Behind all of the disingenuous fact-checking and the performative outrage, one detects in German mainstream commentary the deeper recognition that J.D. Vance was very far from wrong about a great many things in his landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference last Friday. Only the truth can provoke the kind of panicked and intemperate reactions that followed Vance’s remarks. German politics have become a sad farce – a ridiculous performance that every day I find a little more embarrassing. The primary reason for this farce, as Vance said, is the fear our political elites harbour towards their own people, and their complete inability to reverse course on any of the catastrophic policies they have put their names to, from the energy transition to mass migration to the war in Ukraine.
The firewall will keep German politics frozen in amber for some time still. It will keep everything as it was 10 years ago under Angela Merkel, until this inflexible, sclerotic system suddenly breaks and unleashes all of the potential energy it has accumulated in one great chaotic crisis. And make no mistake about it, that crisis is coming, precisely because the controlled demolition that would be in the best interests of our rulers is also utterly beyond their imaginations and their talents. This might read at first like a pessimistic post, but I promise it’s not. I’m developing a cautious optimism almost despite myself as I try to ponder what will happen in the coming months.
In 48 hours, German voters will elect a new Bundestag. The polls could not be worse for the centre-Right Christian Democratic Union and its smaller Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union. The latest INSA survey presents a nightmare scenario for both parties. It has CDU/CSU at 30%, Alternative für Deutschland at 21%, the Social Democrats (SPD) at 15%, the Greens at 13%, Die Linke (the Left Party) at 7% and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) at 5%.
Readers often ask me whether the polls are understating AfD support. That is possible, but I’d argue the question is not important, because whether AfD comes in at 20% or 23% won’t make much difference. Everything actually depends on the small socialist parties that few are talking about right now. Die Linke – successor to the DDR-era Socialist Unity Party – seems all but certain to make it back into the Bundestag, following a social media blitz that has won it wild popularity with young voters. The BSW, meanwhile, probably has even odds of clearing the 5% hurdle for representation.
If both Linke and BSW make it in, CDU and CSU are absolutely screwed, and this by their own cowardly insistence on the firewall. Refusing AfD votes means they will have to cave to the SPD and the Greens on everything to form a coalition with them. Otherwise, the Left-wing parties will band together, hijack Bundestag procedure and form their own minority Government right under their noses.
That’s right: the firewall means we stand a real chance of getting basically the same deeply unpopular SPD-Green Government we have now, additionally radicalised by the hard-line socialists of Die Linke. This is precisely the thing nobody wants and precisely the thing our political elites are prepared to deliver, all to keep the Evil Fascist Nazi Party away from power. If this happens, we’ll get a paralysed Leftoid Chancellor who is incapable of so much as passing a budget. The AfD will climb in the polls and the CDU will bleed voters until the pressure grows so great, or the political crisis so intense, that they decide to break the firewall after all and chase the Leftists out of power.
I wrote about this scenario earlier, but I considered it an exotic possibility unworthy of extended commentary. I now think I vastly underestimated how crazy all of these people are. CDU Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz, cowed by the press, continues to distance himself from the AfD at every opportunity. And while he does so, Left-leaning politicians have begun to say things that suggest they are hatching unusual plots. In a recent interview, Olaf Scholz, Chancellor candidate for a decimated SPD that is polling at 15%, rated his chances of being re-elected Chancellor at 60%. Robert Habeck, for his part, is suddenly saying that he would “of course not” rule out a “coalition” with the SPD and Die Linke (h/t Mathias von Gersdorff).
How can this happen, Eugyppius? Even if all four Left parties band together, they’ll have only 277 seats according to the latest INSA poll! That’s 39 short of a majority! This is nothing to worry about! This can never happen!
Oh, it can. Let’s pretend that Sunday gives us a Bundestag roughly in line with those INSA poll results I pasted above. No more than 37 days after the election, the new Bundestag must convene to elect a Chancellor. This is the first phase of voting, in which the Federal President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, will nominate a candidate following back-room discussions with the major parties. If Merz has hammered out a coalition agreement with the SPD and the Greens – by giving them everything they want, because as we’ll see there is no reason they should concede anything – then he’ll be elected in a landslide, and he’ll form the worst Government we have ever seen. Robert Habeck might well be Economics Minister again. Merz has said this will never happen, but it doesn’t matter, he’ll have no choice. Nancy Faeser (SPD) will probably return to the Interior Ministry, despite her repeated disgraces. And in a betrayal of his own voters unprecedented even for the CDU (which is saying something), Merz will bury the entirety of his anti-migration programme.
