Sometimes I read that the greatest national fault of Germans, at least in the political arena, is our tendency towards authoritarianism or fascism or the like. This is an amateur opinion and my readers will know better. Our real fault is our exaggerated thoroughness, that is to say our dedication to doing the same thing longer and harder than everyone else – well after we have passed the point of diminishing returns, until in our zeal we become a living refutation of our own ideological convictions and a general warning to everybody else against the path we have chosen.

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A lot of the stupid things we get up to politically would not actually be so stupid were we not to pursue them with such dogged thoroughness. History furnishes a wealth of examples, as does the present. Many of our more sensible neighbours, meanwhile, prove the corollary, namely that you can get away with a lot of equally crackpot policy if you maintain healthy levels of detachment and lapsed commitment and you don’t take yourself or your ideas too seriously.

The firewall which the CDU maintains against Alternative für Deutschland has become the latest tragic illustration of German thoroughness. Other parties in other countries have levied their own cordons sanitaires against the populist right, but nobody has pursued this strategy with such ruinous totality as the German Union parties. An absolute prohibition on achieving any parliamentary outcomes whatsoever with a firewalled party can only work as long as that party remains quite small. The larger a firewalled party becomes, the more flexible your firewall has to be. Otherwise, you end up ceding vast political territories to your enemies beyond the wall you have built, ultimately walling off yourself instead.

This will be the fate of the Union in the coming years, and indeed it is already the fate of the Union in Sachsen-Anhalt today. The AfD received 43.8% of the vote on 6 September, enough for 39 of 83 seats in Magdeburg. The CDU, meanwhile, shrunk from 40 seats to 15. Discipline within the shrunken Union ranks has totally collapsed, with these 15 MPs finding themselves divided across no less than three (!) internal factions. At least four of these Union MPs appear to be in dealings with the AfD, to save their political careers if nothing else, and they have already violated the firewall once by helping elect the first AfD Landtag president in German history on 6 October.

The hysteria over that vote refuses to subside because it portends a second firewall failure on 15 December, when the state parliament will convene a plenary session to elect a new premier in the form of AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund. State CDU leadership are presently searching for ways to prevent their own scattered rank-and-file from helping the AfD into government. The things they are getting up to are nothing short of crazy, we have never seen anything like this before. It is an absolute farce and some of it might even be illegal. The firewall is in its death throes in Sachsen-Anhalt, and this is what that looks like.

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You know what we really need in Germany, what we just don’t have enough of?

Rules.

Specifically, we need more rules about what you can say and to whom you can say it, and more rules about what you’re allowed to read and watch and the kinds of content third-party platforms are allowed to serve you.

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We need these rules because right-wing extremism and because Russian disinformation and because Trump and because Alternative für Deutschland and because all the other evils that exist solely and exclusively because of people being allowed to say things and hear things and see things in unmonitored unregulated ways.

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If you are already a subscriber to my blog, then I owe you many thanks. Without your monthly 5 Euros, nothing I do here would be possible. The price of your subscription will never change, although I hope soon to improve its value to you.

I’ve finally recovered from a period of tiresome political ennui and mild disillusion, and I am planning an array of new content for the coming year. I hope to try my hand at some regular audio pieces (in areas well beyond true crime), write a bit more about American themes (particularly while Germany remains so politically constipated), and I have some other ideas too (I am working on the next tabu book review as I type this). Some of my posts will always be free, but subscriber-only content will grow substantially over the coming month. Indeed, I have already begun the transition.

My subscription price has remained unchanged across my five years as a professional blogger, but it can’t remain frozen forever. As of 1 December, I’ll be raising the price of new subscriptions (and the price of new subscriptions only) from 5 Euros to 7 Euros a month – or from 50 Euros to 70 Euros a year. Existing subscribers will remain totally unaffected and their prices will never go up. What is more, if you subscribe before 1 December, your price will also remain fixed at the minimum 5 Euro-per-month or 50 Euro-per-year rate for all time. You will all be grandfathered in under the prior regime and remain pacifically unaffected by this change.

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Heinz is ninety years old and he lives on the ground-floor flat of a modest three-story apartment building on Hosemannstr. 18 in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. Every night his lights go on, every morning his curtains open, but nobody has seen Heinz himself for a very long time. People say he is away on holiday or living with family, and all of them say not to worry – all except an eccentric neighbour whom everyone ignores and who is convinced he can smell something terrible emanating from the old man’s rooms.

For a long time I’ve wanted to start a modest true crime podcast series, focussed on famous German cases that a) remain little-known in the Anglophone world, and that b) illustrate something important about German politics and culture. My idea was to call this series Murder in Germany, and finally after much plotting and dreaming and collecting notes and even more procrastinating, I am happy to present the first pilot episode – on The Missing Pensioner and the Terrible Smell.

I promise not to post too many of these. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. My podcasting productivity is severely curbed by my limited patience for scripting and audio editing. I do, however, have a few more episodes mapped out, which (absent a general revolt) I hope to sprinkle into my feed every two or three weeks between now and December. I’ve tried to keep this first episode tightly scripted and short, but that is only because I am still testing the waters. The goal is ultimately for episodes in the 45-minute to one-hour range.

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On Sunday the Wall Street Journal published a long article headlined “The Welfare State is Crushing Britain.” It focusses on but one aspect of the UK social system, namely disability and sickness benefits, and its details are equal measures depressing, familiar, predictable and alarming.

Like other European redistributionist schemes, British disability payouts have steadily ballooned in the postwar period – expanding from a niche benefit for those unable to work due to serious illness and on-the-job injuries to a morass of programmes that showers millions of people with billions in pointless, self-defeating subsidies.

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A 2024 government survey found that fully 25% of the entire British population might be considered disabled under present inflationary criteria, which adds perspective to the eye-watering figure of 10% presently drawing benefits. The fastest growth in disability claims occurs among working-age demographics, where compensation, once granted, soon becomes a powerful disincentive to work. In this way the British disability system actively cannibalises its own tax base. The total bill for sickness and disability benefits this year will exceed £100 billion, which comes on top of the £280 billion the British taxpayer presently spends on healthcare and which substantially outstrips the £68 billion British defence budget. Disability spending has jumped 25% over the last four years, and without reforms it will rise another 30% over the next four. Fuzzy psychiatric disability claims, from depression to ADHD, drive much of the expansion, as a whole universe of charities and AI-powered chatbots advise ever more able-bodied people on how they might opt in to this wonderful system of free money. Among many crazy details, we learn that those on disability can trade some of their cash benefits for new car leases every three years. This programme now accounts for one in seven automobile sales in Britain and has elevated the company handling these deals (Motability) to the largest automobile leasing concern in the country. The debt required to fund this and the rest of the British social system has driven borrowing costs to rates not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, while high taxes continue to encourage the emigration of the wealthy and productive.

These are the mere symptoms of a sickness that extends well beyond the United Kingdom. We are looking here at a fiscal and also a political crisis afflicting the entire postwar European model. Below the fold I want to explain the nature of this crisis and why our political systems seem powerless to address its fundamental causes – indeed, why many of our politicians seem determined to make it worse. With little chance of reform, we face a future of economic decay and declining living standards, culminating in sovereign debt crises and perhaps even political collapse. The postwar order is slowly dying, in its eighty-first year, of old age. There are no answers and nobody knows what will come next.

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In May I was foolish enough to post a partial review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and suggested I’d follow up with a second part if there was any interest. Alas for me, some of you were interested. Alas for you, I am weak and distractible, and so I’ve dragged my feet. For all of its purported naughtiness Mein Kampf is a serious snooze of a book, and I had enormous trouble summoning the motivation to make my way through the second volume, which if you can believe it manages to be even more tiresome and boring than the first one.

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I finally solved this problem by putting myself on a daily dose of Mein Kampf. Every morning I would wake up and ingest a few grams of Hitler alongside my multivitamin. In this way I’ve finally completed the entire monstrosity, and I’m happy to present you with the rest of everything I have to say about it.

First, though, I want to address those who found themselves offended by my first post on this book. All aspects of Adolf Hitler’s persona, it turns out, are attended by a diffuse crowd of mostly American internet people who act as the man’s reputational bodyguards and profess to feel great personal injury every time anybody speaks even vaguely ill of this historical figure who died 80 years ago and whose relevance for present-day politics has never been more obscure.

