Left-Extremist Endeavours

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Apart from electoral campaigns, public appearance of this Party
was limited. About 750 persons (1998: 1,100) took part in the
annual Ash Wednesday meeting of the REP in Geisenhausen,
Landshut district (Bavaria), on 17 February. A public rally in Berlin
on 12 June, on the occasion of the former 17 June memorial
day #) , also was attended by some 750 persons, among them
many skinheads.
The Party’s situation was characterized by in-fighting which resulted
from the continuing defeat of the REP in this year’s elections
and which focused on SCHLIERER’s course of demarcation
vis-à-vis other right-extremist organizations. Even within the party
leadership, SCHLIERER’s line continued to be controversial. Thus, a
joint list of candidates for the European elections, as proposed by
the "German People’s Union" (DVU), was approved by the REP
presidency but was rejected by the majority of the REP National
Executive Committee 14) . In any case, the agreement reached by
SCHLIERER already in November 1998 with DVU National
Chairman Dr. FREY to the effect that unnecessary REP/DVU
competition should be avoided during elections was actually put
into practice. Thus, the REP ran in the Landtag elections in
Hesse and Berlin while the DVU stood for elections in Bremen
and Brandenburg. These electoral arrangements show that the
REP and the DVU aim to appeal to the same category of voters
with more or less similar right-extremist political concepts.
In protest to the preparatory talks between REP and DVU functionaries
in Schleswig-Holstein about a joint list of candidates for
the Landtag elections on 27 February 2000, Burghard SCHMANCK
who only in October had been elected chairman of the North
Rhine/Westphalia Land Association of the REP and was a
member of the REP National Executive Committee and the
RepBB Chairman, in late December resigned all his offices and
gave up his party membership.
SCHLIERER’s tactics - formal adherence to the ’demarcation’ decision,
and various election agreements with the DVU - shows, for
one thing, that he had to make concessions to his critics within
the party so as to retain them as members and, on the other
hand, that he obviously regards co-operation with the DVU as
less harmful with regard to the REP’s stigmatization as a rightextremist
party than, for instance, with the "National Democratic
Party of Germany" (NPD).
The intra-party opposition nevertheless called for a change of
course. Thus, the Hesse Land Executive Committee of the REP
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