In which the cartel parties of Germany make a literal communist and alleged Stasi collaborator the Senior President of the Bundestag to keep the office away from Alternative für Deutschland

Sometimes defending democracy is complicated.

This man is Gregor Gysi.

Today he served as the Senior President (the Alterspräsident) at the inaugural meeting of the twenty-first Bundestag – a role awarded to the parliamentary representative with the greatest seniority.

Since the nineteenth century, the Senior President was simply the oldest member of parliament, but in 2017 the cartel parties of Germany changed the rules, awarding the Senior Presidency instead to whomever has the most parliamentary experience. They did this to prevent the office of Senior President from accruing to anyone from Alternative für Deutschland.

According to the traditional, pre-2017 rules, the 84 year-old AfD representative Alexander Gauland would have acted as Senior President today. The reforms have happily spared us that profoundly undemocratic fate and granted us the eminently democratic Senior President Gysi instead. We should all be very grateful and also relieved, because the Senior President gets to chair the Bundestag until the election of a proper President, and he also gets to give a speech. You can only imagine how a cryptofascist like the elderly ex-CDU politician Gauland might use these prerogatives to abolish democracy and establish the Fourth Reich all within the space of a few hours. This is literally how democracies die.

While Gauland’s membership in the AfD makes him unfit for the office of Senior President, Gysi’s democratic qualifications are nothing less than stellar. For example, Gysi is a member of Die Linke, or the Left Party – the rebranded successor of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) that once ruled the DDR. That already sounds very democratic, but there is more! Gysi was also a member of the SED, and he even became party chairman in December 1989, shortly before German reunification. As if that weren’t enough to establish Gysi’s democratic credibility, there are also the longstanding allegations that he informed on his fellow East Germans for the Stasi. He is basically a gigademocrat, this Gysi!

In his speech today, Gysi defended democracy in multifarious ways. For example, he praised the openly Communist politician Clara Zetkin, who served as Senior President in the Reichstag in 1932 and openly demanded the revolution of the proletariat. He also complained about the poor reputation of the DDR in modern Germany; the communist legacy, he said, is too often reduced to “the Stasi and the deaths at the wall,” whereas we tend to overlook the considerable progress that the DDR made in other areas, for example in achieving equality for women.

All I can say is, thank God we had Gysi to preserve democracy in the Bundestag today, and not that filthy fascist Alexander Gauland. Who knows what evil things Gauland might have said. Perhaps he would’ve talked about antidemocratic things like restricting migration in accordance with the political preferences of a majority of German voters; perhaps he would’ve raised antidemocratic critiques of German economic stagnation; perhaps he would’ve even leveled antidemocratic attacks on the energy transition. Instead, we had Gysi, that beacon of Western liberalism, casting himself in the tradition of Weimar-era communist revolutionaries and telling us why the DDR wasn’t really all that bad after all.

I am sure that today’s events will do nothing but increase the confidence of East Germans in our brave democratic experiment. The poor Ossis may have had to endure 41 years of drab apartment-block communism, but since 1990 they can truly enjoy the open freedom of Western liberalism. Every day, in the newspaper and on television, the Ossis get to hear from their Wessi betters about how the most popular party in East Germany is fascist and should be banned, and today they got to watch the political establishment bend the rules to welcome a former SED politician and possible Stasi collaborator into the political mainstream. In no way will the Ossis interpret these contortions as yet another move to marginalise their political influence in the reunified Federal Republic.