The enshittified robot politics of Mario Voigt, or: How a plagiarist and AI fraud came to govern Thüringen and why nobody can do anything about it

In December 2024, Mario Voigt became Minister President of Thüringen, sworn in at the head of a political monstrosity known as the blackberry coalition. This is a minority government tolerated by the former communists of Die Linke and cobbled together from Voigt’s own CDU (black), the old-left Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (purple) and the Social Democrats (red). The parties of the blackberry coalition have nothing in common and nobody in Thüringen really wants this misbegotten government. Its entire purpose is to keep the largest party in the Thüringen state parliament, Alternative für Deutschland, out of power.

Voigt is a strange rodentine man; we’ve met him before. He’s the guy who demanded the state issue “revocable social media licenses” for the privilege of commenting online. He enjoys the dubious distinction of being the first head of government in the history of the Federal Republic to promote an ex-Stasi officer to a cabinet post. Such are the measures necessary to defend democracy in this, the best and most democratic Germany of all time.

More relevant here is the fact that Voigt plagiarised substantial portions of his doctoral dissertation. In January, following an internal investigation drawn out long enough to ensure that Voigt faced no awkward questions while he was forming his obstructive government, the Technische Universität Chemnitz officially stripped him of his Ph.D. Voigt has appealed the decision, but according to me he has no prospects of vindication, particularly as much more evidence of his plagiarism has since come to light. Once upon a time, plagiarism was enough to end political careers in the Federal Republic, but too many establishment politicians have been caught doing it and nobody cares anymore. Were Voigt to resign over such a minor matter as blatant intellectual dishonesty, that would benefit the AfD, and anything that benefits the AfD must be bad, so keeping plagiarists in high office must be good.

In the past weeks, Voigt has stumbled into a new and much more hilarious scandal. It all began when he co-authored a puff op-ed for Welt demanding more German-language radio music. The text was so vacuous and riddled with so many repetitive antitheses that everyone immediately recognised it as an AI screed: “Music is more than just entertainment. It is a language, an identity, a cultural self-image”; “This decline [in German radio music] is no coincidence. It is the result of structures that favour the global and cause the local to fade into the background”; “This continuity [in the German music tradition] is not nostalgia. It is an argument.” Lest you think I’m cherry-picking, have a longer taste – purely machine-translated via DeepL, so you know I’m not adjusting the style to make it any more robotic than it actually is:

More German-language music does not crowd out international quality. An additional voice broadens the sound – it does not restrict it. Especially at a time when so much is becoming more global, faster and more interchangeable, the need for a sense of direction is growing. For something that endures. Our language is such an anchor. Our culture is such an anchor.

It creates a sense of belonging without excluding anyone. It fosters identity without isolating us. This debate is no trivial matter. It is a question of cultural self-assertion. Not loud. Not shrill. But clear. For only those who have a voice of their own can be heard in the concert of the world. It is up to us – not through coercion, but through conviction – to give it the space it deserves.

Voigt responded to the ensuing uproar very strangely, telling a reporter that “I can’t understand all the fuss,” adding that “I can only encourage everyone to use AI” and insisting that his office’s reliance on large language models to churn out low-effort political slop is “a testament to the quality of modern Thuringian politics.” Notably, Voigt made no effort to downplay his ridiculous op-ed as an error originating with some subordinate and he made no promise to actually write his own op-eds in future. If you’re thinking that’s likely because our strange little man has been using AI in all manner of shameless ways to write all kinds of things for years now and he knew his shenanigans were about to be discovered, you’d be right.

Last Tuesday, investigative journalists at Frag den Staat published an extensive exposé. They ran eleven of Voigt’s speeches through the AI detection tools Pangram and GPTZero and discovered that only one appears to have been written entirely by a human. Three, meanwhile, are entirely LLM products. Voigt turns out to have used chatbots to compose very sensitive speeches, among them a funeral oration for the former Thuringian Minister President Bernhard Vogel. Sample quote the first: “What remains of such a life? Not the chronology. Not the offices held. Only the attitude with which they were carried out.” Sample quote the second: “We spoke on the phone as recently as January this year. He gave me some ideas for Thüringen. I am well aware that I am not merely stepping into the office of a predecessor, but also into the legacy of a high standard.”

Also composed entirely with the assistance of some AI tool was a speech Voigt delivered at a memorial service for the victims of National Socialism on 29 January 2025. Of these victims, he strangely intoned that “Their eyes were empty and yet infinitely deep.” Achieving heights of banality that would prove difficult even for the stupidest of humans, he declared that “Auschwitz was not the work of some imaginary monster. It was the work of people who believed their actions were in line with a higher purpose.” In words devoid of humanity (because they were written by a computer), he deplored the Holocaust as “the result of a mindset that abandoned humanity bit by bit – in words, in decisions, in indifference.” Voigt reused substantial portions of this speech several months later at an event to commemorate the liberation of Buchenwald, an occasion for which he did not even deem it necessary to get Gemini to spit out a new speech.

Voigt has also used AI to write various newspaper pieces in addition to the Welt trainwreck that set off this controversy. His most spectacular offence is a 2025 op-ed for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung demanding minimum age requirements for social media. The piece attributed quotations to Jonathan Haidt and two other self-appointed social media experts that were entirely hallucinated by his chatbot. When FAZ asked Voigt’s office for comment, they issued a bizarre statement insisting that their use of LLMs to write articles and fabricate quotations is part of an “AI strategy” intended to make the state government of Thüringen “fit for the future.” FAZ promply denounced Voigt’s op-ed as contrary to their editorial guidelines and unpublished it.

There are so many things to say about this delicious scandal. Nobody expects a head of government to personally author all of his speeches, but the serial reliance on AI suggests that neither Voigt nor his staff have anything to say at all, or (what is worse) any idea of what they should be saying. That they’re willing to take such obviously defective and vacuous AI compositions to the public without a second thought speaks volumes about what unselfaware idiots all these people must be. Imagine showing up at some Holocaust event and declaring with a straight face that the victims of National Socialism had “empty” yet “infinitely deep” eyes, without once asking yourself what the fuck you’re even talking about. Most damning of all, however, is the fact that Voigt has been letting AI speak for him for at least 18 months now and nobody noticed until a few weeks ago. Voigt finds himself in a wonderfully symmetrical position: He has no ideas or thoughts on the one hand, but nobody gives a shit about his ideas or thoughts on the other hand. Voigt isn’t in office to do any particular thing or to have any particular vision or to pursue any particular goals. He is in office purely and entirely to keep the AfD out of office, which is also why Voigt could not care less that he’s been outed as a fraud before the entire nation. He can never be forced to resign, because that would benefit the Evil Hitler Nazi Fascist party. Enshittified robot politics to stop fascism is what Germany is all about these days.