To understand why, let’s say Merz remains intransigent. In that case, the SPD and the Greens will abstain or cast their ballots for their own people, and the first phase of voting will fail. No Chancellor candidate will get a majority mandate to form a government. We’ll enter the second phase of voting – a two-week period in which the Bundestag can nominate candidates from its own ranks. Merz cannot be elected Chancellor with AfD votes, remember, because that would violate the firewall. The Union parties would probably nominate some Left-leaning CDU member who would be unpalatable to AfD, or they might refuse to nominate anybody. The firewall is so sacred, you see.
So, they’ll vote and vote for two weeks, and either Merz will cave to the Left on everything, or for some reason he won’t and all those votes will fail. At this point we’ll enter the third phase of voting, where the Left parties have all the power. This is because, in the third phase, you only need a plurality to elect a Chancellor; absolute majorities are no longer required. If you look at the theoretical seat distribution according to that INSA poll above, you’ll notice that the SPD, the Greens and Die Linke among them have 242 votes, while the CDU/CSU have a mere 208 and the AfD 145. At this point, the Left parties will agree on a common candidate – a Chancellor Scholz or a Chancellor Habeck. The CDU will again have to field an unpalatable Left-leaning Chancellor candidate to keep the AfD away, or tactically abstain from voting for Friedrich Merz lest he win with the assistance of Evil Hitler Fascists.
In the very first vote of the third phase, you’d have a Chancellor Scholz or a Chancellor Habeck, appointed with the approval of President Steinmeier, who is himself a member of the SPD. This Green or SPD Chancellor would proceed to appoint a Cabinet, and there is nothing the CDU could do about it without violating the firewall. They would have to bring something called constructive vote of no confidence to get rid of this hated red-red-green government. That means they would have to elect a replacement Chancellor from their own ranks, and this could only happen with AfD support. The firewall would lock the Leftists in power.
I am not the only person thinking about this. As I said, the Left parties are hinting that this is also on their minds. I also suspect it was not only the Aschaffenburg stabbings that caused Friedrich Merz to issue his anti-migration ultimatum to the SPD and the Greens and to step across the firewall at the end of January. This was precisely the moment Die Linke began to recover in the polls, edging towards that crucial 5% cut-off. CDU leadership saw this whole scenario and judged it prudent to signal that it would violate the firewall if the Left parties did not bend to the CDU on migration. Alas, the protests against the Right and the extended media campaign have forced these weak and foolish people to back down, and now they are caught in their own trap. There is no room for firewalls, and the CDU will prove why that is so – whether it is in the next several months, or the next several years.
Alternative für Deutschland should make this scenario very explicit. AfD leaders and spokesmen should be talking about this right now, and if Die Linke and BSW make it into the Bundestag after Sunday’s vote, they should talk about little else. They should explain to voters that the Union parties will have absolutely no leverage in coalition talks with the Left. While negotiations are happening in March, they should say that Merz is presently giving away the keys to the kingdom because he is terrified of becoming Chancellor with their support. Either Merz emerges from these talks with an unstable Kenya coalition that everybody hates and the AfD becomes the strongest party in Germany, or he finds himself approaching the third phase of voting, where he can tear apart his own party in one of two ways – by trying to find a path to the Chancellorship with the AfD, or by deliberately empowering a triumphant and dysfunctional Left coalition.
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Sorry but I don’t agree
Voters who are desperate to reduce immigration know who they need to vote for- there are simply not enough of them
That’s democracy
I think you’re right. Matters will have to get worse, before the majority change their voting habits.
Exactly, all very depressing. Just imagen if Le Pen won in France, she could make a Firewall across the boarder with Germany and rightly so if Germany is forever run by leftists who couldn’t care less how many kids get stabbed when playing in the park. Rebuild the Maginot Line.
Le Pen was instrumental in keeping the AfD out of the Patriots for Europe group in the EU parliament.
What Le Pen did to her own father, who founded the party that catapulted her to stardom, was appalling.
Assuming that the poll above was the actual voting result, 72% of the so-called voters would have voted against the two parties forming the present minority government and the effect of these 72% voting against these two parties would be them remaining in government. Even for your weird idea of democracy¹ as something where people vote for politicians based on pre-election promises which will be immediately dropped after the election because of ‘coalition talks’, this can hardly be called the outcome voters wanted.
¹ Democracy means rule of the demos. But a demos which has no way of preventing certain policies from being implemented and no way to cause certain other policies to be implemented and no way of voting people in our out of specific public offices doesn’t govern anything, regardless how often the partycrats who do rule repeat the nonsensical assertion that it’s the voters and not them who ‘really govern’.