The evangelists among these guys believe I’d just love Mein Kampf if only I weren’t reading it in one of these clunky outdated English translations. They’ve assured me that in fact Germany’s most famous Führer is an excellent stylist and that if I’d just have a look at the wonderful new translation by Thomas Dalton I would absolutely love Mein Kampf. In fact – and I don’t know how these guys missed this – I’m reading Hitler in German, to be precise in the 2016 two-volume IfZ critical edition, where his stylistic faults appear in abundance. Studying this edition has convinced me that Hitler himself knew something was wrong with his style, because he frequently tinkered with the prose across successive print runs, adding hundreds upon hundreds of niggling corrections which the IfZ editors carefully track in a marginal apparatus. None of this helped and the book remains an amateurish trainwreck by any standard. All of that said, I can see how a loose and charitable translator might be tempted to improve Hitler’s readability. I’ve done some of my own Hitler translating for this post and I can say that the urge to iron the wrinkles out of the man’s cramped style becomes quite powerful.

Others believe either a) that I’m trying to score Good Boy Points by saying that I do not like Mein Kampf, or b) that I am legally prevented from speaking positively of Hitler or anything he wrote because I live and write in the repressive open-air nursing home known as the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. I’ll take these in reverse order.

In fact it would not be illegal for me, even in Germany, to write positively of Hitler or his works, as long as I didn’t extend my praise to a general peace-disturbing glorification of the violence and arbitrariness of National Socialist rule. The Bundesrepublican censorship regime with respect to forbidden midcentury topics operates at a painfully superficial and symbolic level, and does not pose great obstacles to my expressing opinions about this era. If I did think my honest takes on some subject would get me in trouble, I hope you know I’d just avoid that subject entirely rather than serve you a bunch of disingenuous politically correct nonsense.

As for a), I can only repeat what I said last time, which is that my project in reviewing tabu books is to evaluate them on their own terms and withhold my own moral commentary. Mein Kampf suffers from extremely obvious stylistic, structural and even grammatical defects, and its shortcomings are interesting for a few reasons. First of all, they’re evidence for who the National Socialists were and by extension what it took to come out on top in the chaotic politics of the Weimar Republic, which favoured street smarts and ruthlessness much more than intellectual horsepower. Perhaps more intriguingly, they also tell us about the strange strategy postwar liberalism has pursued against the spectre of its defeated Nazi enemies, because laying a tabu upon Mein Kampf was in fact wholly unnecessary and, from a naive perspective, even counterproductive. Indeed, few exercises seem more likely to cause profound disillusion with National Socialism than reading this one singular book. Exactly why the postwar BRD fought so hard to prevent ordinary Germans from discovering that Hitler was a terrible writer and a bad thinker is an interesting question, and something I’ll have more to say about at the end of this piece.

My first post addressed general matters together with the contents of the first volume (“A Reckoning”), which Hitler wrote on a typewriter while serving a sentence for high treason in Landsberg Prison. Here I’ll take a closer look at Hitler’s prose style via a few important excerpts in my own translation, before considering the second volume on “The National Socialist Movement,” which Hitler dictated after his release and which appeared in December 1926.

If you want to read further, maybe you’ll consider subscribing. Without your support nothing I do here will be possible.

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Something very important happened in Sachsen-Anhalt yesterday.

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You’ll remember that last month, Sachsen-Anhalt elected a new Landtag, and Alternative für Deutschland received 43.8% of the vote – enough for 39 of 83 parliamentary seats. That is not quite a majority, but it is close enough to make the firewall against the AfD unworkable. Afterwards the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which has five seats, entered talks with the AfD. Thirty-nine plus five is 44, which you will note is a majority of 83. Lead AfD candidate Ulrich Siegmund has announced that he plans to be elected Minister President, or premier, of Sachsen-Anhalt in September, at which point he will form the first-ever AfD state government.

Yesterday the new Landtag held their inaugural meeting, the primary order of business being to elect a Landtag President. Landtag Presidents run parliamentary meetings, administer parliamentary business and act as the body’s official representative. They have little explicit power but great symbolic significance, which would be why all the high-minded defenders of the firewall against the AfD have worked very hard to keep Landtag presidencies out of AfD hands. Of course, the cartel parties no longer have the votes to do much of anything in Sachsen-Anhalt, and it was a foregone conclusion that the AfD would succeed in placing their first Landtag president ever – in the guise of an auto mechanic and real estate agent named Tobias Rausch. The BSW had pledged to support Rausch’s candidacy, and as I said above 39 AfD votes plus 5 BSW votes is 44 votes, which is enough.

Yesterday, however, Rausch did not just get 44 votes. Instead he got 48 votes, which means that four CDU members broke ranks and pissed on the sacred firewall to help the AfD into their first Landtag presidency.

This morning in an interview with NiUS, Rausch confirmed the obvious, namely that the four additional votes came from the CDU. He further said that the Sachsen-Anhalt AfD has been in talks with these CDU defectors, and that he assumes they will also vote Siegmund into the premiership in December: “We are working in Sachsen-Anhalt to form a stable government, which will be partly supported by the BSW but also partly by the CDU.”

All of this sounds like boring parliamentary procedure, but it’s a big deal. The voters in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern deactivated the firewall by kicking the CDU out of the Landtag entirely, and now we learn that in Sachsen-Anhalt too the firewall is a dead letter, because over a fourth of the CDU faction there has broken ranks, not only to support an AfD Landtag President but most likely also to vote the AfD into state government. This is precisely the Union-defector scenario that I spent months predicting,1 that state CDU leadership assured us would never happen and that has the potential to take down the federal coalition, because the coalition agreement between the Union parties and the SPD makes maintaining the firewall against the AfD also at the state level a condition of cooperation between the two parties.2

After news of the Landtag vote broke yesterday, the Bundestag SPD faction marched like a perfect gaggle of lunatics to Bebelplatz in Berlin, famed site of National Socialist book burnings. They carried dumb pre-printed signs and a copy of the German Basic Law like a talisman to ward off far-right vampires. SPD Defence Minister Boris Pistorius took the microphone and said many absurd things, among them these:

What we have witnessed today is a unique breach of a taboo in parliamentary democracy, the likes of which we have not seen in this form for more than 90 years. Namely, that democrats have acted as springboards for right-wing extremists and fascists … This is a day of anger; it is a day of disappointment that democrats have apparently learnt nothing from history and are allowing history to repeat itself … Those who have allowed this to happen have betrayed the democracy of our great country.

In other words, Pistorius likened the CDU defectors in Sachsen-Anhalt to the conservatives who helped Adolf Hitler into the chancellorship in 1933. It will be interesting to see how the Social Democrats continue to govern alongside a party they are now openly accusing of being Nazi enablers.

Long-time reader and friend-of-the-blog Jim Brown asked me to respond to his thesis of German “political ennui,” which he aired in the comments to my last post on the self-immolation of the CDU:

What interests me most is how collective German guilt may have been transmitted across generations, and what that inheritance costs. … [T]he doctrine of collective guilt, which functions much like original sin, is corrosive precisely because it assigns a debt no one can discharge.

My hypothesis is that this produces a kind of political ennui — a diminished civic confidence that leaves the field open to a succession of midwits like Merkel and Merz.

All nations have their foundational myths. These are stories that explain where the people of those nations come from, who they are and above all why they belong together. As the official successor to the German Reich in its final twelve-year flameout, the Federal Republic has cultivated a foundational myth based upon total repudiation of the National Socialist past, acceptance of collective and generationally transmitted guilt for the Holocaust and a near-religious devotion to Our Democracy as promulgated in the Basic Law of 1949.

You could say that the anti-nationalist Federal Republic is the final (and only lasting) answer anyone has given to the vexing twentieth-century question of how to deal with a unified Germany. To some degree we regret our own national existence and we have ceded a good part of our sovereignty to the European Union. In return for this self-effacement we are tolerated as Europe’s dominant industrial power.

