Dumb taxpayer-funded legal bloggers pen a 36-page manual outlining all the things Alternative für Deutschland should definitely absolutely not be allowed to do if they ever come to power

Every day I encounter yet another hamfisted pseudoacademic propaganda operation eagerly churning out oceans of text to shore up the German political establishment. The idea seems to be that with just enough whitepapers, bursting with just enough words, the situation might still be saved.

There are just so many of these outfits, they grow like weeds in the fertile soil of government funding. This Sunday, it has been my dubious pleasure to stumble across the “academic and journalistic open access forum of debate on topical events and developments in constitutional law and politics” billing itself as the Verfassungsblog (the “Constitution Blog”). This factory of tedious prose and political special pleading that nobody will ever read is not just the eccentric side project of a very socially concerned lawyer named Maximilian Steinbeis, oh no. It is funded by the WZB Berlin Social Science Center (and therefore, indirectly, by the German taxpayer) and also by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. We would do well to take these people seriously, in other words, and you should keep that in mind, because things are about to get very ridiculous.

Last year, our state-funded Verfassungbloggers realised that elections were approaching in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg. This worried them terribly, because Alternative für Deutschland dominates polling in all three states. They feared that this “authoritarian populist party” might seize control of one or more state governments, just as other authoritarian populist parties have seized control “in Poland and Hungary, in Florida and Texas.” These parties are very bad, because they “use … power … so that they no longer have to relinquish it.” They “manipulate electoral law” and “stifle opposition” and “pack the administration and judiciary with their own people.” As if that were not bad enough, they also “make the media, scientific and cultural institutions dependent on their will.” Of course, the Federal Republic is presently ruled by a party cartel system that is already doing all of that, but the difference is that none of the parties involved are “authoritarian” or “populist.” The priests of democracy get to do whatever they want, and whatever they do is by definition democratic.

In this spirit, our Verfassungsbloggers launched the “Thüringen Project.” Their aim is to identify how the forces for humanitarian pluralism might manipulate the law, stifle the opposition and pack the administration and judiciary in even more extreme ways than have yet been imagined, all to subvert the will of east German voters and more effectively blunt the power of the AfD when they become the strongest party in the Thuringian Landtag.

To run the Thüringen Project, our Verfassungsbloggers hired a raft of “research assistants,” a “communications manager,” and two doctoral students in the area of “federal-state relations.” They then asked them to submit moody headshots for the “who we are” section of their website …

“Marie Müller-Elmau is research assistant for the Thüringen Project at Verfassungsblog. She studied law and philosophy in Munich, Hong Kong and Berlin.”

… and put them to work doing something called “iterative (looping) qualitative scenario analysis.” I don’t know what that is, but my best guess is that it amounts to fantasising about what might happen in our dark authoritarian populist future and having tedious repetitive conversations about it.

All of this iterative looping has culminated in an overproduced, 36-page .pdf file bearing the characteristically cumbersome title “Strengthening the resilience of the rule of law in Thüringen: Action recommendations from the scenario analysis of the Thüringen Project.” No syllable can be spared in our campaign to defend democracy. In the pages of this plan, they finally define what “authoritarian populist parties” are. These are parties that “use the narrative of a natural, ‘true’ people in opposition to ‘corrupt elites,’ for the purpose of delegitimising pluralistic democracy and establishing an authoritarian regime.” The AfD are of course “a clear example of such a party.” The more panicked all of these people get, the closer they come to saying plainly what they’re really afraid of, namely the growing hostility of native Germans to an increasingly isolated political elite, which plainly does not care much about “authoritarianism” (they are responsible for plenty of that themselves) as much as they are terrified of losing their hold on power.

In their introduction, the Verfassungsbloggers go on to say many more revealing things, for example that “authoritarian-populist parties work with the constitution, not against it,” and that they operate “without necessarily violating laws and constitutional rights.” This makes it hard to understand what is the problem with these “authoritarian populists,” if they are just operating within the law and doing things that the constitution permits. Our research assistants never really answer this question, insisting merely that we need “concrete solutions for the protection of democratic institutions.” As always, we must erode democracy in order to save it.