If you believe mass immigration poses an existential threat to white European civilisation, vote AfD. Who knows if they would sort it all out, but it’s worth a try. If you don’t vote AfD then you’re either really thick or not bothered about immigration. That’s the choice. Not complicated, to me.
If you believe mass immigration poses an existential threat to white European civilisation, vote AfD.
Complication #1: If you were an at least somewhat prominent member of the AfD, a statement like that made in public would get you kicked out immediately. The AfD has repeatedly stated that it accepts all people with a German passport as German, regardless of their heritage. Their beef is solely with people abusing the asylum system to immigrate illegally who’ll then be allowed to stay forever nevertheless. It’s also quite popular with well-integrated muslims of Turkish origin whose families have been living in Germany for decades.
Complication 2#: The BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) is a split off from the SED/ PDS/ Die Linke which is also opposed to unlimited immigration.
Complication #3: Prior to Merkel, the CDU was an anti-immigration party with strong support for the ius sanguinis to determine who is or isn’t German.
Complication #4: The German voting system, which has both MPs for constituencies (Erststimme, first vote) and party lists (Zweitstimme, second vote). Many CDU politicians will be constituency candidates people will be voting for because they’re conservatives who always vote for their candidate who has always represented them.
As usual, I can’t agree with your assertion that the system cannot possible have been rigged to produce results voters would have preferred to avoid. It most certainly is.
Where and when did I say the system wasn’t rigged? Of course those in power will try to retain it, but you still (so far) get to vote and (so far) the AfD have not been banned.
“Many CDU politicians will be constituency candidates people will be voting for because they’re conservatives who always vote for their candidate who has always represented them.”
Those people are idiots, or not really conservative, and in any case traitors to their race and civilisation.
That the BSW is also opposed to immigration presents a complication for some, especially as I guess they are unlikely to ally themselves with the AfD. It would not be a complication for me because I’m not a lefty.
People in the US voted for Trump, and he is now carrying out stuff that people voted him in to do. I am sure lots of people voted for him despite having reservations, but they made a choice.
What I was trying to get at was: People opposed to unlimited immigration may vote CDU in the hope that it finally finds its mind again or because their MP (MdB, Mitglied des Bundestages, member of the federal parliament) has always been “the CDU or CSU [Bavaria] guy” or because they don’t “want to waste their vote” [on a party that’s not going to govern, anyway] they may vote AfD or BSW. CDU/CSU and AfD could govern together (51%) but that’s probably not going to happen because of threatening noises and actual threats and violence by adherents of left-leaning parties.
For the AfD to have any chance of governing, it would need to get at least 50% of the vote so that no coalition could be formed without it. Ideally, it would need to get at least 51% so that it could govern without a coalition partner. The chances of this happening are 0 which is going deter people from voting for it because of the “wasted votes” myth. In the exceedingly unlikely case that this would actually happen, the outcome is – to say the least – open. It would certainly immediately cause large-scale rioting of the violent hard left and all people inclined towards it and I would expect a concerted effort by all parties left of the CDU and sizable parts of the CDU itself to get rid of such an undesired result as quickly a possible, eg, declare some state of emergency and simply abolish ordinary political procedures for the time being, Corona being the precedent that the powers who are can do that overnight if they really want it.
This system is not a democracy. It;s willing to take [mock] input from the people if this input is useful. When a sudden epidemic of “Nazism” were assumed to have occurred, all bets would be off.
I don’t see what’s undemocratic about it. The parties colluding to exclude the AfD are doing so quite publicly. The voters can make their minds up as to what they think of that.
I don’t know much about German politics but it seems like anyone expecting the CDU to restrict immigration falls into the same category us people expecting that from the Conservatives.
White people have been more successful by far than anyone else on the planet except with regard to the rather crucial measure of ensuring their survival. Sad.
Democracy means rule of the people and not rule of someone who claims to do so on the proper behalf of them. For this definition, every state which has ever existed on this planet was a democracy as all rulers, with the exception of some absolutist monarchs, certainly Louis XIV, and conquerors, have always claimed to rule on behalf of the people.
Democracy means you get to kick the rulers out and replace them with someone else.
The literal meaning of the word democracy is rule of the demos, which is all citizens of a state. That’s not the case in a parliamentary system and hence, a parliamentary system is not a democracy. For practical purposes, voters in contemporary parliamentary states have less political power than the plebs of the Roman Republic had and nobody ever called that a democracy. Also, the US founding fathers intentionally didn’t create a democracy but another kind of republic. Not even direct election of the head of government was originally planned for that, although the system has meanwhile degenerated (in the sense of not working like it was supposed to work anymore) to that.
