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.

Populist political movements face fierce opposition from the establishment press everywhere they exist, with unrelenting hostile coverage across all public and private media. This has forced the opposition to lean heavily on social media platforms, and regime-adjacent reporters have responded by tarring these platforms as cesspools of “Russian disinformation” and algorithmic manipulation in turn. This state of affairs has profoundly shaped politics over the past decade, permitting the opposition to make serious inroads among younger demographics who care little for newspapers or broadcast television, while (especially in Europe) leaving older segments of the population with more traditional media habits largely out of the loop. In consequence, populist parties and movements often seem young, cool and trendy, and have also acquired an array of anti-fragile properties.

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Not everything about this media landscape is peace, joy and pancakes, however. Informal social media networks constructed around specific e-celebrities and their interlocking audiences often prove erratic and unreliable. While everyone involved in media – social or otherwise – must attract audiences for subscriptions and advertisements, the peculiar pressures of social media mean that influencers active there are less reporters or pundits than they are entertainers. The reasons are structural: Social media platforms reward overtly entertaining content above all else, and things like long-form investigative journalism or deeply researched political documentaries require overhead and institutional backing beyond what most successful posters have at their disposal.

You can take the measure of these incentives (and their frequent perversity) by observing the transformation of Tucker Carlson, who at Fox News was an incisive polemicist and pundit, and who as an independent content creator has platformed an array of kooks pushing foolish internet fables like chemtrails and aliens (which Tucker believes are demons) and Epstein-Mossad conspiracy pablum. Carlson alas is more the rule than the exception in this area. Vast portions of the populist opposition have succumbed to the conspiratorial interpretations of the internet brainrot industry, losing themselves in a true-crime soap opera simulacrum of political reality. What is good for podcast subscription numbers is at the same time terrible, self-defeating politics.

Last weekend, Jennica Pounds, better known as the MAGA-adjacent influencer Data Republican, stirred up a massive and quite pointless controversy that illustrates other ways in which social media influencers can be counterproductive and even actively harmful to the causes they claim to champion.

For those who don’t know, Pounds runs the grant-indexing website datarepublican.com and she has nearly one million followers on X, where she came to prominence through critical posts on NGO funding chains that attracted the attention of Elon Musk.1 I’ll be the first to acknowledge that Pounds has done valuable work, even if I find her tone a little shrill and her conclusions sometimes gratingly sensationalised. I can accept that much of that is necessary; a lot of what unfolds on social media comes wrapped in a loud tabloid aesthetic.

In a series of (since-deleted) posts made on 21 and 22 August, Pounds accused Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah B. Rogers of attempted entrapment. The story itself is so trivial it’s hardly worth summarising. Basically, Rogers met Pounds and provided her with materials documenting a Biden-era effort by the Global Engagement Center to monitor and inform responses to “gendered disinformation” in domestic American discourse. One of these documents carried a residual stamp from an earlier distribution to Congress reading “Not for public release,” and others contained FOIA-related redactions. Rogers clearly thought she was giving Pounds a tip and sources for a story that would further the political messaging of the Trump administration and Pounds’s own work as an investigator of government corruption and malfeasance. Leaks and tips like this are pedestrian; they’re how politicians and government officials shape public opinion and they’re the basis of a great part of political reporting.

Any journalist would’ve either accepted Rogers’s tip or, if uninterested, simply passed on the story. Pounds, however, decided that Rogers was pursuing a “deep state” entrapment plot – unaccountably assuming that merely receiving the “sensitive documents” placed her in some kind of legal jeopardy.2 In fact nothing Rogers passed to Pounds was at all sensitive, and Rogers proved as much by posting the contents of these supersecret highly dangerous materials to X herself. At the height of the controversy, Pounds’s loud and appallingly ignorant followers began demanding the resignation of a sympathetic and politically aligned State Department official_, while other MAGA slopfluencers joined the fray with their own dark and deeply idiotic insinuations. After multiple wrongheaded posts, including vain appeals to the all-knowing Grok (who also told Pounds her fears were overblown) …

… our heroine went silent, then deleted her more risible xeets and published an odd AI-composed non-apology ….

… which Rogers accepted, to the extent one can accept non-apologies like this.

