ABSTRACT
The difficult political circumstances of the Grand Coalition government between 1966 and 1969 were aggravated by the whole Extra-Parliamentary Opposition movement. As the Federal Republic began to suffer its first economic problems, a new right-wing extremist party, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) was founded in November 1964. The rapid rise in support for this protest party presented a new problem for West Germany's established democratic parties, as the NPD began to gain a series of regional successes, clearing the 5 per cent clause in several Land parliaments between 1966 and 1969. During the coalition negotiations between the Christian Democratic Union/ Christian Social Union and the Social Democratic Party in 1966 there had been serious discussion of the question of electoral reform. At the end of the 1980s the German term Politikverdrossenheit appeared. It coincided with a time when a right-wing extremist party, die Republikaner, was achieving some success in both the 1989 European and German regional elections.
