Newsletter No. 37 by Erika Steinbach – September 2026

Dear members, friends and supporters of the DES,

An online press conference took place on 3 September. You can watch and share the recording on our YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/dxgFa2IUoXY.

Since 1 January 2026, our foundation has been entitled to a grant of EUR 25.5 million for the year 2026 under the Foundation Funding Act. Any unspent funds from this grant will lapse on 31 December 2026. It is not possible to carry them over to the following year.

Alexander Dobrindt, the minister with sole responsibility for this matter, is now evidently using this as a pretext, under the guise of an „ongoing review“, to deliberately delay the payment of the funds to which we are entitled until, due to the passage of time, they can no longer be fully utilised or lapse entirely at the end of the year.

We regard this course of action on the part of the Federal Minister of the Interior – who has sole responsibility in this matter – not merely as unacceptable harassment. It is a deliberate, unscrupulous frontal assault on the most fundamental principles of the rule of law and democracy in any democracy, carried out at our expense, and it is a criminal offence.

We applied for the funding to which we are entitled for 2026 back in March 2025, following the last federal election. After a year and a half of fruitless scrutiny, we now consider the offence under Section 339 of the German Criminal Code (StGB) to have been committed.

Furthermore, an individual application has already been lodged with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg against the Federal Republic of Germany by the DES in calendar week 35.