I don’t agree with the Under Secretary of State that Pounds’s “distrust” was “understandable.” Pounds continues to post histrionic justifications of her indefensible behaviour, including this deeply strange AI-assisted essay that opens with an extended encomium to noted internet lolcow James Lindsay (of Archangel Michael conspiracy fame) before proceeding to bafflingly constructed arguments that either make no sense or are flatly wrong:

I corrected my own record before anyone could extract the correction out of me. That being said: that is the only disavowal I am willing to perform. I will say when I got something wrong. I will not restore my standing by spending someone else’s.

To see what I mean, first look at the structure of what I walked into: Hand a person sensitive documents and every move they can make reads as guilt.

– Keep the documents and it is possession

– Publish them and it is leaking.

– Act on them and it is undermining the government.

– Say nothing and it is complicity.

That was what instigated the panic in me. There was no non-liable move I could make with those documents. That is exactly the kind of procedural trap that has ensnared many good conservatives like Jeff Clark. I had no reason to trust the actual person giving me documents. Every action becomes evidence.

Elsewhere Pounds writes of Rogers as her “handler” (which I guess would make her some kind of secret agent) and complains about the “asymmetry” in her relationship with the Under Secretary:

Remember that all of this was provoked when Rogers did Pounds a small favour by providing her a tip about an ephemeral propaganda operation conducted by the Biden administration.

At this point one presumes the U.S. State Department will avoid social media influencers like the plague and send their stories to boring rank-and-file journalists at places like Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. They’re at least able to investigate tips without making themselves the story (most of the time anyway). And while it’s easy to lampoon Pounds’s hysteria, it’s rather more sobering to read the thousands of replies from her fiercely loyal followers who on the one hand have stuffed their social media profiles with all the MAGA signaling the character limit will bear and who on the other hand believe what Pounds is doing is just the best thing ever.

The depressing truth is this: Had Pounds simply published a piece about the revelations Rogers had given her, she would’ve earned only the smallest fraction of the clicks she achieved through her panic attack. I fear that those who follow social media personalities strictly for content are in a minority; vastly greater numbers want to be active spectators in a kind of political sportsball. They view favoured internet personalities as main characters in broader struggles and are all too willing to believe that through their likes and retweets and donations they can join the battle against phantom deep state communist plots to sideline their favoured intrepid exposers of NGO corruption. Successful political messaging and opinion-shaping campaigns seem threadbare and boring by comparison; people who specialise in useful nuts-and-bolts content like that will always find themselves playing second-fiddle to the drama queens and the fantastic conspiracists.3

Among the grave and increasingly obvious limitations of populist politics is that their discourse is forced into a chaotic and unreliable media environment subject to these counterproductive dynamics. It’s a frustrating and shitty situation and I doubt there’s very much to be done about it.

Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor at the centre of an explosive plagiarism and diversity hiring scandal, was found dead Friday at his home in Battersea. His family have a released a statement strongly implying that he committed suicide. Arday was 41 years old.

A noisy minority of self-righteous simpletons hope to place responsibility for Arday’s death with the people who exposed his fraud and the ridiculous hiring practices that brought him to prominence.

Beware always of false dichotomies. Arday was both “a culture war pawn” (and quite a willing one) and a “fucking human being.” In fact there are a lot of fucking human beings around, billions of them, so it’s hard to know how that changes anything. Suicides are solely responsible for their own deaths and do not become special put-upon victims the moment they take their own lives. That is an important line to hold, and not only because some of what follows will be critical of Arday: Nobody should be constructing suicide as a means of farming sympathy or of striking back at one’s critics, because suicide in most cases is a profoundly anti-social and destructive answer to one’s problems. Particularly for a father of two children, as Arday was, killing oneself represents a seriously selfish and narcissistic act.

I was a professor for many years in the United States, and I’ve had abundant experience with diversity hires and their enablers. Below the fold, I want to explain how people like Arday come to be hired in the first place, why many of them turn out to be such terrible people, why institutions like Cambridge are so desperate to defend them even when they’re caught in indefensible misconduct, and why the entire ad hoc system of preferential minority hiring is even more ridiculous and counterproductive than many imagine.

