Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the protests had been "an encouragement and a mandate" to act politically. "We want to use all instruments of rule of law to protect our democracy. ”We want to break up right-wing extremist networks, cut their funding and take away their weapons," she said. The 13 point plan includes laws that include freezing bank accounts, cut funding models for the extremist organisations and target their donors. The interior minister said that this 13 point programme would certainly combat right extremism which she described as the biggest threat facing the German society.

The government also plans to ban right-wing extremist events more easily and far-right activists will be stopped from entering or leaving Germany whenever possible. German government sources say that there are around 38,000 right wing extremists in Germany and out of them, around 14,000 are potentially violent. Sources said that the official agencies are monitoring the movements and activities of these extremists and if they fail to get the funds from their donors, their anti-national activities, will come down.

The freezing of bank accounts is an important step to deal with the extremists because in recent years, they got strengthened because of the huge financial help from pro fascist business people and rich donors. In Hitler’s Germany also in 1930’s the Nazi party got big support from some industry people, especially arms and weapons manufacturers and this helped the party in expanding the organisation as also funding the Gestapo with huge resources. The Left parties as also the Greens, a member of the federal coalition have been demanding the freezing of the bank accounts of the extremist groups for long. That way, the government agreeing to the demand is a victory for the Left.

Though the official far right party AFD operates as a legal political party, many of its members have neo-fascist past and they are more active in the organization now as the AFD is fighting hard to win more seats in the coming elections for European Parliament slated in June this year. Till last month, there was a fear that the AFD will be gaining more seats compared to the coalition government partners and the Left and this will help the new European Parliament to move right after the June elections. Seasoned political observers say that there has been some change in political mood in Germany and presently AFD is a bit down compared to its surge in the last year. The AFD may not do well as it was thinking before.

At the other end, the two left parties de Linke and the new party BWS are preparing for the June elections. The BWS has started massive campaign to spread its message and its target is the working class areas where the AFD has made inroads in the base of the Left. Both de Linke and BWS are in a competition to draw the attention of the working class and that is a good sign for the German Left as a whole. The Left has won the first stage of its battle against far right with the German government action against the extremists, now the next stage of battle is to defeat the AFD in as many seats as possible in the European Parliament elections. That will be known in June only. (IPA Service)