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The Guilt Cult naturally has its drawbacks. Most obnoxiously, it places a small cast of officially deplored villains at the centre of all the most important stories we tell about ourselves. And as the years between 1933 and 1945 slip ever further into the past, the Guilt Cult rooted in these years becomes an ever more powerful fixation, seemingly to allay the anxiety that one day without anybody noticing Hitler and company might just vanish into the fog of history. In 1989, Botho Strauß wrote of Hitler as “the tragedy of my late birth, the black sun around which all the planetary values of this Republic orbit.” He said that “In my modern life, the past extorts everything from within and without” and that “there is no writing and no thinking that is spared from it.”1 That was 37 years ago, when the discourse was far less pathological than it is now. I can’t imagine how Strauß would characterise the Guilt Cult in Germany today.

All of that said, I would hesitate to trace Germany’s political ennui to the Guilt Cult in itself. Many of our neighbours have succumbed to similar political trajectories despite having altogether more positive founding myths. Also too, just a few decades ago Germany was a fairly optimistic place. The true drivers of depressed feeling in the Federal Republic feel overwhelmingly economic: high interest rates, expensive energy, deindustrialisation, wage compression, insanely high taxes, dysfunctional public services and crumbling infrastructure. Behind these problems lie some genuinely terrible causes, foremost among them our demographic decline. Germans are getting older and they are having too few children. In the open-air nursing home that Germany increasingly resembles, pensions and healthcare become overwhelming political obsessions; the appearance of a novel influenza-like-illness is enough to occasion a years-long panic; nobody wants to think very hard about the future.

Foundational myths are a kind of scaffolding upon which you can festoon any number of personal perspectives. It’s easy to feel badly about Germany’s past, but there are other possibilities. Our responsibility for the great crimes of National Socialism has become the foundation of German ethnic identification, and for no few it is perversely intertwined with a kind of inverted national pride. You see this whenever our politicians or pundits venture to lecture Americans about their politics. They are fond of insisting that our historical experience has uniquely positioned us to detect and denounce fascism wherever it emerges, despite the fact that nobody any longer has any living memory or personal experience of Nazism. The Guilt Cult thus becomes a locus of moral authority and an occasion for tiresome preening.

I’ve written before about the deep contradictions of our present ideological situation. Ideally, progressive Germans would like nothing more than to vanish into a vaguer, general Europeanness, finally driving a stake through the heart of their own hated nationalism. Yet such escape is unthinkable, because fleeing Germanness would amount to abandoning their greatest duty, which is to carry responsibility for the Holocaust and prevent the recurrence of fascism. Efforts to reconstruct Germany as a proposition nation and deconstruct German identity as yet another purportedly fake genre of ‘whiteness’ break apart on the rocks of these mythical obligations. Can immigrants to the Federal Republic really and truly become ‘German,’ in the same way many believe that immigrants to the United States can become American? That would seem to entail opting into the entire programme of national regret and Holocaust guilt – a strange proposition, and also (you would think) a deeply unattractive one.

The most important thing to remember about the Guilt Cult, is that Germans impose it upon themselves. They are not victims in this. Our leaders cultivate this mythology because they think it furthers our European integration and because it is a powerful cudgel to wield against real and notional opponents on “the right.” Ordinary Germans participate in the Guilt Cult because they find it personally meaningful and because it constitutes an important part of their national identity. The Guilt Cult may be a demoralising force, but I would locate the bulk of its malign influence elsewhere. It keeps cultural attention fixated on a set of political evils that every year grow more anachronistic and have ever less to do with our present world, while distracting everyone from a growing body of increasingly urgent problems. National Socialism is not coming back to Germany, because National Socialism is in the past and the past does not recur. The real threats to our political system are posed by the hostile migrants we’ve welcomed into our country and by an array of foolish anti-industrial policies that will destroy our economy if they’re not unwound very soon.

Present-day German politics present a puzzle.

The more you think about it, the harder it becomes to explain.

No party has shaped the Federal Republic more than the Christian Democratic Union, or the CDU. Since 1949, CDU chancellors have ruled Germany for 53 years, all told; the Social Democrats, their rivals, have had the helm for less than half that time. Union chancellors rebuilt Germany after the war, oversaw reunification and collaborated in founding the European Union. A lot of what we think of as Germany and even Europe today has something to do with the Union, and soon all of that will be over with – over and gone.

The Union has entered a period of protracted decline, which has now progressed so far it begins to resemble an implosion. Because the fate of the Federal Republic and the CDU have been linked for nearly 80 years, the consequences for Germany, its people and its economy have been almost as dire. The press reports on the electoral losses, the dismal poll numbers, Chancelor Friedrich Merz’s endless gaffes and stupidities and the rise of Alternative für Deutschland, but above all these details there towers a much bigger story, too large for the media to appreciate. This story is that Germany’s politics are changing forever, for reasons that are hard to grasp and in ways historians will puzzle over for decades to come.

It is getting easier every day to imagine a world in which the CDU collapses completely or breaks up into several regional successor parties. Already the Union is on track to lose all but trace support across multiple east German states. Nobody knows what Germany will look like, or what kinds of politics Germany will have, should the Union go under – or what the death throes might look like. I think the result is unlikely to be an unvarnished and indefinite AfD utopia, and there are multiple ways this political transition could turn into a catastrophe and lock us into a kind of DDR-light Green-socialist nightmare.

If you want to read more about why the CDU – the dominant political force of postwar Germany – appears to be committing suicide, and what it all means, I invite you to subscribe. Without your support nothing I do here would be possible.

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Okay, against my better judgment, I’ll bite. But first, a story:

At the start of the Covid pandemic, my research institute shut down and I found myself stuck at home and bored out of my mind. For lack of anything better to do, I decided to try my hand at picking locks. I taught myself the basic principles with the help of YouTube, I ordered a few picking sets from Amazon, and after a few weeks’ practice I found I could open most basic padlocks inside of a few minutes. I was hit-or-miss on more advanced padlocks, and I never came close to mastering what I regarded as the summit of the discipline, the six-pin cylinder locks that secure most German residences. (I did manage to open my practice ABUS double cylinder with different pin configurations two or three times, but only after extremely frustrating multi-hour attacks, and I was never able to defeat any of the various security pins.)

I gave up on lockpicking after a few months, when I realised that picking locks is probably the least impressive parlour trick you can cultivate and that increasing one’s lockpicking proficiency requires refining the same extremely narrow and tiresomely acquired skillset over months and years as you work your way up the hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated lock designs. To my mind, and with all due apologies to lockpicking enthusiasts among my readers, there are many more rewarding pursuits out there for people who like small mechanical puzzles.

Of course, nothing is wasted, and you learn something even from abandoned pursuits. In this case, I gained first-hand experience with the fact that all security measures are only ever just as good as they have to be. Many locks objectively speaking are not very secure, and a surprising number are plagued by egregious design flaws that you need only a little knowledge and practice to exploit. Pin-by-pin picking, it turns out, is for hobbyists and tinkerers; in the real world locks are mostly shimmed, bumped, combed, rapped, raked, drilled, bypassed, snapped and cut. Yet locks keep most people out most of the time anyway, because many of these exploits are brand- and model-specific (requiring generalist attackers to amass a great deal of specific knowledge), because opening locks you are not authorised to open is highly illegal, and because our world is awash in locks, most of which secure things like rusty bicycles and boxes of Christmas ornaments that nobody much cares to access. The risk that any particular lock may be attacked is therefore low and most locks can get away with their flaws.

Put another way, our existing system of lock security exists in delicate balance with the low density of human aptitude and enthusiasm for achieving unauthorised access to the things that these locks secure. Any technique upsetting this balance would prove very awkward and potentially very expensive for a great many people. A novel attack requiring basically no skill, an investment of only a few Euros, mere seconds to deploy and possessing potential against a wide variety of systems – from the dumbest padlocks to the most sophisticated bank vault combination systems – would land us in a real security crisis. Our dilemma would be even greater, were this novel attack method merely enabled by an otherwise useful and widely available technology.