They have looped up seven specific means of attenuating democracy in Thüringen to protect it from a democratically elected plurality of AfD representatives. Two of them (adjustments to procedures for electing the Landtag president and the Minister President) I don’t care that much about, but the other five are pretty eye-opening:

1) The AfD must be deprived of any chance to influence the makeup of the judiciary. Towards this end, our Verfassungbgloggers propose making it easier to elect judges to the Constitutional Court. These elections presently require a two-thirds parliamentary majority, raising the possibility that the AfD could block unsavoury candidates. A smaller majority should be required so that the “democratic parties” can override the objections of the strongest democratically elected party. They call this “strengthening the resilience of the constitutional court.”

2) The AfD must be deprived of the chance to cancel funding for state media. Presently, the Thüringen Minister President (that is, the state governor) has the power to cancel state contracts unilaterally. An AfD Minister President could therefore theoretically cancel state media funding, in which case “the nationwide financing of [state] broadcasting would be severely impaired.” The law should be changed such that the Minister President can cancel contracts only with parliamentary consent.

3) The AfD must likewise be deprived of the chance to dissolve or influence the programme of that other state propaganda arm, the State Centre for Political Education in Thüringen (LZT). Legislation should be enacted to insulate the LZT from the control of the state parliament and enshrine it as a quasi-independent entity, so that they can continue educating everybody about the true meaning of democracy with taxpayer funds, regardless of what the taxpayers wish to be educated about.

4) The AfD should not be allowed to appoint or dismiss the state intelligence chief (the President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution) and the police commissioner. Both offices should be transformed into something like pure civil service positions and no longer staffed by political appointees. Our Verfassungsbloggers note that “political neutrality is particularly important in the exercise” of these offices, and that they should not merely “cooperate with the government on common political goals.” The reigning parties, of course, have been using the constitutional protectors as a naked political tool for a long time now, and cooperating with politicians on political goals has long since become the guiding purpose of the constitutional protectors. Often, one only recognises abuses when your opponent is in a position to take advantage of them.

5) The AfD should not be allowed to conduct popular, non-binding referenda. This one is by far the most amazing. The problem with such referenda, we read, is that they would lend legitimacy to the AfD programme and make it hard to oppose popular initiatives. Thus they “are not instruments of direct democracy, but rather campaign instruments” which somehow “bypass democratic institutions.” Also, Viktor Orbán is fond of “national consultations” so they are ipso facto bad for that reason alone. The Thüringen constitution must be emended to make such referenda illegal, that is how bad and dangerous it is, to ask the voters what they want.

There are two things to say about this.

The first and most obvious, is that, for all their tedium, our Verfassungsbloggers have at least provided us with a handy list of things the AfD should prioritise if they ever come to power. It would seem, from reading these recommendations, that the establishment believe their rule rests primarily on three pillars: 1) The judiciary and specific deep state institutions like the police and domestic intelligence agencies; 2) state media and related propaganda operations; and 3) the exclusion of the people from political decision-making. If the AfD do get into government, they need to pack the courts, take control of the appropriate agencies, shut down the state media propagandists and involve their supporters – if only symbolically – in the political process. Imagine what a big sad all these Verfassungsbloggers would have in response, it is almost worth it for that reason alone.

The second and rather subtler thing, is that our Verfassungsblogger-in-chief is a west German, who is here coordinating an entire “project” about how best to subvert east German politics. As I wrote last September, reunification begins to resemble something like occupation or even neocolonialism from the perspective of the east. West Germans own most of the valuable real estate in the east, they control all major eastern media outlets and they even supply many of their leading politicians. When the press and our Verfassungsbloggers smear the strongest eastern political party as anti-democratic, they are drawing on old, longstanding suspicions that easterners still have a little too much of the DDR flowing in their veins, that they’re poorly adapted to democracy and that they must have their elections managed by wiser, farsighted western ambassadors of liberalism. It is of course very much the opposite. Our eastern brethren have had a taste of all this before and they’d very much prefer to avoid a second dose. The blind arrogance of these people makes me so angry, that I now and again think about moving to the east and voting for the AfD just to spite them.