The son of a Nazi SA assault division member, Voigt, 62, was the
chief candidate for the extremist National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), which scored one percent in the German vote for the EU-wide election on Sunday.
Three years after being found guilty in 2004 of promoting Nazism
after he called Hitler "a great man", Voigt questioned the number of
Holocaust deaths and demanded the return of German land lost after World
War II.
He also received a four-month
suspended jail sentence for inciting violence after calling in a 1998
campaign speech for voters to engage in "armed combat".
And in 2011 the NPD stirred controversy again, with posters
depicting Voigt, on his motorbike, wearing a black leather jacket, with
the motto "Gas geben" (Step on It) or literally "give gas" in what some
saw as a reference to gas chambers where millions of Jews perished in
Nazi extermination camps.
The signs were put up around Berlin, including just across from the capital's Jewish Museum.
Voigt, who is married and trained as an aviation engineer before
graduating in political science, was head of the NPD from 1996 until
2011.
Despite its meagre score in Sunday's elections, the NPD has benefited from the recent scrapping of a three-percent threshold for European elections in Germany, enabling it to now send a lawmaker to the European Parliament.
As an MEP, Voigt will be paid €8,020 a month, earn a 3.5 percent pension, have a monthly expenditure allowance for office costs of €4,300, a travel allowance of €4,243 a year and a daily food and accommodation allowance of €304.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert has labelled the
NPD "an anti-democratic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-constitutional
party".
"The whole of Europe is being flooded
with foreign peoples," states the NPD website and it campaigned
for Sunday's elections with posters claiming "Money for Grandma, Instead
of for Sinti and Roma".
Germany's upper house
of parliament last year launched a push before the Constitutional Court
to ban the NPD, a decade after a first attempt failed.
At the time Germany's highest court argued that the presence of
undercover state informants in party ranks had sullied the evidence.
The NPD scored just 1.3 percent in national elections last September
and has never entered the national parliament but is represented in two
eastern states' legislatures.
The party was created in 1964, notably by former Nazi party members.
As head of the party, Voigt managed to triple the membership of the
NPD and has sought to clean up its public image by urging skinheads to
keep a lower profile.
source thelocal
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