Obviously, I am not really talking about locks any longer. This is a metaphor for the security risks posed by Large Language Models. As metaphors go, it is a crude and imperfect one, which I chose because it will help me emphasise two points:

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Die Linke, or the Left Party, achieved a sensational 25.7% of the vote in Berlin on Sunday. It’s only the second time this descendant of the East German Socialist Unity Party has ever won a German state election, and it’s their fourth-best result anywhere since reunification. Commentators have decried a second communist takeover of the German capital, this time by electoral means rather than the Russian army. The antisemitism and clan scandals of their Neukölln district branch are all over the press.

This raises some interesting questions:

Who are the Die Linke anyway?

What do they want?

Are they as crazy as everyone claims?

Are they communists, cultural Marxists, democratic socialists, terminally woke?

Or are they just the latest stupid-Uni-girl-cum-pro-migrant party?

Is Berlin doomed?

There is circulating on social media an amusing list of highlights from the Berlin Linke’s 336-page election programme. The items lend some sense of what this party is about, while also casting into perspective the complaints about alleged AfD extremism that flow constantly from parties like the Social Democrats and the Greens:

• The Berlin Linke call for replacing or supplementing policing with “social work” wherever possible. They want fewer police with no tasers and they want to abolish so-called “gun free zones.”

• They want to repeal the prohibition on face-coverings and defensive weapons at protests.

• They call for the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution to be abolished as an intelligence agency. The successor agency should still monitor political extremism, but purely from publicly available sources.

• The believe squatters should acquire ownership of their dwellings after occupying them for a single year.

• They demand an end to fines and punishments for fare evaders and also the elimination of the criminal statute that prohibits fare evasion in the first place.

(Maybe you want to subscribe to my blog to read more about this absurd party. Without my readers’ support nothing I do here would be possible.)

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Within months of becoming Chancellor, Friedrich Merz promised an “Autumn of reforms,” which never materialised because the political will to fix Germany’s economic and fiscal problems does not exist within his coalition. Having failed to change anything and driven support for the once-mighty CDU to historic lows, Merz has instead been served an Autumn of Reckoning. It is unclear whether he will survive it.

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The state elections in Sachsen-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin that for months have inspired fear and trembling within the German political establishment have come and gone. Each of them has realised our rulers’ worst fears in different ways.

1) In Sachsen-Anhalt, the CDU underperformed polls by more than 20%, while Alternative für Deutschland achieved the highest vote share any party has ever won in that state. The AfD are already in talks with the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, and everyone expects an AfD government under Ulrich Siegmund to take power in the coming months.

2) In Berlin, the CDU managed to squander the clear polling dominance it enjoyed throughout 2025 to finish in second place with just 18.8% of the vote – nearly seven points behind Die Linke. That is what a series of extremely stupid and unnecessary local scandals alongside association with the most unpopular Chancellor in the history of the Federal Republic can do to a party.

Zohran Mamdani’s advisers and campaign strategists assisted Die Linke in their left-populist Berlin campaign, which enjoyed particularly strong appeal among young voters. Assuming some late-breaking turbulence caused by the corruption and indiscipline that are typical of Die Linke do not derail things, they will form a government with the Greens and the Social Democrats.

3) In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the CDU managed to underperform every last poll, logging their worst electoral result in all of history. With just 4.9% of the vote, they failed for the first time ever to scrape across the 5% hurdle for representation in the Landtag – an outcome I have predicted for weeks. Whereas in Sachsen-Anhalt voters overcame the firewall by making the AfD too powerful to wall off, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern they abolished it entirely by kicking the party that invented and maintains the firewall straight out of parliament.

Alternative für Deutschland won the largest vote share, but the result will be another coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Die Linke under the long-serving Minister President Manuela Schwesig. Schwesig enjoys especially strong popularity among women and pensioners, and she will be helped into power by a smattering of leftist students and climate-obsessed urbanites. The AfD will stand alone in opposition to the tepid foolishness of the coming legislature, and the citizens of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will develop new ways of thinking about the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler party, which probably cannot be all that evil or fascist or Nazi or Hitler, given that there is no longer any alternative to the left here in the northeast.

For ten years, the Union has borrowed the policies of left-of-centre parties and made them its own – bestowing on Germany the dumbest energy policy in the developed world and saddling its citizens with a deluge of unproductive, hostile and dependent foreigners from the global south. Then, Merz’s government made everything worse by caving to every last Social Democrat demand, essentially continuing Merkel’s political strategy but now in the absence of any conceivable political benefit.

There is no longer any reason to vote for the Union and in fact no reason for the Union to exist at all. The people who really want infinity migration and the energy transition can just cast their ballots for the leftist parties that developed and supported these crazy policies in the first place. People who don’t want infinity migration and the energy transition, meanwhile, have nowhere to go but Alternative für Deutschland. Merz’s incompetence at the federal level moreover means voters blame the CDU for the stagnant German economy and our creeping deindustrialisation. Worsening economic conditions have also hurt the Social Democrats, but not as much. Partly this is because, as in Sachsen-Anhalt, the left has shared votes among themselves to keep the SPD viable. Partly it is also because a bad economy has driven young voters to Die Linke, which is in turn happy to help the SPD into government.

The left has an entire mutually beneficial party ecosystem to manage discontent and to shuffle their perpetually disappointed voters around among themselves. The Union, in contrast, has actively fought against the emergence of rivals to their right and thus has been reduced to a mere vessel for leftist policies. The Union furthermore remains alone in its commitment to solving Germany’s problems “from the political middle,” while the leftist parties of this notional “middle” – the Social Democrats and the Greens – are happy to form coalitions with the fringe elements of Die Linke wherever the possibility arises. Any party so committed to its own asymmetrical disadvantage as is the Union must sooner or later cease to exist.

As the AfD wins elections and gains strength in East Germany, additional forces conspire against the hapless CDU, which has triangulated itself into defending a worthless political no-man’s land. The general agitation against the AfD and the fight “against the right” has the effect of turning every last state election into a referendum on national politics, and nationally the Union is mostly despised. The CDU have responded to these trends by jumping on the anti-AfD bandwagon, on the one hand insulting their own voters (many of whom harbour AfD sympathies) and on the other hand sparing the left all serious criticism. Thus the Union cedes the AfD a total monopoly over the most valuable political real estate in Europe today, namely anti-leftism in all its forms – all while protecting and enabling the parties whose policies are slowly destroying them.

The reckoning is not over with, the disasters for the Union are still rolling in. The Social Democrats have now called into question Merz’s entire entitlements reform programme. Demands to oust Merz from the CDU party chairmanship have begun, and will grow louder. The latest national poll has the Union a record ten points behind the AfD:

Here’s exit poll data from ZDF for Meck-Pomm and Berlin …

…and here’s the slightly different prognosis from ARD:

These are mere prognoses and they’ll fluctuate slightly as the counting continues through tonight, but they’ll generally be accurate to within one or two points. We won’t know until late tonight whether the CDU in a historical first has failed to cross the 5% hurdle for representation in a state parliament, but as of now we can be certain that they logged their worst result in any election in the history of the Federal Republic, underperforming their heretofore worst performance in the Bremen 1951 election.

In both cases we will probably get leftist red-red-green governments consisting of Die Linke, SPD and Greens – under a Left Party mayor in Berlin, and under the Social Democrat Manuela Schwesig in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Once again I have a dinner appointment, but I’ll try to keep this post updated as count continues throughout the night.

UPDATE: CDU still hanging by a thread in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, both ZDF and ARD projections have them right at 5%, tendency declining as the count continues. BSW situation similar – right around 5% mark. Greens look secure with about 5.5%.

UPDATE II: The CDU is going to fall hundreds of votes short of the 5% cutoff for representation in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Landtag. About 40 districts remain to be counted as I type this, and short of a miracle there aren’t enough votes left in the uncounted ballots for the Union to make it from 4.84% (where they’re at presently) to 5% or higher. This has never happened before in the history of the Federal Republic and it may well spell the end of Friedrich Merz’s chancellorship. In some ways the destruction of the Union in MV is more significant even than the historic AfD victory in Sachsen-Anhalt on 6 September.

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Now, finally, everyone can see the truth of Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Since late 2024, I’ve had to read a lot of nonsense about this man. People have hailed Merz as our centre-right saviour who would put right three years of failed Green energy policy. Merz’s allies tried to sell him as a skilled foreign policy operator and foremost European Trump whisperer who would persuade the Americans to maintain their support for Ukraine in the war against Russia. Some of my own readers insisted that Merz was a nefarious Blackrock functionary who would get up to all manner of deviousness once he had the run of the chancellery.

