The second in command of Germany’s largest ultra-right party, the NPD, has resigned after being critized for participating in a social event featuring a penis-shaped cake and a former porn actress. Peter Marx said Sunday he was resigning from his post as the party’s Secretary-General, officially over the "public debate about his person".
News server Spiegel Online has reported that his resignation is mainly to do with his fellow party members’ dissatisfaction with his "obnoxious" behavior. The ultra-right National Democratic Party of Germany is the strongest representative of extremist ultra-right politics in the country.
The party has promoters primarily in former communist East Germany, where it draws on the difficult economic and social situation of inhabitants there. In two eastern states, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony, the party is even seated in state assemblies.
Spiegel reports that a wave of dissatisfaction inside the NPD was sparked by photographs of the birthday party in Saarbrücken which Marx attended. The man whose birthday was being celebrated was given a cake in the shape of a penis.
Last year the NPD lost its chair, Holger Apfel, to intra-party disputes. German secret services label the NPD an "anti-Semitic, racist and revisionist" party striving to overthrow Germany’s democratic order.
According to the NPD’s program, it wants to create a strictly ethnically-defined national society. The party has repeatedly drawn attention for its anti-immigrant campaigns, as it considers the inclusion of immigrants into German society to be "national suicide."
In the past the German Government has tried and failed to ban the NPD. Debates on a new proposal to ban the party were unleashed after the discovery of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground terrorist cell, who investigators believe murdered 10 people throughout the country, most of them immigrants.
