Thuringian parliament descends into chaos after Alternative für Deutschland antidemocratically and fascistically insists on adhering to established laws and procedures

The farce of German democracy marches on.

They never tire of telling us that we live in a democracy.

This means that that dreaded mass known as “the people” are permitted – with however much groaning and reluctance – to present themselves every four years to choose their representatives. These representatives then betake themselves to the parliament, where they form some manner of government, which proceeds to rule us in highly democratic ways. This is is literally the best thing ever, except for the fact that “the people,” in their profound stupidity, cannot always be relied upon to vote for the right parties. Sometimes they vote for the wrong ones, and in these cases democratic solutions must be found to rein in the rabble’s undemocratic exercise of democracy.

The people of Thüringen have proven themselves particularly inconvenient to democracy, in that they have exercised their democratic rights to vote overwhelmingly for the evil, fascist and antidemocratic party known as Alternative für Deutschland. What makes the AfD so evil and fascist is never quite explained, but we hear all the time that they are very bad so the point must be beyond question. The people of Thüringen transgressed against democracy so powerfully, that they gave the AfD 32 seats of their 88-seat state parliament – far more than they granted to any of the upstanding, democratic parties. These parties include such paragons of democratic virtue as Die Linke (the Left Party), which somehow manages to be both officially democratic and also the direct successor to the DDR-era Socialist Unity Party (they got a mere 12 seats); the Linke-offshoot party known as the Bündnis Sahra Wageknecht (they got 15 seats); the Christian Democrats (they got 23 seats); and the Social Democrats (they got 6 seats, lol).

Now, a naive person might think that the AfD, being the party most favoured by the people of Thüringen, should enjoy certain parliamentary prerogatives. Existing procedures, for example, grant the strongest party the right to propose candidates for the office of parliamentary president. The president is the person who presides over the meetings of the parliament; he is like a glorified committee chair and his powers are not all that great. The very idea that the AfD might have the right to suggest their own candidates for president, however, strikes enormous fear into the hearts of the “democratic” parties, who are determined to save Thuringian democracy by all the antidemocratic means at their disposal. If necessary, we must destroy democracy itself, to save the Thuringian parliament from the spectre of a democratically elected AfD president.

This brings us to the absolute unprecedented clownshow that unfolded yesterday at the Thuringian parliament in Erfurt. It was set to be a day of boring, routine procedure, when the newly elected parliament would constitute itself and elect a president. Thüringen is anomalous, in that this state – alone of all the federal states of Germany – has a specific law mandating adherence to parliamentary procedures. New parliaments cannot just change these procedures on the fly; they have to be officially constituted as a legislative body first. These legally mandated procedures require that an acting “senior president” preside over the first meeting of the new parliament. This senior president is simply the oldest member of the dominant party – in this case an affable rotund AfD politician named Jürgen Treutler.

Jürgen Treutler, the supergenius fascist who discovered that all you need to do to establish fascism is follow all democratic laws and procedures rigorously and to the letter.

According to custom, the senior president opens the first meeting with a speech. Then he appoints provisional secretaries, determines that there is a parliamentary quorum, and presides over the election of the parliamentary president who will replace him. When this president is elected, the state parliament has been officially constituted, and it can act in its parliamentary capacity – for example, by changing the procedural rules that have governed it down to this point.

All of this should have happened yesterday, but it did not, because our brave, upstanding democratic parties were determined to take a stand for democracy by antidemocratically denying the AfD their parliamentary prerogatives. Specifically, they wanted to force an early change of parliamentary rules, to specify that all parties – and not just the AfD – may propose candidates for president. Thus Treutler had hardly begun his customary speech when the heckling and shouting from the ranks of the CDU began. They insisted that Treutler recognise a quorum and take up proposals to change the nomination procedure. Treutler insisted that he had to follow the legally mandated procedure and that this was out of order. The hecklers in the CDU kept shouting; Treutler and the other AfD members kept pointing out that the new parliament had to be constituted before it could change its own legally binding procedures. The democratic parties did not care about this, because they had just discovered a few days ago that the Thuringian law mandating parliamentary procedures is unconstitutional, although it dates from 1994 and nobody had thought to question its constitutionality before. At one particularly embarrassing point, Andreas Bühl, from the CDU, shouted at Treutler that “what you’re doing here amounts to a seizure of power!” The word he used – “Machtergreifung” – alludes directly to the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933, because nothing smells quite so powerfully of Nazism as rigorously adhering to stuffy decades-old rules that are, again, legally mandated and that no court has yet overturned.

