By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
There was a time not that long ago when serious
people entertained the idea that “democracy” might mean something more than a
tiny claque of entrenched post–Cold War progressives running the world’s
institutions in their own interest. David Marquand, a British academic, coined
the term “democratic deficit” in the 1970s to describe the lack of access that
citizens had to influencing the European common market (as the European
Union was then), either through voting or normal forms of democratic access,
despite the immense and invasive regulatory power of that institution.
The European Union’s power is the product of pooled
sovereignty — a transfer and diminishment of powers from national parliaments,
which are accountable to democratic peoples, to European institutions that are
deliberately more remote. European peoples don’t have direct electoral input
into the powerful European Commission, the executive body of the EU that also
has the sole power to initiate legislation. Often members are brought onto the
commission after they have lost elections in their countries. The elected
European Parliament is selected in low-turnout, low-information elections, and
it does little but debate the merit of the EU itself. There is no real
connection between its actions and the sentiment of European citizens that
would qualify it as a truly deliberative body, let alone a representative one.
Major state-shaping initiatives, like the institution of
the euro currency, have been done in the face of majority opposition in Germany
and other countries. The EU began to run as if it had a “telos” — a structured
end in mind, ever greater union, ever larger gobs of power shifted from
democratic parliaments to German-dominated European ministries. European
treaties, such as the Lisbon Treaty of 2007, began to be rejected by publics,
and elections were rerun until the “correct” and final
non-repealable result was given. Now the treaties have largely ceased, and the
EU simply reinterprets previously approved language in new ways to assert new
powers, such as its ability to punish member states for infringing “the rule of
law.”
JD Vance, in his Munich speech, issued a challenge to the
peoples of Europe to be better democrats. He hinted at the polls showing
massive national majorities that wished to control and halt the mass migration
of Muslims into the continent. He also condemned the “firewall” politics that
leads Germany’s political parties to rule out ever forming a coalition with the
insurgent Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which achieved nearly 20
percent support in this week’s election.
The AfD was second only to the center-right Christian
Democratic Union/Christian Social Union, which garnered 28.5 percent of the
vote. The leader of the Christian Democrats, Friedrich Merz, has decided to
double down against Vance. Not only has he kept to the firewall politics
despite the AfD’s strong result, he is determined to form a coalition with the
center-left SPD (Social Democratic Party), led by Olaf Scholz, the outgoing
chancellor of Germany, and the party that got the biggest kicking from its previous
result. This is a way of defying not just the far right but everyone who
withdrew their votes from the previous government. And it’s a defiance of
political logic. Several countries have tried this transition whereby the two
great political rival parties of the 20th century enter into peacetime grand
coalitions with one another to stop smaller parties from obtaining power. It
almost always results in both members of the coalition losing support as they
are seen to be betraying their bases.
But Merz didn’t stop there. Just weeks ago, in light of
more stabbing attacks by Muslim immigrants, Merz had vowed to the public that
“on Day One” he would take back control of Germany’s borders. “We see before us
the ruins of 10 years of misguided asylum and immigration policy in Germany,”
he said. “We reached the limit.” He could not have been more specific. “On the
first day of my tenure as chancellor, I will instruct the interior ministry to
impose permanent border controls with all our neighbors and refuse all attempts
at illegal entry,” he vowed.
In his very first press conference after the election,
Merz said the opposite. “None of us are talking about border closures,” he
said. “No one. Although this was claimed at times during the election campaign.
None of us will close the border.”
The very name of Alternative für Deutschland was meant as
a rebuke to Angela Merkel, the former Christian Democrat leader who had said
there was no alternative to her own preferred plans for fixing the financial
crisis. Her words became a symbol for the “no-choice” politics that have provoked voters into
supporting populists.
Merz is convinced that allowing free speech or easing up
on the firewall will allow illiberal and authoritarian tyrants back into
politics. He is blind to the reality that he is becoming the face of illiberal
tyranny, of a government that is committed to ideological zealotry at the cost
of its own people. This is a hubris sure to fail.
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