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None of that was remotely true. Merz has always been what I said he was from the beginning – an incompetent politician, a stubborn and clueless man with no plan, no strategy and no real ambition for anything beyond being Chancellor. He continues the steady devolution I have seen in German politics throughout my adult life, a devolution according to which every successive head of state plumbs new depths of idiocy, proving that everything can always get worse. Merz makes Angela Merkel seem a political genius by comparison and he has spared even Olaf Scholz’s clowncar government the curse of being the biggest shitshow in the history of the Federal Republic.

Friedrich Merz has the worst approval ratings any pollster has ever detected; only 14% of Germans believe that he is the right man for the job. His authority within his own party has decayed so thoroughly that even obtaining the resignation of a disliked deputy General Secretary proved to be nearly impossible for him and the occasion for new public embarrassment. Twenty Union MPs have already rebelled against the tax reforms proposed by Merz and his coalition partners, the Social Democrats. Further mutinies brewing in committee will likely derail the entire November budget vote. As if that were not enough, just today the powerful leader of the Parlamentskreis Mittelstand (the “Parliamentary Group for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises”) all but demanded that Merz fire his Labour Minister, the Social Democrat Bärbel Bas – a move that would spell the end of the coalition.

Merz can’t appear in public without detractors spawning from some parallel universe to boo and heckle him off the street. No Union politician presently running for office wants to be seen anywhere near him, but the Merz curse is powerful even when you keep the man out of sight and hundreds of kilometers away. If present polls are to be trusted, the CDU will see their worst-ever result in any election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern this Sunday. There exists a strong possibility that the Union won’t even make it over the 5% hurdle for representation in the Landtag. The Sachsen-Anhalt debacle was bad enough; Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is shaping up to be even worse.

Even those not mired in campaigns have learned to avoid their cursed Chancellor. On the evening of 6 September, Merz invited CDU state premiers to the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus in Berlin to present a united front as the party faced its impending electoral disaster in Sachsen-Anhalt. All but one serving Minister President snubbed him, leaving Merz to pace and fret about the multifarious conspiracies swirling beneath him in his party.

Merz for his part has done nothing but confirm the general impression that he is an incorrigible idiot. After the catastrophic Sachsen-Anhalt vote, he gave a shell-shocked press conference in which mumbled nonsense about how he plans to improve his emotional communication and pointlessly railed against his own deputy parliamentary group leader. Two days later, he set aside prepared remarks in the Bundestag to deliver a deranged rant against Alternative für Deutschland, in which he bizarrely taunted the party for achieving only 44% of the vote and accused its members of supporting “ethnic cleansing” under the rubric of remigration.

So personally finished, so politically dead is Merz, that great swathes of his party are presently telling every journalist who will listen about their desperate plans to topple him and replace him with another, more perfect Chancellor. Many expect that Merz’s chancellorship has mere days or weeks of life left in it, and that if a more competent successor can take the reins, the bleeding of the Union can be stopped.

Apparently, it is above all the state leaders of the CDU who are convinced Merz has to go. This would be because his disastrous performance is harming their own local prospects, and it is at the state level above all where the pain of AfD ascendance is felt most acutely.

There is, however, no easy way to get rid of a German Chancellor. Merz has never expressed interest in resigning, and neither he nor anyone in his office has suggested he might bring a confidence vote to the floor of the Bundestag. Merz thinks he’s doing a fantastic job, he has no idea what a fuckup he is, and he has no plans to give up. This leaves as the only other possibility a constructive vote of no-confidence supported by the CDU against Merz. This, too, is pretty much inconceivable. The present plan is thus for the state premiers of the CDU to approach the Chancellor and convince him to give up, perhaps by credibly threatening a constructive no-confidence vote to oust him. At that point, Merz would have little choice but to pass the baton to one of their own number.

And here we encounter the second major problem, namely that of who should replace our dead Chancellor walking. There needs to be one obvious successor on whom everybody can agree, because the last thing the Union wants is to give Merz’s catastrophic chancellorship a sequel in the form of a catastrophic power struggle. Journalists like to say the obvious replacement is Hendrik Wüst, the dismal left-leaning Minister President of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Yet Wüst is a centrist Merkelian, well to the left of much of the CDU Bundestag faction, and his candidacy already faces quiet, implicit opposition from his conservative rival, the CSU Minister President of Bavaria Markus Söder. Yet equally powerful reasons speak against Söder as Merz’s successor, for there has never been a Chancellor from the CSU and many Christian Democrats would oppose toppling one of their own in favour of a replacement from their smaller, Bavarian sister party. A contrary, outside possibility aired here and there is the right-leaning Boris Rhein, the Minister President of Hessen, but I’m not sure how much of that is wishful thinking.

It’s highly unlikely a new Chancellor could turn anything around. Merz has been uniquely terrible at his job, but the CDU and the CSU have problems that go well beyond one man’s personal incompetence. The firewall against the AfD compels the CDU to make leftist politics with leftist parties, which places the Union in a political no-man’s land. Everyone who really favours the left will sooner or later just vote for the Social Democrats, the Greens or Die Linke; everyone opposed to the left will increasingly vote for the AfD.

Even a cactus could handle the political communication better than Merz, but communication is vastly overestimated among political elites, who find it convenient to chalk up every failure to poor messaging. A replacement could conceivably show more interest in and skill for the nuts and bolts of politics – the backroom horsetrading, threatening and head-cracking – but there are hard limits here because the firewall itself is the greatest source of Union weakness. The CDU can’t force terms on Greens or Social Democrats because they can’t credibly threaten to walk away and form a government with the right-populists instead.

For a long time now, Merz’s government has been propped up by the sheer lack of alternatives, and there is a good chance Merz himself benefits from this same force. Politically, Merz is dead, and we will now see how long Germany can stumble forwards with a zombie Chancellor who can marshal no support, pass no legislation, and achieve nothing else politically beyond the demise of his own party.

There will be some district-level recounts, some numbers might fluctuate slightly, but the preliminary results of Sunday’s cataclysmic election in Sachsen-Anhalt will not meaningfully change.

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• Alternative für Deutschland won 43.8% of the vote and 39 seats in the Landtag – just three short of an absolute majority. No party since reunification has ever performed this strongly in Sachsen-Anhalt before.

• The CDU substantially underperformed polls and logged their worst-ever result in this state since 1990, with just 17.2% of the vote and 15 Landtag seats. It is an unmitigated and deeply deserved disaster for the hapless Union.

• Die Linke/the Left Party, the Social Democrats and the Greens split the left vote more or less equally among themselves, after a (to me) unexpectedly successful tactical voting initiative. Each achieved eight seats with 8–9% of the vote – 24 seats in total for the entire left-party spectrum.

• The old-left Linke-offshoot party Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) substantially outperformed polls with 5.3% of the vote and five Landtag seats.

What this means is simple: The AfD have no majority of their own, but the anti-AfD cartel parties (CDU, SPD and Greens) with their would-be collaborators in Die Linke do not have any majority against the AfD either. Both blocs stand against each other in effective stalemate with 39 votes each. This leaves the BSW as kingmakers, and the BSW have already ruled out the possibility of working with the CDU, and so all possibilities accrue to the AfD side of things. As I said on the night of the vote, Ulrich Siegmund’s repeated pledges to rule alone or not at all were a campaign strategy, and now they have also emerged as a negotiating tactic. Siegmund has established his willingness to walk away if the BSW do not give him what he wants.

As for what will happen now, it is easiest to imagine that the AfD and the BSW will reach some kind of understanding and that Ulrich Siegmund will be sworn in after procedural wrangling as the first AfD Minister President of the Federal Republic. There would be no formal coalition with the BSW, but rather a toleration arrangement with the AfD in a minority government.

Ironically, AfD strength has all but foreclosed the possibility that CDU defectors might elect Siegmund to the premiership without BSW support. Three such defectors would be required for a parliamentary majority, which would be fully one fifth of the minuscule CDU faction. That is already a hard ask, and it becomes a still harder one when you recognise that the tattered remnants of the Union returning to Magdeburg will be nothing but the most loyal party functionaries.