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Basically, the State Office for Coastal Protection in Schleswig-Holstein embarked upon a project some years ago to replace the Missunde II, an old diesel automobile ferry that connects the towns of Missunde and Brodersby …

… with the hypermodern superclever very progressive Missunde III, which runs entirely on solar power and also looks like a poorly assembled Ikea coffee table:

Our climatists promptly sold the old Missunde II for 17,000 Euros, but then they realised that the Missunde III didn’t really work. Its large overhead solar panels acted like a sail in stiff winds, she had trouble handling the currents of the Schlei and she was too heavy for her guidance cables and thus had trouble mooring at the dock. While authorities tinkered with their retard prestige project, all commuters between Missunde and Brodersby had to take 30km detours across the nearest bridge, and so this brave effort to further the green economy of Schleswig-Holstein ended up actually increasing carbon emissions.

With no solution in sight and the locals up in arms, the Office for Coastal Protection before long went limping back to the buyer of the decommissioned Missunde II, who agreed to sell the old ferry he had bought for 17,000 Euros back to them for 100,000 Euros.

That was the state of play in September 2024. Since then, Schleswig-Holstein has sunk more money into repairing the old Missunde II and into retrofitting the Missunde III – all for nothing. Since last weekend, Missunde III has actually been in service, but she still can’t reliably moor, and a full 6.5 million Euros later, authorities have finally given up. The Missunde III will be retired as soon as the old diesel-powered Missunde II can be made inlet-worthy again.

Renowned climatist idiot Daniel Günther, the faintly hydrocephalic Minister President of Schleswig-Holstein …

… has nevertheless spoken vaguely of retrofitting the diesel Missunde II with an electric drive: “We are working to ensure that it has a propulsion system that meets the criteria for climate and environmental protection.” As Apollo News reports, precisely such a retrofit was what Schleswig-Holstein considered doing all the way back in 2019 – before discovering that it would be about as expensive as buying a new all-electric ferry, and then opting to build a vastly larger and much more expensive ferry, just because.

Nobody knows what will become of the entirely useless enormously expensive zero-emissions Missunde III, although Günther has promised that “A solution will be found.”

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Consider three recent anecdotes from German politics:

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1) In a rambling editorial recently printed in his organisation’s own newspaper, the deputy federal chairman of the Union of Police argues that German police cannot support Alternative für Deutschland: “Anyone who takes his oath of office seriously has no choice: the AfD is a no-go! By virtue of the oath they have sworn, police officers cannot vote for, support or join a party that is hostile to the constitution.” Should the AfD enter government in Sachsen-Anhalt following the September elections, he argues that state riot police should work together with the Federal Police on the strength of article Article 91 of the German Basic Law to intervene against the government of this East German state, all in order “to restore constitutional order.”

2) A year ago, the Social Democrats (SPD) nominated a terrible pinched woman named Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf for a seat on the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. In part because Brosius-Gersdorf is a horrible person and in part because Chancellor Friedrich Merz is an incompetent fool, the nomination provoked a grassroots revolt within the centre-right Union parties. After multiple Union MPs refused to vote Brosius-Gersdorf onto the court, citing her unacceptably liberal views on abortion, not only the SPD but also the Greens and the press and elements of the CDU embarked upon a sustained temper tantrum about the interference of alternative media and populist elements in court nominations. The CDU Minister President of Schleswig-Holstein Daniel Günther in January complained that “NIUS and similar websites” – which he characterised as “opponents of our democracy” – were responsible for sinking Brosius-Gersdorf’s nomination. When asked whether Günther was saying that “we need to regulate [alternative media], we need to censor it if necessary, and in extreme cases even ban it,” Günther agreed: “Yes.”

3) After the February 2025 elections, Alternative für Deutschland became the second-largest party in the Bundestag, with 151 MPs; the Social Democrats booked historic losses and landed in third position, with just 120 MPs. The AfD assumed their second-place finish would entitle them to the second-largest party caucus room. This chamber, officially designated “3S 001”, has been occupied by the Social Democrats since 1999; they christened it the “Otto-Wels-Saal” after one of their political heroes. Despite their shrunken numbers, however, the SPD refused to relinquish their room, and ultimately the establishment parties used their combined votes on the Bundestag’s cross-party steering body (the “Council of Elders,” or Ältestenrat), to compel the AfD to accept a substantially smaller chamber. Despite their reduced numbers, the SPD continues to caucus in their overlarge “Otto-Wels-Saal,” while the AfD have been granted a supplementary room to ease crowding. Their legal challenges have thus far failed.

