Election Time In Berlin

Public Eye's Brian Montopoli is writing weekly dispatches for CBSNews.com while living and working in Berlin as part of the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship Program. He will return to Public Eye in October.

One stands out from the crowd. It features a picture of a skinhead, along with the word "Stopp."

The sign, which was posted by the far-left Party of Democratic Socialism, can be seen all over the city. It implores Berliners not to resign themselves to the presence of Nazis among them. It argues that Nazis should not gather, should not speak, and should not have any sort of public presence.

Technically, in today's Germany, they don't. The country has laws against expressing certain beliefs: One can be jailed for stating that he is a devoted follower of Adolf Hitler or a supporter of the Holocaust.

But while the National Democratic Party (NPD) is careful to avoid saying anything illegal, it's widely considered a neo-Nazi organization.

The German government tried to dismantle the NPD a few years ago, after the group saw an upswing in support and visibility related to its anti-foreigner rhetoric. (Like much of Europe, Germany has a serious immigration problem.)

The government's efforts to ban the group failed, however. There was strong evidence that the NPD was advocating illegal positions, but the court rejected the ban because many of the high ranking members of the NPD were actually government informants.

One cannot dismantle a political party or jail someone for advocating a particular position in America, where free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment.

"Free speech has always been a big issue in the U.S., but it has never been as important in Europe," Gert-Joachim Glaessner, professor of German Politics at Humboldt University in Berlin, told CBSNews.com. "And of course there's the specific German view that has to do with the Nazi era that some expressions of speech are simply not acceptable."

The NPD is not a major force in German politics. It has, in all likelihood, less than 10,000 members, and its sister party, Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), is presently little more than founder Gerhard Frey, a multimillionaire Munich-based publisher of far-right rhetoric. In the 2005 German federal election, the NDP-DVU coalition took less than 2 percent of the vote, giving it no national representation.

The far-right parties do hold some small, local positions, and they could win more local representation in the Sept. 17 elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. As in U.S. midterm elections, voters are more likely to cast protest votes in these smaller contests.

The parties have little hope of making serious inroads anytime soon, however. That's why they are focused on what Glaessner calls "cultural infiltration." They start clubs and holds events to attract young people, with organizers often not initially identifying themselves as NPD or DVU.

The parties target areas of the former East Germany where unemployment is high and most of the motivated and educated have migrated away. The population left behind is largely young, male, uneducated and angry. Ironically, since all parties in Germany receive money from the state, NPD and DVU are partially publicly funded.

Berlin has pockets in which the NDP has support, and the NPD has posted signs of its own. But the city, which is presided over by Mayor Klaus Wowereit, an openly gay member of the Social Democratic Party, is strongly liberal. Wowereit is expected to win reelection Sept.17.

Berliners can't actually vote for him, though. The German electoral process is extremely complicated. Citizens here cast two votes, one for a party list and another for a local candidate. These votes decide the makeup of the parliament, which elects a Senate and names a mayor.

Why so convoluted?

"Germany had a clear representative system before the Nazis came along," says Glaessner. "This system was put in place in order to avoid anyone being able to accumulate too much power."