Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany - History

History

The party was founded in 1981 by two 17-year-olds with the nicknames "Zewa" (a leading facial tissue brand) and "Kotze" (vomit). In the following years it was joined by many punks and organized many demonstrations, which were sometimes ended by the police, often leading to arrests. The party was dissolved in 1986, but was recreated in 1994 and soon chose to participate in elections. In the 1997 Hamburg city elections the APPD received a stunning 5.3% of the votes in St. Pauli and thus became the fourth-strongest party in that district. In 1998 the APPD ran in the Bundestag election with Karl Nagel as its candidate for the chancellorship, and using slogans like "Labour sucks" ("Arbeit ist Scheiße") and "Drinking, drinking, every day just drinking" ("Saufen! Saufen! Jeden Tag nur saufen"). The APPD failed, however, to gain the 0.5% of the votes needed to pay to the voters in the form of a promised large party with free beer. With approximately 35,000, or 0.1%, of the votes, the APPD outperformed Lyndon LaRouche's "BüSo" and also the German Communist Party DKP. Finally the party was dissolved in 1999. In December 2000 the APPD was reestablished in Munich, but did not participate in the Bundestag election of 2002. A sufficient number of signatures were collected for participation in the European election 2004, however these did not arrive because the German Postal Service declined to forward them to party chairman Christoph Grossmann. In the following year, the APPD took place in the Bundestag election of 2005 with little success. As a result, the party split into two parties in 2006 - the APPD and the Pogo-Partei. Both parties plan to run in the next elections for the Bundestag and European Parliament in 2009.