I could provide many more examples in this vein, but three are enough for my purposes – these being to describe how Germany is actually governed and how the establishment parties of Germany consider their relationship to the state.

In civics class, parties appear as little more than informal election-winning cooperatives. Now and again “the sovereign” – that is to say, “the people” – may grant one or various parties a limited right to govern, but the state is held to be in some sense public property. Politicians and their parties are at best its temporary custodians.1

Our Democracy Enjoyers particularly deplore state systems in which parties have captured the state – a special political form we might call the “party state.” Germany became a party state after 1933, when the NSDAP seized the entire state apparatus and outlawed all competitors. Contemporary states owned and operated by single parties include China, Cuba and North Korea. Our Democracy Enjoyers hate all single-party states because they are not democratic.

Party states need not however be single-party states. While the Socialist Unity Party (SED) effectively owned the DDR, they tolerated an array of subservient bloc parties from the very beginning. None of these parties ever had any chance of governing; they functioned only as extensions or alternative faces of the SED itself. These parties included gutted, early opposition parties like the CDU (Ost) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPD), but also SED concoctions like the Democratic Farmers’ Party (DBD) and the cynically post-Nazi National Democratic Party (NDPD). The SED cultivated these parties both as a democratic figleaf and also to integrate “non-proletarian” (particularly Christian) elements within the communist system. The precedent of the DDR shows that the party state can assume various innovative forms and that multiple parties may be useful for political, propaganda or other purposes.

My thesis of the Federal Republic is that it is also a party state. The only difference between the DDR and the BRD is that, in the BRD, several different parties share ownership of the state among themselves.

The three anecdotes at the head of this piece reveal this party ownership in incidental but telling ways. They show, for example, how a substantial portion of the police consider their oath of office to preclude loyalty to a democratically elected opposition party. Should the voters go rogue and install any such party at the state level, a prominent police union functionary openly hopes for insurrection and federal intervention. Periodically voiced ambitions and campaigns to cleanse the civil service of AfD elements come from a similar place. The ownership parties cannot countenance opposition creep into the bureaucracy, because they correctly regard the bureaucracy as their property.

The hysteria surrounding a thwarted SPD nomination to the Federal Constitutional Court reveals that the parties that own the BRD extend their proprietary interests not only to the executive and legislative branches, but also to the allegedly independent judiciary. The ruling parties have divided the prerogative to nominate judicial candidates informally among themselves. This prerogative is so jealously guarded that a leading Union politician cited a single thwarted SPD nomination to make the case for mass censorship and regulation of “alternative” media.

And while it is a minor incident that hardly matters, the dispute over the Otto-Wels-Saal shows that the proprietary feelings of the state parties extend to physical architecture, even specific rooms and buildings, which the parties of the party state regard not as public property but as their very own chambers – to name, possess and use as they see fit.

While progressive liberal political systems are all oligarchies, and this because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, they are not all party states – far from it. The party state is a clunky and outmoded political system that historically arose out of accident or necessity, generally following a revolution perpetrated by a single party or political movement in a moment of particular ascendance. The Federal Republic was founded as a party state in 1949, mainly to foreclose the possibility that subversive National Socialist or communist elements might return to influence via democratic processes. This is the basic meaning of German “defensive democracy,” which denotes an array of legal or constitutional tools for the parties that own the state to fend off or criminalise competitors.

The parties do not all own the state equally. The Union parties and the Social Democrats act as more or less equal partners. Considerable electoral losses have made it more procedurally difficult for the SPD to enact its vision, but the Union continues to recognise SPD co-ownership of the state where it counts. The ordo-liberal FDP has but a small share in the ownership of the BRD, and as their decline continues they may sooner or later face outright dispossession. The Greens, meanwhile, could be welcomed as co-owners only in the political reshuffling that occurred after reunification. You could say that the SPD granted some of their share to the Green Party after 1990, and that the Greens have capitalised on their junior position by making special inroads among social elites and the press in particular.