As was pointed out in a past article of the incredibly well-read guy whose name I don’t remember: Democracy underwent a transformation from being a negative to being a positive term in the 19th century, presumably because it stood in opposition to rule via inherited privilege, and since then, everybody’s a democrat according to himself, including Lenin and Hitler. This has effectively rendered the term meaningless in contemporary usage, see also German Democratic Republic.
Well I am going by the generally accepted definition.
Perhaps you can describe what you think a democracy is, and cite some examples.
Democracy is combination of the Greek words demos – people – and kratos – to rule. Invented in Athens, it used to stand for a political system where
The classical definition is in Aristotle, Politics, book 3 from part VII (7) onward:
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.3.three.html
[difficult to read due to stupid formatting]
The essence is that there are three general types of government, rule by one, rule by a selected few and rule by many/ the multitude which come in true and in degenerated forms, eg, monarchy and tyrannis for rule by one. Democracy is a form of the latter, rule by many/ the multitude. Considering that there are about 68 million people in the UK but there are only 650 members of the house of commons and 836 of the house of lords, which are entitled to make political decisions or occupy public offices, that’s clearly a case of rule of a selected few and not rule of the multitude.
BTW, I don’t know how this is in the UK but in Germany, this is part of mid-level secondary school education (7th – 10th form, Sozialkunde).
That model doesn’t sound very practical nor is it in use anywhere that I am aware of
It’s nevertheless what the people who invented the term meant with “democracy¹”, while they would have classified the parliamentarian model as some sort of oligarchy/ aristocracy. That’s especially true because voters have no direct influence on politics whatsoever. They may just chose a politician whose face they particularly like who’s then free to do whatever he wants.
¹ By that time, states and cities where basically identical.
We seem to have drifted into this, but it’s what people accept. I wish I could persuade people otherwise, but they probably think I am a crank.
Gott helfe dem deutschen Volk. Sounds as if things are going to get ugly.
They don’t need God – they can help themselves
Too many white people hate themselves and want to commit suicide, or they hate other white people
Wow, in the UK vs Germany race to the bottom the Germans are nosing ahead (very slightly)…
German politics gets more like Waiting for Godot by the minute, the migrant statistics and the latest massacre.
In the great Theatre of the Absurd up in the sky, Berthold Brecht will be smiling wryly.
Centre-stage to be vacated, new cast to enter stage right, stage left door surplus to requirements for forthcoming productions.
I would say that perhaps one of the biggest political shifts in the last 20 years has been the way the main political parties have ceased to view each other as rivals (and at times enemies) and have lined up behind the bureaucracy.
In doing so they have adopted the position of the bureaucracy which is to order, instruct and control the population. The natural enemy of the bureaucracy, and therefore the fully aligned mainstream political establishment ,are people who resist being instructed and controlled.
That is why politicians these days define democracy as institutions and defending democracy means defending institutions. Institutions are basically the bureaucracy.
The emergence of political parties that resist the bureaucracy are, I suppose, a much needed reaction to the disappearance of political forces that represent people instead of the bureaucracy.
Yes, the Uniparty.
People need to stop voting for them but so far too many just don’t get it.
It’s not just that it’s in effect one party. It’s that its actual constituency is the bureaucracy, not the people.
Yes, that makes sense. I think this is enabled by there being in effect one party. If there’s no real opposition then the government doesn’t have to represent the people.
Looks like Poland’s about to become more diverse;
”Germany could send up to 70,000 migrants to Poland per year, according to a Polish MP.
@DariuszMatecki
filmed the new massive migrant center near the Polish border.
Germany “can’t cope with the migration problem.”
The solution? Send them to Poland and other EU nations.”
https://x.com/RMXnews/status/1892965780813148494
Its just so depressing, these people with the “firewall” claim they are anti facists, but their behaviour betrays the reality of what they are, anti democratic, despots ignoring the will of the voter. In the EU it seems that it is now so blatantly a Dictatorship ran by a cadre of unelected, who do run Germany, France, Italy etc and which the conniving Starmer is retying us too. The people have no real say its just a pretence ran by greedy, power crazed ego maniacs. I truly believe now that war will be coming but it is going to be a great civil war wherby the indigenous populations rise up against the puppets in their Governments and take down the EU.
Its the only way out of this I believe, I cannot see it sorting itself out any other way.
A decade or so ago Nigel Farage stood up in the EU Parliament and warned the Kommissars that if they made meaningful change via democratic means impossible, the only alternative people would have would be violence.
Perhaps someone should send a link of the speech to the head of the CDU.
They are playing with fire.
The trouble is that any such fire will fizzle out, because people have lost their bottle.