German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has been accused of breaking his word after his government raised funding for the “Live Democracy!” program to €192 million, up from the previously planned €180 million. The money goes to associations and organisations that are rooted primarily in the political Left.
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel launched a sharp attack: “Friedrich Merz promised voters the left is over—now it is clear: the Chancellor is once again caving in to the SPD. Instead of ending the one-sided funding of politically left-leaning NGOs, their budgets are even being increased.”
These NGOs, Weidel said, are neither independent nor genuinely civil-society-based but dependent on the federal government and “systematically intervening in political decision-making.” She reminded voters that the CDU once circulated questionnaires to scrutinise NGO activities, but under Merz this investigation “fizzled out.”
Rather than ensuring neutrality and pluralism, taxpayer money is being used to “defame and marginalise critical opinions,” she warned. Only the AfD, she claimed, would “end the party-political instrumentalisation of NGOs” and safeguard free democratic opinion-formation.
Legal scholars have echoed these concerns. Hubertus Gersdorf, a constitutional and media lawyer at Leipzig University and husband of legal scholar Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, told Junge Freiheit that without safeguards, the state risks abusing NGO funding: “Left-wing governments will support left-wing organisations, and right-wing governments will support right-wing ones—and that must be prevented.”
“In a democracy, the process of opinion- and will-formation must flow from the people to the state,” Gersdorf added. “If the state intervenes through NGOs, it reverses this process. That is characteristic of autocracies—indeed, of dictatorships.”