If you want to go into politics or influence political outcomes in a party state, you have to do that by joining and then rising through the ranks of the state party, which is where all the real politics happen. In Germany, this means applying for membership in the CDU, the CSU, the SPD or the Greens. Founding new parties or political movements is permitted only insofar as these never achieve any significance. If your movement or your upstart party does matter, you’ll find yourself in serious shit. One clear symptom of a party state – particularly in parliamentary systems – is a party apparatus that never changes and remains effectively frozen in amber, generation after generation.2 While many other European countries have seen substantial upheaval their party systems, the German party landscape (setting aside the late addition of the Greens) has been fixed since the 1950s.

The AfD has been shunned as an illegitimate neo-fascist threat from the moment of its foundation, when it was merely a Euro-sceptic “professor party” full of disaffected CDU elements with no real nationalist bent. Elites are fairly open about the reasons for their hostility: They believe the AfD has manipulated democratic procedures (see my first footnote) to insinuate their way into a state that is not theirs to run. As the AfD has gained strength, the establishment parties of the party state have responded with increasingly brazen cartel tactics to keep the upstarts out of government, in the process laying bare a great deal about how Germany is actually governed. Any cooperation between the CDU and the AfD would signal an intention on the part of the Union to prise the state away from the state’s effective co-owners, which would constitute something approaching a coup. This is why any hint of rapprochement between Union politicians and the AfD causes such hysteria, and why there can be no compromise here, now or ever.

I write about this because state elections in Sachsen-Anhalt are rapidly approaching, and the AfD in that state remains on the edge of achieving an outright parliamentary majority. Even if they fall short of a majority, various procedural and other imponderables might still land them in power despite the total opposition of the establishment parties. We will soon learn, for the first time in the entire history of the Federal Republic, whether mere democratic procedures are enough to break the hold of the party state. In general, I am pessimistic that they are, even if I’m not sure what tactics the powers that be will deploy against procedural setbacks.

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I have some things to say about Ceuta:

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Contrary to various claims, the Spanish Supreme Court Judgment of 29 June 2026 did not grant a right of indefinite residence to migrants who swim their way to the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta. What that judgment did do, is inspire social media rumours among would-be young North African emigrants that Spain was suddenly open to them, perhaps particularly if they chose a watery route. These migrants spent the latter half of July networking on websites like Facebook and gathering in Moroccan Fnideq, just south of Ceuta. Finally they charged the enclave border en masse on Thursday, largely unopposed by Moroccan border security, which may have been simple incompetence or a sly effort by the Rabat government to punish Spain for recent rapprochment with their rival, Algeria.

Nobody knows exactly how many migrants surged into Ceuta, a town of 85,000 people, because nobody was in a position to count. It was perhaps as many as 70,000. Some came over land, but many others swam around a small concrete breakwater into the enclave. The new arrivals – overwhelmingly well-nourished and ill-behaved young men – set about rioting, looting and giving breathless interviews to naive New York Times reporters on the lack of career opportunities in North Africa. In the absence of any 2015 German-style welcoming committee, shelter or provisions, many of these petty criminals and lowlives then returned whence they came, but thousands have stayed.

This video was taken in Ceuta on Saturday night:

And this video of migrants transporting a wounded comrade and shouting “Allahu Akbar” was shot Sunday afternoon:

Local officials estimate that between 3,000 and 5,000 migrants are still in Ceuta as of today. Spanish police are arresting individual migrants on the street for deportation to Morocco, but the operation appears sporadic and slow-going. European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen at first pledged to monitor the situation with particular intensity; today she offered to increase Frontex support for the enclave. Pedro Sánchez’s government reportedly ignored advance warning from intelligence services about the pending influx, and heads of state across the European Union have criticised the leftist Prime Minister’s flatfooted reaction, with Giorgia Meloni and some of her top ministers going so far as to demand Spain’s suspension from Schengen.

