Exercise 2: Why the NPD's Two Ban Attempts Failed for Two Genuinely Different Reasons — Possible Solution ================================================================================================================== This exercise is asking you to identify precisely what each ruling actually turned on, and show why those two grounds are not the same problem in different clothing. WHY THE 2003 ATTEMPT ACTUALLY FAILED The 2003 rejection had nothing to do with whether the NPD's own ideology was unconstitutional - the Court never even reached that question on the merits. It failed for a real, procedural reason: roughly 30 of the party's own top 200 leadership figures turned out to be undercover government informants. Because the state itself was embedded that deeply inside the party's own leadership, the Court could not fairly determine which of the party's own actions genuinely reflected its own independent aims versus state-influenced conduct - the case was thrown out on the integrity of the evidence and process itself, not on a judgment about the party. WHY THE 2017 ATTEMPT ACTUALLY FAILED, ON COMPLETELY DIFFERENT GROUNDS The 2013-2017 case had no comparable informant problem. This time the Court actually reached the substantive question and found the NPD's own aims genuinely unconstitutional - it satisfied exactly the ideological test Article 21(2) requires. The ban was still denied, but for a real, different reason entirely: the Court ruled the party too electorally insignificant to pose a genuine, realistic threat of actually succeeding in undermining democracy. WHY THESE ARE GENUINELY DIFFERENT KINDS OF FAILURE The first case failed on a question of process and evidence - could the Court trust what it was looking at. The second case failed on a question of substance and real-world threat - even trusting what the Court was looking at completely, was it dangerous enough to justify a ban. A party could, in principle, fail the first test (its case improperly compromised by informants) while having genuinely dangerous real aims, or pass the first test cleanly while still being judged too weak to warrant a ban, as the NPD actually did in 2017. These are two independent hurdles, not one underlying problem showing up twice. WHY THIS DISTINCTION MATTERS Recognizing that these are two separate, independent grounds - rather than treating "the NPD was banned twice for basically the same reason" as accurate - is what lets you correctly understand the real legal standard Article 21(2) actually requires: a clean evidentiary case, genuinely unconstitutional aims, AND a realistic capacity to actually succeed. Losing on any one of those three elements is enough to defeat a ban, even if the other two are clearly satisfied. ANSWER: The NPD's two failed ban attempts turned on genuinely different grounds. The 2003 case failed on a procedural, evidentiary problem - the presence of roughly 30 government informants among its top 200 leaders made it impossible for the Court to fairly judge which of the party's actions were genuinely its own. The 2017 case reached the substantive question directly, found the NPD's aims genuinely unconstitutional, and still denied the ban - this time because the party was judged too electorally insignificant to pose a real threat. These are two independent hurdles a ban case must clear (clean evidence, and a realistic capacity to actually succeed), not the same underlying problem recurring twice. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ It separates the procedural basis of the 2003 ruling from the substantive basis of the 2017 ruling explicitly, and explains why treating them as the same failure would actually misrepresent the real legal standard Article 21(2) requires a ban case to satisfy.