German Communist Party

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For other uses, see Communist Party of Germany (disambiguation).

The German Communist Party (German: Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, DKP) is a Marxist-Leninist Communist party in Germany.^[1]

It was formed in West Germany in 1968, in order to fill the place of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which had been banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1956. It was to a great extent born out of the Extraparliamentary Opposition.^{[citation needed]}

The party remained on the political fringe, never winning more than 0.3% of the total votes in federal elections.^[2] However, in the 1970s it managed to get up to 2.2% in elections in the city state of Hamburg, up to 3.1% in elections in the city state in Bremen, and up to 2.7% in elections in Saarland.

During the Cold War, the DKP received most of its funds through covert transfers from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), the East German ruling party.^[1] Following German reunification, the DKP entered a steady decline.^[1] As of 2008, its membership has dropped to some 4,000, less than a tenth of its pre-Unification strength. The average party member is 60 years old, and the party is practically bankrupt.^[1]

Many members of the DKP left the party after the re-unification of Germany and joined the newly formed Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), a descendant of the SED. For the 2005 federal elections, the DKP endorsed the ticket of the Left Party, successor to the PDS.

The DKP received national public attention in early 2008 when Christel Wegner, elected to the parliament of Lower Saxony on the list of the Left Party as the first DKP state member of parliament, appeared to endorse the Berlin Wall, the Stasi and other aspects of the East German state in an interview. This caused embarrassment to the national Left Party leadership.^[1] Wegner was subsequently expelled from the party's parliamentary group and denied having made the controversial endorsements a few days later.^[3]

The party operates a weekly newspaper, unsere zeit.