Germany: undermining democracy to “save” it
There’s a lot of this “we must become tyrants in order to save democracy” stuff going around. In Germany, for example, the latest salvo in the German war against the AfD:
By longstanding tradition, the AfD should have been allotted committee chairmanships and vice chairmanships based on its February vote share. Doing so would have meant that the powerful budget, interior, and finance committees, along with three other committees, would have been under AfD direction, giving it the possibility of shaping legislation. But in a reversal of what is normally an automatic affirmation, on Wednesday, May 21, the other parties in Parliament voted down the AfD chairmanships and put those six committees in the control of other, often less popular, parties. The far-left Die Linke (the Left) party, which had garnered just 9 percent of the parliamentary vote, was awarded two chairs.
The rationale given for this anti-democratic coup is a recent designation of the AfD as a right-wing extremist party. On May 2, 2025, four days before parliamentary power was to change hands, outgoing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser from the Social Democratic Party announced that Germany’s domestic spy agency (the BfV) had slapped that label on the AfD, based on a 1,000-page secret dossier. According to press leaks, the dossier appeared to consist of public statements by AfD leaders, many already chewed over endlessly by the party’s opponents, relating to Germany’s mass migration problem.
AfD representatives have asserted, for example, that Germans have a cultural history tied to their ethnic and national identity; that this history and identity deserve protection; and that unchecked illegal migration threatens national cohesion.
The dossier also contained statements “implying,” as a scandalized Reuters put it, that “immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals.” Actually, those AfD statements didn’t “imply” that immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals; they asserted that fact outright, because that is what government crime statistics overwhelmingly show. …
In any case, the “right extremist” designation was a mere pretext for shutting the AfD out of power. Half a year before Nancy Faeser revealed the existence of the secret dossier, the establishment parties had pulled the same trick in the state government of Thüringen.
I am reminded of the fact that even before Trump’s win in 2016, and certainly immediately afterwards, the Trump’s opposition equated the slogan or logo “MAGA” with racism. For many many Democrats that perception and labeling has stuck. Call something racist and bigoted, and you can not only disagree with it but discredit it and justify attempts to block it even when it wins elections – all in the name of protecting or “saving” democracy. The contradiction is obvious, but it seems to work as propaganda for many many people.
In Germany there is also the terrible legacy of Nazism. If a group such as AfD talks about German “cultural history tied to ethnic and national identity,” it’s easy to label them Nazi-esque in order to frighten people off, and in order to discredit any argument for preserving German culture against an Islamic onslaught. What’s more, because the Nazis came to power through democratic/legal means and then proceeded to establish a dictatorship that included (again through legal means) suspending the powers of the legislative body, the idea that the anti-fascist forces must subvert democracy in order to save it carries a certain amount of persuasiveness.
“In Germany there is also the terrible legacy of Nazism.”
Oh, and there’s more than that. Marxism is “the German Ideology”, an ideology born on German soil out of a confluence of German philosophical movements whose seeds blossomed elsewhere. And, although imposed by the Soviets, half of Germany was Marxist-Leninist from 1945 until 1990.
The tendency towards authoritarianism is always present in the German heart; only its political mode of expression changes.
The German actor Maximillian Schell did a documentary interview of Marlene Dietrich in 1984, and one memorable point is a bitter, angry diatribe she gives about the German people’s preoccupation with/submission to a “strong leader” (ein Fuhrer).
Sounds like the Biden gang, who now admit that they did things which were anti-democratic to “save democracy” from Trump. To them, “democracy” means Democrat Party/oligarchy rule.
On Germany: In the European countries which are being invaded by Islam, it is simply true, alas, that the culture of unassimilated Muslims is not compatible with traditional European values based on Christian culture, even if no longer on actual Christian belief. The treatment of women is very different, for one thing, and that’s a big part of the trouble.
Germany is a paradox, the land of civilization’s greatest musical composers-the Bach family (not just JS Bach), Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann.
And of its great evils, which extend to the present thanks to Merkel and the oddly-named CDU, the Christian Democratic Union, which is no longer Christian or democratic, opposing AfD. Merkel led the way to Europe’s conversion to Eurabia; she is on record as saying that walking past a cemetary is the equivalent of worshipping in a Christian church.
We are witness to the auto-immolation of Christianity and its derivative, Western civilization, to which the American Left subscribes.
half of Germany was Marxist-Leninist from 1945 until 1990.
==
A shade over 20% of the population lived in the Soviet Zone.
Abusive behavior by the German government has an analogue in a half-dozen other occidental countries. (Please note that under parliamentary rules modal in the United States, they’d receive seats on those committees but as members of the opposition they’d receive no chairmanships).
==
The AfD has a commonsensical platform which takes exception to a menu of policies followed by the German government over the last 35 years (some longer). I recently saw a piece of survey research wherein 48% of the respondents in Germany said they wanted AfD banned. Democratic voters among your neighbors want the same thing, they’re just unwilling to give it such lucid expression.
angry diatribe she gives about the German people’s preoccupation with/submission to a “strong leader” (ein Fuhrer).
==
And who was the ‘strong leader’ prior to 1933 or after 1945?
The irony is literally biblical. In suppressing the Germans intent upon resisting Germany’s Islamization, Germany’s leftists are enabling the growth within Germany of a fanaticism that exceeds even their own.
Nature views death as obstinate stupidity’s natural reward.
Neo,
I agree with everything you said. The Left doesn’t believe it’s above the law, it believes it is the law. A very big difference!
What is the remedy, when the government in power refuses to acknowledge the electoral result, and then bends the parliamentary rules to refuse allocation of the power that the voters have selected, to govern? It seems to me there are very few avenues available. Those in power have decided that those who vote, do not matter. They are subjects, not citizens.
This morning I checked whether WaPo is still using the slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” after all the lies it has backed to enable Democrats to retain power.
Yup.
Democrats Thrive in Darkness.
If Germany leads Europe into a(nother) war against Russia (Barbarossa II?), which side will the US be on?
When you look at major European countries and their history of political writings on liberty, freedom, private property and individual rights you get plenty of countries like England, France, Austria and Scotland that produced writers and thinkers in that vein but virtually zero out of Germany except maybe Roepke and Dahrendorf and they were post WWII.
I lived in Germany for 4 years and went back every Summer for ten years and never found anyone who even thought about individual liberties.
Sure there is Sophie Scholl, the White Rose movement but they were guillotined. Then there was PEGIDA but that died and now there is the AfD. I hope they win. I pray Germany wakes up because France and the UK today are jokes.
Tommy Robinson gets it far better than 99% of the Oxbridge grads.