This System is Built to Self-Destruct
How Conservatives and the Right are once again threatening German democracy
A crucial factor – first for Adolf Hitler's rise and then for what was later called the seizure of power (Machtergreifung), but can much more accurately be described as a transfer of power (Machtübergabe) – was the weakness, overconfidence, opportunism, arrogance, and simply the lack of practical skill of the conservative parties of the Weimar Republic. They made it easy for Hitler.
“The death of democracy in Germany in 1933 teaches us unmistakably that the danger of moderate conservative party organizations being taken over by radical elements represents a significant weakness of modern democratic politics,” writes American political scientist Daniel Ziblatt in the remarkable anthology “Als die Demokratie starb. Die Machtergreifung der Nationalsozialisten – Geschichte und Gegenwart,” with clear reference to current developments in the USA, in Germany, in all possible parts of the world threatened by globalized fascism.
I ordered and read the book when I learned the news that Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf was no longer available for the position of Federal Constitutional Court judge – after a campaign that was so destructive and dangerous to democracy that Ziblatt's description of what happened in the German National People's Party (DNVP) from 1928 to 1933 somehow mirrors what is currently happening in the CDU and CSU: These are directional struggles between “pragmatists” and “fundamentalists,” in Ziblatt's terminology, that threaten to tear the party apart.
The consequences would be devastating. On the other hand, this development is foreseeable. The humiliation of the SPD, which, as in the late years of the Weimar Republic, must deny itself and is caught in a historical dilemma between saving democracy and defending its own principles – was intentional. The SPD proposed Brosius-Gersdorf, their proposal was rejected contrary to all democratic customs – the CDU and CSU showed themselves to be leaderless and fragmented, driven and made a plaything of radical forces from far-right civil society actors like the NGO Citizen-Go and manipulative media.
This leadership weakness is the problem of the CDU and CSU, which matters, on which the fate of this second German republic will be decided. It is the historical responsibility of these parties and their personnel, and it is not certain whether they are aware of this responsibility or whether they can bear this responsibility. What is clear: Whether conservative forces give in to the extreme right depends, according to Ziblatt, “on the organizational resources of the established elite at the moment they are challenged.”
The Leadership Problem of Jens Spahn
The danger, writes Ziblatt, does not come from the party itself, which by its structure tends to moderate extreme positions, indeed was created to mitigate these extreme positions – the danger comes from a radical base or from other forces that Jens Spahn, who leads the CDU/CSU faction in the Bundestag, clearly does not have under control – or that he wants to use to make the coalition with the SPD collapse before 2029, to form a coalition with the AfD; the year 2027 is often mentioned, after the events of recent days and weeks it could also be Christmas 2025.
But not only Spahn embodies the leadership problem and thus the reliability risk of the Union, Chancellor Friedrich Merz himself also proves to be currently overwhelmed with establishing at least something like internal communication and external coherence, minimum requirements of leadership. The debate about the provisional end of German arms deliveries to Israel, for example, has derailed so much that men in responsible positions express themselves with sometimes harsh criticism, sometimes also resorting to formulations from their culture-war parallel world.
Roderich Kiesewetter, for example, seems to consider more or less the entire Western media from “New York Times” to “Le Monde” as accomplices of Palestinian terrorists, he says sentences that act like corrosive acid on the fragile democratic structure. Merz bows “to an antisemitic street mob that also threatens Jewish life in Germany,” according to Kiesewetter, “and one bows to the warfare of merciless Hamas propaganda” – as if the inhumane starvation policy of Israeli warfare were not a reality.
The Gaza example shows, on the one hand, how much some parts of German conversative elites have retreated into their own reality – “I trust a friend like Israel to use weapons in accordance with international law,” as Kiesewetter formulated his eyes-closed-to-reality politics. And it shows, on the other hand, how unreliable and unpragmatic, in Ziblatt’s sense, the conservative parties are currently acting – which is the connection to the bizarre fundamentalism of the debate about Brosius-Gersdorf, which was conducted with a deliberate degree of hostility to science, another component of the ultra-right power grab as demonstrated in the USA.
Central to the debate about Brosius-Gersdorf was a sentence she had written in an argumentative consideration of the contradictorily resolved abortion issue in the German context, which, while not lawful, is nevertheless penalty-free, a certain double standard that Brosius-Gersdorf wanted to logically clarify by formulating: “There are good reasons why the guarantee of human dignity only applies from birth.” In normal times, such a sentence is part of a rational and argumentative debate – but in these times, precisely those who otherwise style themselves as enemies of morality moralized this sentence, this debate, and deliberately made it into a culture war on a topic that should be debated and resolved socially and not party-politically.
Actually, this debate has long been settled: 80 percent of Germans believe that abortion should no longer be illegal, according to a representative survey commissioned by the Federal Ministry for Women in 2024. In her impressive statement, a document for future historians, Brosius-Gersdorf tried once more argumentatively and wrote: “The constitutional solution can logically only be that either human dignity is open to weighing or does not apply to unborn life.”
Inversions in the Culture War
This part of the statement was directed both at the CDU/CSU faction, which seems not to care that their campaign against Brosius-Gersdorf not only damaged an important organ of German democracy by politicizing the election of Federal Constitutional Court judges in an unprecedented way – it also contradicts the coalition agreement with the SPD and the overwhelming majority opinion of the population; signs of culture wars are precisely these leverage effects of often radical minority opinions.
