03.10.2022
Hearing of the Federal Constitutional Court on 25 October 2022 on the promotion of Desiderius Erasmus Foundation with federal funding
Erika Steinbach explains:, Chair of the Foundation:
„Our foundation trusts in the rule of law and is confident that the blatant and unlawful unequal treatment of the Desiderius Erasmus Foundation (DES) by the German Bundestag and the Federal Government will now be brought to an end by the highest German court.
In its rulings of 1966 and 1986, the Federal Constitutional Court stated that the state must promote political party foundations whose relevance is reflected in elections on an equal basis and that the state must not influence political content. It also ruled that „all permanent political movements of significance“ must be supported. The court is convinced that state control of opinion is not compatible with a free, pluralistic democracy in which different, competing political views compete with one another. However, given the way in which the federal government and the Bundestag treat our foundation, this is unfortunately not the case.
Since 2017, the AfD, which is closely associated with our foundation and on whose election results DES funding must be based, has been firmly anchored in the political spectrum of the Federal Republic of Germany. Since then, it has not only been represented in the German Bundestag with a clear result, but has also been more widely established in the federal states than the FDP, the Left Party and the CSU. Even Bündnis90/Die Grünen were and are not represented in all state parliaments.
This is not insignificant, given that our country has a federal structure. This is also evident in the fact that the Federal Council must approve every budget passed by the Bundestag. In this respect, the election results from the federal states are of great relevance to the allocation of funds to party-affiliated foundations, beyond the election results for the Bundestag.
Since 2018, we have been prevented from carrying out and disseminating our educational work on an equal footing due to the unlawful denial of funds. We are unable to keep up with the approximately 12,000 educational events held annually by other foundations, nor are we able to award scholarships or build up a party archive. Not to mention the required international contacts. The other six foundations are sharing a total of 659 million euros in taxpayers' money among themselves in this 2022 financial year.
In order to deny our foundation any funding this year, following the AfD's second entry into the German Bundestag, the Bundestag went so far as to make the negative statement, by not naming us, that we did not stand on the ground of the constitutional state. This was despite the fact that a few months earlier, the federal government had informed the Bundestag that the Desiderius Erasmus Foundation was not under observation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
It is encouraging to note that even academics who tend to be politically left-wing, such as Prof. Claus Leggewie, constitutional law expert Prof. Claus-Dieter Classen and Prof. Christoph Möllers, are of the opinion that we should not be denied public funding.
The Desiderius Erasmus Foundation now expects the Federal Constitutional Court to finally put a stop to this anti-democratic practice of the German Bundestag in accordance with the rule of law. This also requires that appropriate guidelines from the Federal Constitutional Court put an end to any further delaying tactics.“