The sad farce of German "democracy"

To live in Germany in 2024 is to be lectured constantly about democracy. An endless parade of doubtful personalities – pundits, experts and a lot of very shrill women – appear on the television every night to tell you which parties are democratic, which people are democratic and therefore who enjoys democratic legitimacy. As we have seen, however, the whole concept of democracy is very confusing. Those people and organisations who want to mute free expression and ban political parties are all held to be extremely democratic, while those parties that demand more direct democracy and talk constantly about respecting the popular will are the direct modern equivalent of illiberal antidemocratic fascists.

To make all of this even harder, we are told that the upcoming September elections in Thüringen, Brandenburg and Saxony present a grave threat to democracy. To counteract this threat we have things like the Thüringen Project, where our greatest legal minds are at this very moment brainstorming ways to defend Thuringian democracy from the political preferences of actual voters. Crucially, the very existence of the Thüringen Project means that democracy must still reign supreme in Thüringen. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the democratic police of the Thüringen Project to defend. We therefore need only study Thuringian politics in their present state to gain a better idea of what this mysterious, shape-shifting, elusive phenomenon we call German democracy might be.

We will start at the top. The current Minister President (i.e., governor) of Thüringen is a highly democratic man named Bodo Ramelow:

Ramelow is a member of Die Linke, or the Left Party, which is the direct successor of the Socialist Unity Party (or SED) that used to govern the DDR. That might seem baffling, as the SED and the DDR were anything but democratic. Still more baffling is the fact that the constitutional protectors suspected Ramelow of antidemocratic tendencies and even surveilled him for many years. But democracy as we have learned is extremely complicated, and whatever antidemocratic essence Ramelow may have harboured in the past, he is a stalwart democratic politician today. He is also a huge fan of the mobile game Candy Crush, which he enjoys playing during government meetings. That at least seems unambiguously democratic, and perhaps it is even enough to overcome Ramelow’s political unreliability in other respects.

Ramelow first became Minister President in 2014, in a coalition government formed by Die Linke, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens. Ramelow then appointed a man named Stephan Kramer to head the State Office of Constitutional Protection in Thüringen:

Kramer, who will become important later, is a member of the leftist Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which was founded by an old Stasi informant named Anetta Kahane and which is active in extremely innovative democratic pursuits like internet censorship. Democracy, we have seen, just gets more and more complicateder.

In the 2019 Thuringian elections, some very nearly anti-democratic things happened. To begin with, the eminently democratic coalition of leftists, socialists and Greens lost their absolute majority. What made that worse, was the fact that the evil fascists of Alternative für Deutschland doubled their representation, largely at the expense of the pro-democratic CDU. It was hard for the luminaries of German democracy to work out how to form a government in this undemocratic situation. Nothing could be more antidemocratic than forming a coalition with the AfD, so that was out. Some people dreamed of a grand CDU, SPD, FDP and Green coalition, but that never happened. In the end, everybody thought it best for the SPD, Die Linke and the Greens to form a minority government with the support of the CDU and the FDP, who found it vastly preferable to keep the AfD out of government than to govern themselves.

Thus did our extremely clever if scheming politicians manage to restore the status quo from 2014 and save democracy from those filthy antidemocratic voters who had delivered a clear mandate for a very different, right-leaning government.

All, however, was not quite safe for democracy. There still remained the matter of who would be Minister President. The SPD, the Greens and Die Linke obviously wanted their brave leader Ramelow to serve another term, but he failed in the first and second round of parliamentary voting. In the third round, the FDP candidate Thomas Kemmerich won. The FDP is a resolutely democratic party, but you would have to be a naif to think that Kemmerich’s victory was anything but grossly antidemocratic. The problem is that he’d been elected with the help of AfD votes, and this made him more or less a fascist by association. Everybody in Germany decried this antidemocratic turn of events. Angela Merkel in particular was very upset. She interrupted her South African junket to declare that Kemmerich’s election was an “unforgivable event” that would have to be reversed. Within a day, the personally democratic if situationally antidemocratic Kemmerich was pressured to resign. Courts would later declare Merkel’s intervention unconstitutional, but somehow all of this was still intensely democratic, which just shows you how complicated democracy is.

Having learned that democracy in Thuringia cannot easily be divorced from outcomes that favour the left, our chastened parliamentarians rapidly elected Bodo Ramelow to serve another term as Minister President, which is of course what they should’ve done in the first place. This was all extremely, almost sublimely democratic, although in such a complicated way, that some people wondered if things had not gone a little bit too far. Perhaps there had been too much of this new complicated democracy. Ramelow therefore promised to hold new elections to remove any doubtful aura attaching to his Minister Presidency, but he never got around to that, being prevented in this by other profoundly democratic things like the pandemic response.

All of this means that Ramelow continues as Minister President to this day, Candy Crushing his way through tiresome committee meetings. It also means that our stalwart constitutional protector Stephan Kramer remains in office, vigorously defending this bold new form of Thuringian democracy against the popular will, from which it has almost completely divorced itself. Under Kramer, the Thuringian constitutional protectors declared the AfD to be “proven right-wing extremists” in March 2021. On state media a few days ago, Kramer explained that they had made this classification public “because one of our tasks is to make voters aware of this danger so that their decision at the ballot box will hopefully help prevent extremists from coming into government.” Kramer further emphasised that “I will do everything I can between now and election day, within the scope of my legal options and civic duties, to ward off the extremist attack.” Those words – “extremist attack” – are how Kramer refers to the AfD election campaign, because they are just so antidemocratic.

In summary: A constitutional protector who owes his office to a Minister President who was appointed to a second term via the anti-constitutional interventions of outsiders is now vowing to use his office to forestall political developments that may deprive his Minister President of power in the future. It is almost like “democracy” in Thüringen is synonymous with left-wing government. Elections which threaten to deprive Bodo Ramelow of office or his left-wing coalition of power are by definition anti-democratic, deplorable and perhaps even illegal.

Thuringians can vote for whichever party they want, but their votes are only democratic if they are cast for those specific parties. If Kramer has his way, Thuringia will soon achieve the democratic end-state – one in which the sad reality of popular sovereignty in practice will be replaced with a theoretical popular sovereignty that exists entirely in an ideal, Platonic form, unchanging and as it ought to be, now and forever.