Everyone who matters – including the CDU – has ruled out the worst conceivable outcome, namely another anti-AfD firewall coalition under Union stewardship. Yet some variant of this scenario remains distantly possible, because the BSW continues to voice its idiotic preference for a “cross-party” Minister President, and – as I said above – Siegmund might just walk away and refuse to stand for the top office at all. The “cross-party” premier would be a magical somebody voted into office either a) by everyone but the AfD, or b) by the BSW and the AfD together. In the former variant, this Minister President would have no clear mandate and no consistent majority for any conceivable agenda. In the latter variant, the AfD would propose some figurehead Minister President, the BSW would cosign it, and this figurehead would then fill his cabinet with AfD and BSW ministers.

Yes, that is as dumb as it sounds, but there’s maybe only a one-in-twenty chance that it comes to that. There’s not much fight left in the cartel parties of Sachsen-Anhalt. Multiple prominent CDU figures, including failed Union lead candidate Sven Schulze, have said the CDU should go into opposition in Sachsen-Anahlt, and Schulze has acknowledged that voters have given the Regierungsauftrag (the responsibility of forming a government) to Siegmund’s AfD.

In other amusing developments:

Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Sven Schulze gave a shell-shocked press conference yesterday.

Merz in particular seemed surprised at the Sachsen-Anhalt result. “We are all deeply shocked,” he said, “we did not expect it to happen like this.” This must raise serious questions about Merz’s information environment, given that the outcome of the Sunday vote has been eminently predictable for months. Merz further asked himself “how things could have come to this” and confided that he is “looking for the reasons within myself too” – acknowledging that his own controversies have been a constant theme in this year’s elections. As has become customary for failed politicians, Merz ultimately concluded that he needs to communicate better, but then upon realising that this is a shopworn cliché he added bizarrely that he must “try to connect with people more deeply on an emotional level,” because that will make everything better.

For some reason the firewall against the AfD is no longer the flavour of the month within the Union. Angela Merkel, once its staunchest enforcer, just today said that “I didn’t come up with it and I don’t particularly like it either.” Boris Rhein, CDU Minister President of Hessen, has called the Brandmauer “the wrongest path,” declaring with newfound democratic sentiment that his party should “talk to everyone, talk about everything, build bridges to the centre and not push people beyond firewalls.” This shift in sentiment is to be expected, as Unioners realise that they and not the AfD are the ones whom the firewall will shut out of government.

Naturally, not everybody is equally introspective. Arch-Merkelian Hendrik Wüst, CDU press favourite and Minister President of Nordrhein-Westphalen, has developed a new interest in banning the AfD, calling for a federal and state “working group” to look into this possibility.

The Turkish Association in Germany has declared that Sunday’s AfD victory means that all migrants in Sachsen-Anhalt face serious danger. Our hysterical activists have demanded that the government cease sending asylum seekers to Sachsen-Anhalt and also release all refugees presently in that state from their residence requirements. This follows earlier warnings from an advocacy organisation that as many as 80% of migrants in Sachsen-Anahlt might leave the state should the AfD enter government there.

…and slightly different numbers from ARD:

As the headline says, these are preliminary exit-poll numbers, but historically they’re generally accurate to within a few percentage points.

In the first (ZDF) version, AfD would be one seat short of an absolute majority. CDU, SPD, Greens and Linke would be able to outvote them, 42 to 41. In the second (ARD) version, the AfD would be three seats short, because the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) is scraping past 5% in this scenario. CDU, SPD, Greens and Linke would have the same share of Landtag seats as the AfD, namely 39.

Contrary to my speculations in yesterday’s post, the polls did not overstate the small parties, but rather seem to have understated them.

I have a full evening but I’ll try to update this post as new results roll in.

UPDATE 1: The big question yesterday was whether the Greens would make it in. Now the big question is whether the BSW makes it in. Despite everything Ulrich Siegmund has spent the last month saying, a five-seat BSW faction increases the chances of an AfD government substantially. AfD could receive several defections from CDU to make this happen, and the prospect of unpopular cooperation with Die Linke makes this more than conceivable. But AfD could also receive some measure of support from BSW or even enter a coalition with them, which is probably more likely than many imagine right now.

UPDATE 2: As votes are tallied further, it’s looking increasingly like BSW will clear the 5% mark. Likely Landtag seat breakdown is: AfD 39, cartel parties plus Die Linke 40 (CDU: 16, SPD: 8, Linke: 8, Greens: 8), BSW 4. The CDU in Sachsen-Anhalt are showing early signs of cracking as they fear defections to AfD in the Landtag; lead Union candidate Sven Schulze refusing clearly to affirm the anti-AfD firewall in a live television interview just now.

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The lunatic progressive-left Amadeu Antonio Foundation has formulated a horror scenario of all the deeply troubling and antidemocratic things the voters of Sachsen-Anhalt may be on the verge of enabling, which I am happy to present to you via the breathless histrionics of The Atlantic:

Imagine that it’s October 2026, and one of Germany’s 16 federal states has come under the control of a far-right government for the first time since the Nazi era. With an absolute majority in the state Parliament and one of its own installed as state premier, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, quickly begins implementing its agenda. The interior minister announces an emergency remigration program: abolishing asylum, revoking the residence permit of any foreigner convicted of a crime, pledging to review all naturalization decisions made during this century, and incarcerating those designated for deportation. The government stops classifying Ukrainians as war refugees and ends their social benefits. European Union flags disappear from public buildings. The mainstream press is shunned in favor of influencers aligned with the party’s ideology. The government authorizes vigilante groups to act as an auxiliary police force in regions with high crime rates.

You could be forgiven for wondering whether the Amadeu Antonio Foundation is running some kind of deep-cover pro-AfD campaign. All mainstream press coverage, activist whining and cartel-party rhetoric seems dedicated to the singular goal of constructing the AfD as a genuine alternative to the present dysfunctional political order of the Federal Republic. The enemies of the AfD want nothing more than to convince voters that the party will prove powerful and effective if given access to the levers of power. They will remigrate the migrants, fold up the rainbow flags and restore order. “Please don’t vote for the AfD, they might well just fix something.”

Some weeks ago, Der Spiegel ran a cover story on Ulrich Siegmund, lead AfD candidate in Sachsen-Anhalt. The piece called him “The most dangerous man in Germany” and supplied cover art evoking wanted posters from the RAF era:

“The AfD are hip and cool, countercultural, borderline illegal! Definitely don’t vote for them!” Inside, the piece mainly just complained about what a charming man Siegmund is and how effective he has proven at political messaging. Rarely have I read anything at such cross-purposes to the clear goals of its authors. These are levels of stupid we haven’t really seen in the German press since Covid. Undirected neuroticism and hysteria are making everybody dumb.

When they are not doing everything in their power to construct the AfD as the answer to everything, our political and moral superiors are issuing threats. Antifa groups have threatened to storm the Landtag building in Magdeburg in the event of an AfD victory. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned that an AfD government in Sachsen-Anhalt will cause investor flight and inflict “substantial [economic] damage” on the state. Three prominent Sachsen-Anhalt CDU politicians, including lead candidate Sven Schulze, have threatened that AfD educational reforms would endanger the recognition of school-leaving qualifications in the rest of Germany. Danyal Bayaz, Green Finance Minister of Baden-Württemberg, suggested that Sachsen-Anhalt under AfD rule might find its financing via the Länderfinanzausgleich (the so-called “Federal Financial Equalization System”) restricted. Perhaps most hilariously, the pro-migration umbrella organisation LAMSA threatened that as many as 80% of all migrants living in Sachsen-Anhalt would consider leaving the state should the AfD come to power there. And last but not least, the economist Reint Gropp has warned that an AfD government could cause the economy of Sachsen-Anhalt to enter an indefinite recession.

So the message, in summary, has been: Don’t you dare vote for the AfD because voting for the AfD might actually work. If you vote for them the left will get really pissed off and do some rioting, also a lot of bad economic things might happen for vague reasons we just pulled out of our asses, also it might ruin your children’s career prospects and also all the migrants might just leave Sachsen-Anhalt out of pique.

