Sometimes I read that the greatest national fault of Germans, at least in the political arena, is our tendency towards authoritarianism or fascism or the like. This is an amateur opinion and my readers will know better. Our real fault is our exaggerated thoroughness, that is to say our dedication to doing the same thing longer and harder than everyone else – well after we have passed the point of diminishing returns, until in our zeal we become a living refutation of our own ideological convictions and a general warning to everybody else against the path we have chosen.
A lot of the stupid things we get up to politically would not actually be so stupid were we not to pursue them with such dogged thoroughness. History furnishes a wealth of examples, as does the present. Many of our more sensible neighbours, meanwhile, prove the corollary, namely that you can get away with a lot of equally crackpot policy if you maintain healthy levels of detachment and lapsed commitment and you don’t take yourself or your ideas too seriously.
The firewall which the CDU maintains against Alternative für Deutschland has become the latest tragic illustration of German thoroughness. Other parties in other countries have levied their own cordons sanitaires against the populist right, but nobody has pursued this strategy with such ruinous totality as the German Union parties. An absolute prohibition on achieving any parliamentary outcomes whatsoever with a firewalled party can only work as long as that party remains quite small. The larger a firewalled party becomes, the more flexible your firewall has to be. Otherwise, you end up ceding vast political territories to your enemies beyond the wall you have built, ultimately walling off yourself instead.
This will be the fate of the Union in the coming years, and indeed it is already the fate of the Union in Sachsen-Anhalt today. The AfD received 43.8% of the vote on 6 September, enough for 39 of 83 seats in Magdeburg. The CDU, meanwhile, shrunk from 40 seats to 15. Discipline within the shrunken Union ranks has totally collapsed, with these 15 MPs finding themselves divided across no less than three (!) internal factions. At least four of these Union MPs appear to be in dealings with the AfD, to save their political careers if nothing else, and they have already violated the firewall once by helping elect the first AfD Landtag president in German history on 6 October.
The hysteria over that vote refuses to subside because it portends a second firewall failure on 15 December, when the state parliament will convene a plenary session to elect a new premier in the form of AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund. State CDU leadership are presently searching for ways to prevent their own scattered rank-and-file from helping the AfD into government. The things they are getting up to are nothing short of crazy, we have never seen anything like this before. It is an absolute farce and some of it might even be illegal. The firewall is in its death throes in Sachsen-Anhalt, and this is what that looks like.