Andreas Bühl bravely opposing the superfascist procedures of the Thuringian Landtag that his own party neglected to change because they thought these rules would benefit them.

Ultimately, in the depths of his fascism, Treutler adjourned the parliament so that the CDU might consult the state constitutional court on the procedural legalities in question. The court is expected to decide any moment now. I can imagine few things that are more distinctly fascistic than this, and I shudder to think how our democracy will ever survive it.

Because Germany has spent the past decade transforming itself into an open-air insane asylum, all of this has naturally led to renewed calls for banning the AfD. The CDU politician Marco Wanderwitz, who has become especially deranged on all matters relating to the AfD since he lost an election to an AfD candidate some years ago, said that “The AfD’s actions in the Thuringian state parliament followed their usual script of contempt for parliamentary democracy and its institutions.” The acting Interior Minister of Thüringen Georg Maier tweeted that yesterday’s “events … have shown that the AfD is aggressively combating parliamentarism [and] I think that this fulfils the conditions for a ban.” Had the senior president Treutler violated existing law and procedures by granting the out-of-order requests of CDU representatives, he would have doubtless avoided these accusations, because democracy is not at all adherence to democratic laws and procedures, but unquestioning deference to a cadre of self-anointed “democratic” elite who get to do whatever the fuck they want, regardless of what votes have been cast and what any laws or procedures say.

The Spiegel journalist Ann-Katrin Müller – a truly horrible woman – explained all of this to her audience of democracy enthusiasts this morning. Yesterday, she writes, “The far-right AfD … pulled out all the stops.” Their rigorous adherence to rules that others devised years ago and a law that predates the existence of the AfD by eleven years was nothing but a ploy “to sow seeds of doubt about [parliamentary democracy] and ridicule its institutions to further their authoritarian aims.” Adjourning the session to allow the CDU to consult the constitutional court was likewise a devious fascistic strategy:

If the court rules in favour of the AfD, that’s a victory for the AfD. If the court rules against them, it will also be a victory for the AfD in the medium term. The party can once again claim that the courts are not independent, that there is a “cartel” of parties and institutions working against the AfD, and that there is also a “political-media establishment” that supports the whole thing.

Perhaps Ann-Katrin Müller, the courts, and the “democratic parties” should not behave in unreasonable and transparently antidemocratic ways and say ridiculous antidemocratic things, if they don’t want the AfD to point out that they are unreasonable and transparently antidemocratic. Perhaps they could deny the AfD the opportunity to score points on this front by behaving better and saying smarter things. Just throwing out ideas, here.

There is one final, farcical point to note: If our reigning paragons of all that is proper, upstanding and democratic wanted to strip the AfD of the right to propose presidential candidates, they could’ve just changed the procedures or the law mandating them in the last legislative period. This is precisely what the ridiculous taxpayer-funded legal bloggers of the “Thüringen Project” (I wrote about them here) suggested they do back in April. The Greens in the Thuringian Landtag even proposed such a change all the way back in December 2023. The CDU, however, refused to take up the matter, either because “they were of the opinion that they would be the strongest party” after the 2024 elections (according to Green Party representative Madeleine Henfling), or because they “did not see any urgent need for action at the time” (according to CDU parliamentary secretary Andreas “Machtergreifung” Bühl). Let us dispense with much bullshit and say plainly what everybody knows to be true: Henfling is right. The CDU elected to keep the present rules in 2023, because they thought they would come out on top in September and they wanted the exclusive right to nominate a parliamentary president from their own ranks. They overestimated their popularity and now they have decided that the law mandating the very rule from which they hoped to benefit is unconstitutional and should be denied to the AfD. It is the same with the preeminent legal minds of the “Thüringen Project,” who have likewise discovered just this week the unconstitutionality of the Thuringian procedural law, after spending all of 2024 pleading that the procedures it mandated should be revised to the disadvantage of the AfD (thereby implicitly accepting its constitutionality).

I fully expect the Constitutional Court to rule against the AfD in the coming hours. This whole thing was a carefully staged drama for the benefit of an anxious, ageing and easily manipulated public. The truth is that DeMocRAcY, the popular will and parliamentary procedures do not matter at all if establishment parties decide to ignore them, the press lies to the public about them and the judiciary goes along with it all.

UPDATE: As I predicted, the Constitutional Court has decided in favour of the CDU on the most important issue: the senior president Treutler must accept proposals to change parliamentary procedure before the election of a parliamentary president. This decision arrives deep into the evening. They had a lot of thinking to do, those constitutional judges.