Nobody will be surprised to discover that this rhetoric has not worked and that AfD polling numbers remain strong, but I at least am a little shocked that we haven’t seen any more serious anti-opposition efforts of the kind we witnessed in the run-up to the European elections in 2024. Nor have we seen any hardball efforts to fortify the election, for example by lowering the 5% hurdle for Landtag representation. The reaction to this looming political defeat feels simultaneously resigned, depressed and directionless.

The chance that the AfD will win an outright majority and enter government above the district level for the first time in their twelve-year history stands in my estimation between 30% and 50%.

Everything depends on how many parties make it into the Landtag. As you know, smaller parties that fail to win 5% or more of the vote are excluded from representation entirely. The more parties that fail to cross the 5% hurdle, the smaller the percentage required to win an outright majority of Landtag seats. Right now it is completely certain only that the AfD, the CDU and Die Linke (the Left Party) will get more than 5%:

It seems more than possible that the SPD will make it into the Landtag as well – they’ve recovered slightly from their mid-summer doldrums and are back around 7%. The Greens are at 5%, and have at best a 50% chance of making it. Everyone now thinks it’s increasingly unlikely that the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) will get much more than 4%, as momentum has turned against them; and nobody believes the liberal FDP has a shot here.

The possibilities that await us tomorrow are therefore these:

1) A three-party Landtag, with SPD and Greens both failing to get more than 5% of the vote. In this case, there is no doubt that the AfD will have a clear majority of Landtag seats and that Ulrich Siegmund will be the next Minister President Sachsen-Anhalt.

2) A four-party Landtag, with SPD scraping in but the Greens falling short. In this case, the AfD will need to outperform the polls just slightly and capture 43% or more of the vote. This is conceivable but it will be close.

3) A five-party Landtag, with SPD and Greens both achieving representation. In this case, the AfD will almost certainly not win the vote share necessary for a parliamentary majority.

I think it’s possible (though I’m not totally certain) that our surveys are overestimating support for the small parties in Sachsen-Anhalt across the board. Most of the polls, remember, consist of percentages that are weighted according to the prior assumptions of the pollsters. Earlier this year, most polls seriously overestimated small party performance in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz, because these pollster assumptions were wrong. If that trend repeats in Sachsen-Anhalt, then it’s probably going to be SPD struggling with the 5% hurdle and the Greens well below it. Another reason to think this might happen, is the fact that turnout tomorrow is going to be enormous, if not record-setting. High turnout generally makes it harder for smaller parties to drag themselves across that crucial 5% mark, because it is the big parties and not the small ones that send most of the people to the polls in the first place.

Lest you think this is all motivated reasoning, you should know that the best outcome, from the establishment and especially the Union perspective, is an outright AfD majority according to either scenario 1) or 2). Should the AfD narrowly miss this goal, the Union would be compelled to seek support from the Left Party to form a government – an eventuality so distasteful to Union voters in the East that it could well result in an AfD government anyway, as many Union back-benchers would be tempted to defect and vote Ulrich Siegmund into the Minister Presidency.1 The ramifications of a political fuckup like this could well take down the Federal Government. Sven Schulze and the wider CDU fear the implications of being forced to cooperate with Die Linke so much that they’re contemplating a strange and unprecedented move to block the formation of a new government in Sachsen-Anhalt entirely.2

People in our sphere like to talk about this thing called the Overton Window.

Anytime somebody proposes a political initiative or a protest movement or a petition or a publicity campaign that is either manifestly unworkable, counterproductive or ill-advised, we hear that we should lend our support nevertheless, because whatever this misbegotten thing might otherwise be, it is absolutely sure to “move the Overton Window.”

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This fuzzy concept has been invoked so many times in so many contexts that it has become a parody of itself. I am tired of hearing about the Overton Window. I think it is a reductive and also an obfuscatory theory about mass democratic discourse that is promulgated only because it furthers the interests of specific people with large audiences and activist agendas. You don’t hear about the Overton Window because it is a useful model of policy or opinion formation. You hear about the Overton Window because it justifies the importance of countercultural discourse activists (I propose to call them “Overtonians”) and the kinds of things – protesting, tweeting, petitioning, podcasting, interviewing, publishing, and yes, even substacking – they get up to.1

Superficially, the Overton Window sounds unobjectionable enough, if not painfully self-evident. The term denotes (in the neutral formulation of Wikipedia) “the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” Also “key to the concept is that the window changes over time; it can shift, shrink or expand.” Thus the Overton Window comes inseparably packaged with the possibility of moving said window, primarily because Overtonians only talk about the Overton Window to the extent they claim to be dragging it about, like a suitcase. Less obtrusive but more important are the dubious assumptions and vague terms that the Overton Window brings in its wake. Chief among the former is the slyly unstated idea that the Overton Window is a singular, bounded entity. As for the latter, the curious mind will find itself wondering what “politically acceptable” means in practice and what this entity called a “mainstream population” is and where it is to be found.

Some concepts have so little substance they can hardly survive a review of their own history, and so it is with the Overton Window. The name comes from Joseph P. Overton, who worked at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a small free-market think tank in Michigan. In the 1990s, Overton found himself trying to explain why rich people interested in changing policy should give money to an organisation like the Mackinac Center that writes a lot of white papers while doing nothing overtly political. His pitch held that politicians are followers who at any given moment can select only from a range of publicly acceptable policies, and that it is the task of think-tankers like Overton to move this range of acceptability around by writing things, or something. Overton died in a plane crash in 2003 before he could publicise his framework, and his colleague Joseph Lehman was left to popularise the idea. Lehman gave the concept its name and tethered it to an equally dubious ladder of discursive stages, according to which any given political idea exists somewhere on a scale from unthinkable to radical to acceptable to sensible to popular to policy, depending on how it is aligned with our eponymous window.

From its very inception, then, the Overtonians fielded their concept of the Overton Window not because it provided a productive way to conceive of opinion formation or consensus, but simply as an argument for why donors should give money to the Overtonians. The term itself broke into the mainstream after Glenn Beck published a ghostwritten thriller bearing that name in 2010, after which internet discussion surrounding Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2015 promoted the Overton Window vastly beyond its competence into a General Folk Theory of All Discourse. For a decade it has been nothing but Overton Windows and the moving of them, which is a shame, because there are much more productive ways to think about how opinions and policies are formed in mass democratic systems.

To begin with, there is not one singular undifferentiated “mainstream” that acts on policy. There is a cultural elite responsible for opinion formation within the realms of those who hold political power, and beneath them there are the rabble, subdivided across various discursive sectors. Ideas may enjoy more or less popularity among the elites or the rabble, but they also have a another somewhat unrelated and vastly more important property we might call articulability. Any given position may enjoy a great deal of popularity while being essentially unspeakable or inarticulable in ordinary discourse; conversely, elites can and do enact highly articulable or speakable policies even when these are fundamentally unpopular. Here, ideological and moral systems impose constraints on the positions people can espouse and the way they can espouse them, while denying the advocates of many popular positions the intellectual authority and sometimes even the words necessary to press their views.

From Covid containment to climatism to mass migration, we see that elites again and again enact obviously wrongheaded policies well in advance of public opinion formation, and sometimes even before elite opinion itself has solidified. These are invariably policies which are highly articulable, which is to say they lend themselves to easy expression within the prevailing system of moral and political values. Saving lives, protecting the environment and welcoming refugees from war-torn lands sound like good ideas and they are boosted by a whole world of moral beliefs inherited from the liberal tradition. These high-minded measures bring with them a manic media-fueled euphoria before the eminently foreseeable consequences become clear. From that point on, these bad decisions are quietly opposed by growing numbers of people, first among the rabble but later also in specific elite sectors. Crucially, this opposition happens on inarticulable grounds, because in our highly egalitarian societies there is no easy way to say that saving lives is not always a reasonable end, that the only thing worse than emitting too much CO2 is emitting too little CO2 and that our states do not exist to succour the world’s unfortunates.

