutes they had distributed around 150 of the CDs containing amateurish, angry songs lashing out against foreigners and calling for a reawakening of German nationalism.
"Forward now to new victories/Forward our hour is near. Every enemy will succumb/Come the NPD is calling to action."
Members of the local Green Party, working on a tip-off, showed up to frustrate the NPD's efforts by exchanging the CDs for free tickets for clubs and sports events.
The extreme-right NPD was founded in 1964 and, after years of decline, captured 9 per cent of the vote in the Saxon state election last September and entered a state parliament for the first time since 1968.
The party has 7,000 members and a large local network of groups and initiatives nationwide, but no federal presence.
Officials in the Office for Constitutional Protection, who monitor NPD officials' every move, say there is no sign the party will come even close to a Bundestag seat on Sunday.
"NPD activities . . . are relatively limited in terms of numbers," said Claus Guggenburger in the Berlin office.
"There's not that much activity, but of course you can't really look into people's heads and see where people make the x on their ballot."
After last year's media circus in Saxony, the NPD and its "Work for Germans" slogans have been mostly ignored in this election campaign.
The only real mention came when a party candidate in Dresden died and was replaced by Franz Schönhuber, an 82-year-old former SS officer.
It appears that the snap election caught the NPD off guard.
Oskar Lafontaine, the one-time Schröder ally now heading the new Left Party, has co-opted some of the NPD's protest vote with populist slogans of his own.
"It's about populism and not about left or right. Now that there is a populist left, it's put the right-wingers in their place," said Dr Ralf Altenhof, who is a political scientist and extremism expert at the University of Chemnitz.
But he warned that the lack of NPD media coverage this time around could be dangerous too.
"The less is written the greater the possibility for the NPD to portray itself as not extremist," Dr Altenhof said, "and the greater danger for young people who think the party is legitimate."