But the statement was also directed, not only in this aspect, at the media and specifically at the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,” for which I worked for a few years in more liberal times. The sharp-witted editor and feuilleton writer Frank Schirrmacher wrote a text at that time about the tendency of “inversion,” i.e., the reversal of arguments, and with this term anticipated much of what characterizes our time and also the newspaper that forgot him so quickly, almost erased him.
“The left culture war has failed,” was the title of the comment after Brosius-Gersdorf's withdrawal – a brilliant inversion entirely in the style of the new-right media like Nius and increasingly radicalizing columnists and journalists from Springer et al. The author claims therein completely illogically that Brosius-Gersdorf had concealed “the highly political context of her supposedly legal-scientific statements,” supposedly?, he rather half-heartedly refuses the insight that he himself argues against the majority opinion of the population and finally assigns Brosius-Gersdorf herself the blame for the damage that he and his ilk have created.
If one had hoped, for just a moment, that reason and respect would prevail, at least from the side of a respected daily newspaper, then one was quickly disappointed. Brosius-Gersdorf herself had directly addressed those responsible and tried to explain to them that the special significance of media for the democratic order is also connected to the fact that they should not become the “spearhead” of “honor-cutting journalism.” Also from “responsible leaders” specifically of the CDU/CSU, she wrote almost imploringly, “bourgeois values like decency, respect and sense of responsibility” must be upheld.
It was, she made clear, not really about the content of the dispute, but about the form – and this is a special pathology of current culture wars, which are carried out mainly from the right or very right, contrary to a lot of media reporting of recent years, which has created a moral panic that something like censorship comes from the left. I am still waiting for some insight or self-criticism from the authors, they were mainly male authors, of these contributions, regarding the current development.
But how far the systemic crisis – in Daniel Ziblatt's sense, in the sense of the decay of democracy – has actually already progressed, was shown by the reaction of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,” which communicated not like a medium, but like a party with its own interests, beyond the public. It thus acts like a faction in the culture war that takes a topic and makes it a question of black and white, right and wrong, them and us. One can call that polarizing or simply manipulation.
We Need New Institutions
For, and this is a crucial aspect of this so much more far-reaching Brosius-Gersdorf episode, certain topics are not suitable for being fought out in the manipulative conflict space of the current debate format. In other words: The question of abortion is not one in which the opinion of an editor at the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” should count more than that of every female and male citizen of this country. It is not a question for political or media forums – it is a social question that requires new or different forms of will formation and decision-making.
Historian Thomas Weber, the editor of the volume “Als die Demokratie starb,” writes very thoughtfully at the end of the book, with a view to today: “Decline has an irresistible attraction, both for scientists and for the general public. There are plenty of studies on despotism, demagogy, collapse, war and genocide. But there are few historical studies we can rely on to understand how solidarity and trust can be restored, how dignity, sympathy and compassion can be reawakened, and how a politics of enemies can return to a politics of opponents.”
That is exactly the difference between culture war and normal conflicts as they can be mediated and fought out. Thomas Weber continues: “What are the institutions and socio-psychological processes that have been best suited in the past to achieve these goals? We know surprisingly little about the success factors of intra- and inter-social repair and depolarization, about how to get people – to paraphrase poet Amanda Gorman – to focus not on what stands between them, but on what lies ahead of them.”
How Does General Will Work?
This passage moved me deeply because it shows a thorough understanding of the dilemma of our present, fed from the analysis of the greatest catastrophe and crimes that Germany has brought upon the world. How can we break out of the constraints, the wrong paths, the systemically designed dead ends that we have partly created ourselves, that have partly grown historically, that are partly protected and defended with clear self-interests? How can one thus create a future without decay?
In the case of abortion, there is an example of how it can be done differently: In Ireland, it was a citizens' council that solved the centuries-old conflict, which, as it turned out, had mainly been created by the churches, by politics, by the media – the people themselves, society as a whole, had completely different interests, beyond false or supposed polarization, a term that has been used misleadingly again and again in recent years. We are not polarized, it is systemic factors that polarize.
This is where the debate must begin, what follows from the debacle around Brosius-Gersdorf. It is about systemic innovation, about new institutional forms, how social change can happen in such a way that it is removed from media and political manipulation. It is about formulating something like general will in the sense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Federal Constitutional Court is actually such a body that should be removed from politicization, CDU/CSU and right-wing media have caused considerable damage to the fragile system.
From autumn onwards and for at least the entire year 2026, I will deal with questions about what other institutions are needed to preserve democracy by changing it. I will write about this here and also in other places. Stay tuned.
Until then, as always: Start worrying, details to follow.
PS: One more piece of news from last week that particularly pleased me: My book “Kipppunkte. Von den Versprechen der Neunziger zu den Krisen der Gegenwart” was nominated by the German business newspaper “Handelsblatt” as one of the ten best economics books of the year. The selection shows how understanding is growing that the current democratic crisis is massively connected to the changes in capitalism that have been driven forward since the nineties and have contributed so much more to the, to use the word again, polarization or fragmentation of society than all the so-called culture wars from the left that were lamented by those who were and are cheerleaders of destructive neoliberalism.