I’ve expressed articulability in binary terms, but it’s better to think of this property as finely variable and audience-specific. All ideas, from Maoism to anarcho-capitalism, will of course enjoy articulability among specific subcultures, but the more this articulability depends upon foreign moral systems or arcane terminology or unfamiliar prior beliefs, the less articulability these ideas will enjoy beyond their originating fandom. Ideas that are broadly articulable across many audiences and within the elite specifically can travel quite far regardless of their popularity. The Davos set in particular proved to be prolific collectors of every last highly articulable yet deeply unpopular idea they could find, from degrowth to insect protein to fifteen-minute cities.

It is tempting to blame everything on flabby Western liberalism, but simple social acceptability is probably the most powerful factor influencing how far arguments and ideas can travel. The most highly articulable ideas all seem at first glance friendly, frugal, inclusive, charitable, selfless, kind, nurturing, gentle and open. They appear to be about sharing rather than taking, equalising rather than singling out. Everything that can be argued on soft terms like these enjoys outsized social acceptability and thus an enormous advantage. Conversely, ideas which seem to be exclusive, selfish, unkind, complex or rooted in hierarchical assumptions confer social stigma and take a serious articulability hit, however prudent and advisable they may be in fact. In conditions of mass democracy, the soft and the infantilising will be preferred over the hard and the necessary again and again.

States and the politicians who purport to manage them do not just receive and implement the substance of public opinion. They act instead through highly complex, heavily bureaucratised institutions, which control not only what politicians can do but also which problems they can even perceive and fundamentally how they conceive of their scope for action. Clearly, opinions which make their way into elite circles can influence institutional and therefore state behaviour, but via their institutionally mediated actions states shape political discourse in turn.

The institutional filter is therefore another very huge piece of the puzzle here. State institutions have enormous inertia; they fix and maintain orthodoxies for years and generations, even as consensus shifts beneath them. They monopolise most areas of state policy and they work primarily out of view, because most of the things states do are not the subject of any political discussion. In countless areas, these institutions implement policies according to dominant paradigms (what two theorists have called “policy images”2) which explain which problems are to be solved and how.

These paradigms and their associated policy monopolies benefit specific people, but as in all things there are inevitably losers whom they harm, and when policy goes bad or cultural consensus shifts the pool of losers and discontents grows. Crucially, this doesn’t matter initially and sometimes it never matters at all; institutions are well-insulated against public opinion, they don’t have human moral understandings and they’re happy to impoverish, ruin and kill people. Opponents can succeed only via generational turnover, or if they can get rival institutions to take an interest in their cause. Oppositional views no matter how popular can only exercise influence once they have gained this crucial institutional purchase. From there they have some hope of shattering the prior paradigm; new policy images, with differently aligned institutional monopolies, then emerge to fill the new space. States do not calibrate their actions according to slow adjustments of any windows. They rather experience long periods of institutional and political stasis, punctuated by moments of sudden realignemnt.

In summary: The Overton Window is a simplistic fable about political discourse and nobody serious should mention it. There is no single, coherent window of socially acceptable ideas that can be moved back and forth, compressed or expanded. Rather, different pools of ideas maintain currency across different parts of the political spectrum, often wholly discontiguous from each other, often with considerable overlap. Public discourse is better modeled as a two-tier system, with cultural elites acting as gatekeepers and ideas benefiting from prior inherent and contingent articulability. The popularity or currency of any given proposal does not matter very much; many policies are enacted against popular opinion or well in advance of its formation. Unless Overtonian advocates can find an institutional venue for their opposition, their advocacy will go nowhere no matter how many people they win over to their side.

This dreadful clown of a woman is named Susan Sziborra-Seidlitz.

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She is the lead candidate for the Green Party in Sachsen-Anhalt and she is fighting for her political career and the broader relevance of her party, which may not make it into the state parliament when voters go to the polls this coming Sunday. The AfD, on the other hand, are on the verge of achieving an outright majority and entering government for the first time. Yes, you read that right: the good citizens of Sachsen-Anhalt are on the verge of voting their way back into Evil Fascist Nazi Hitlerism again.

This displeases Sziborra-Seidlitz because she really hates Nazis, or at least she claims to. It’s actually hard to know what she thinks of the undisputed card-carrying Nazis who ceased to exist formally in 1945 and almost all of whom are either dead or among the oldest people presently alive. At least I couldn’t find her saying much of anything about those guys. Sziborra-Seidlitz saves most of her bile for the far more politically useful purported Nazis with whose politics she disagrees. These are the kind of Nazis she really loathes.

Some years ago Sziborra-Seidlitz helped author a press release suggesting the local CDU politician Robert Möritz might be a Nazi because he served as an usher at some “neo-Nazi demonstration” when he was 19 and had a dodgy tattoo. When Möritz pleaded these were youthful mistakes, our problem glasses-sporting schoolmarm doubled down. Years later in 2024, Sziborra-Seidlitz accused lead AfD candidate Ulrich Siegmund of maintaining close relations with Nazis, because Siegmund was among a few attendees at a meeting on “remigration” in Potsdam.

Of course Sziborra-Seidlitz has not waged her witch-hunt against these incredibly nefarious if equally scarce neo-Nazis alone. In these cases she was merely contributing to much bigger and more general discourse. The AfD in general are smeared as Nazis all the time, particularly the AfD in Sachsen-Anhalt, because nothing makes you more Nazi than being likely to win an election while also being in the political opposition. To make the case, journalists have reported unceasingly on a few politicians in the AfD Sachsen-Anhalt chapter who spent a youthful year or two in a since-banned microscopic hard-right group nobody ever heard of before called the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend (“German Youth Loyal to the Fatherland”). Pleas that these were teenage stupidities irrelevant for these candidates’ present politics have fallen on deaf ears.

I type all of this because it makes this story all the more hilarious:

The husband of Saxony-Anhalt Green Party lead candidate Susan Sziborra-Seidlitz was apparently a leading figure in Quedlinburg’s neo-Nazi scene in the 1990s. In a 1995 Antifa magazine, David Seidlitz was listed as a “well-known neo-Nazi in the town” and associated with a group called the “Deutsche Recken” … Today, Seidlitz serves as the Greens’ regional manager for Central Saxony-Anhalt.

When approached by a journalist from Compact magazine, Sziborra-Seidlitz stated that her husband was “a flawless democrat, unlike the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt.” As early as 2022, she had commented in the state parliament on her husband’s past, saying that Seidlitz had been friends with a well-known neo-Nazi at the time because of a “highly polarised youth culture” in Quedlinburg. Yet she claimed he had never been a leading member or part of a group. Today, she said, Seidlitz is also a staunch “antifascist,” and she continued that his career path shows there has been “potential for democratic maturation” over the past 30 years.

Here’s a clip from the Antifa magazine at issue …

… and here’s a blurry photograph of David Seidlitz himself, posing next to various other confused teenagers fearsome fascist revolutionaries:

Now, it is my policy not to call anybody a neo-Nazi or a former neo-Nazi unless that person actually identifies this way, simply because almost everybody smeared as a Nazi these days has a rather different opinion about his true political orientation. When the primary source is some underground Antifa rag, still more caution is warranted. In this case, though, scruples would be superfluous because everybody involved – including Seidlitz himself – appears to agree enthusiastically that he really was a neo-Nazi back in 1995.

Yesterday, Sziborra-Seidlitz gave an amazing speech in which she addressed these grave charges against her husband, primarily by explaining that they are not so grave after all. She said she considers this whole issue of her husband having been a neo-Nazi “irrelevant for the future of this state.” She bemoaned “the quite crude smear campaign” to which she is being subjected because she is married to an ex-neo-Nazi. She explained that her husband had merely “hung out with right-wing extremists” and insisted that this was just how “the youth scene” worked in Sachsen-Anhalt back in the 1990s. She implied loads of people did the same thing or worse, and she said this was all 30 years ago. Afterwards Green Party heavyweight (and Minister President of Baden-Württemberg) Cem Özdemir took the microphone and explained why it’s actually great to have the spouses of ex-neo-Nazis in government. It merely shows, he said, that Sziborra-Seidlitz is “firmly rooted in real life” and it proves that Sziborra-Seidlitz “understands how to turn people who hate this country – the Nazis – into good citizens.”

Who knew that a leading Green Party politician in 2026 would be arguing before a cheering leftist crowd that marrying ex-Nazis is good actually.

This is the most insane timeline.