Many have seen in these remarkable events a deliberate weaponisation of mass migration by state actors to punish or pressure Spain for whatever reason. That the Rabat government might have initially tolerated the crossings is the scenario with the most precedent, but for me these speculations mostly miss the point. The most obtrusive factor here is just the incredible weakness of EU border security, which our leaders have happily outsourced to neighbouring third countries like Morocco, in the process ceding these countries incredible leverage. Thus all it takes to overrun ancient Spanish territory in North Africa is a diffuse social media propaganda campaign, limited cooperation from organised smuggler networks and the momentary inattention of Moroccan border police. Europe stands at the mercy of whatever random geopolitical upset, third-world economic malaise or passing confusion can summon the hordes.

The reason this post is so late, is that I just hate repeating myself. As the same things happen over and over again, I have to fight ever harder to find an original perspective. I read my older posts on the migration problem now with some faint embarrassment, because I think the standard explanations I once entertained for this strange and unprecedented phenomenon are at best minor footnotes to a problem that can best be explained by some combination of inattention, disinterest and weakness. The migrants aren’t really a great labour force; they remain overwhelmingly on the dole and unemployed. The humanitarian thesis feels increasingly post hoc to me – a story we started telling ourselves when the migration was already happening and we needed somehow to feel good about it. And some parties on the left may once have hoped that the migrants would form a favourable client class to cement their political dominance, but on the electoral front migration has served only to fuel the rise of the populist right.

Mostly these insane things happen because we’re weak, and our leaders have lost interest in basic state functions like border security. They’ve moved on to more interesting and exotic projects – weird social engineering projects to stamp out whatever they imagine “the right” to be, weird energy projects to phase out fossil fuel combustion, weird governance projects to relocate responsibility over many aspects of the economy and daily life to unelected managers and technocrats. Mass migration is in nobody’s interest but it keeps happening because the flabby and distracted states of Europe can’t be arsed to stop it.

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Yesterday evening at around 10pm, a man directed a white Citröen Space Tourer delivery van from Lennéstraße into the Tiergarten in Berlin – accelerating through a crowd that had gathered for the closing rally of Christopher Street Day. One woman died at the scene and 29 were injured, three of them critically. The van ultimately struck a tree, at which point its occupant fled, attacking bystanders with a machete. The CSD rally at the Brandenburger Tor was dispersed minutes later at around 10:15.

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German police spent most of today conducting an ever-widening manhunt for their prime suspect in this attack, a 21 year-old German citizen and Berlin resident of Lebanese descent named Abdul Ballout.

Ballout had rented the van from its private owner and his mobile telephone was found inside it. Masked SEK officers raided Ballout’s apartment in Tiergarten/Schöneberg today, but he was not present. Officers also searched his sister’s apartment in Neukölln/Treptow, this too in vain. Then at around 6pm this evening, another SEK unit found Ballout’s hideout in a garden allotment in Berlin-Spandau. Officers shot Ballout dead after he lunged at them with a bladed weapon.

Ballout was born in Germany to a naturalised Lebanese mother, and he has been known to security services since he was a teenager. They had classified him as an Islamist Gefährder, or a clear threat. His previous criminal convictions include assault and robbery. Most recently, he attempted to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State, but he was detained after a tip-off from German authorities in Lebanon, where he spent three months in custody. Finally the Lebanese shipped Ballout back to the Federal Republic, and he was held pending trial for “preparing a serious violent offence endangering the state.” The Tiergarten Magistrates’ Court found Ballout guilty and sentenced him in May 2026 to a year and ten months imprisonment. Yet they reportedly granted him “conditional release” on the condition that he attend a deradicalisation programme operated by the “Violence Prevention Network.” Ballout met with the deradicalisers twice in June and July; they found him evasive and insincere. His third meeting was set for this coming Monday – two days after the terror attack he perpetrated.

Police apparently had Ballout under intermittent surveillance in the months since his conviction. Some weeks ago he posted a picture to social media featuring a gun. Officials raided his apartment but found only a toy weapon.

Some early reports and witness statements suggested there may have been two perpetrators, but thus far police do not appear to be searching for any other suspects. By all accounts Ballout seems to have acted alone.

This afternoon, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz addressed the attack in a eulogy at the St.-Marien-Kirche on Alexanderplatz. He mentioned neither Islam nor mass migration, insisting instead that “intolerance, exclusion, discrimination, rude language and offensive jokes” had a part in Ballout’s violence.