The German establishment is desperately clinging to power in the face of democracy

Like in France, there is an open and crude effort to deny voters their democratic choice

At least have enough class to wait more than five seconds after the election you just lost before doing democracy dirty.

The results were still firming up amid exit poll results in eastern Germany's state elections when the second-place party in Thuringia took to social media to tell voters what’s what.

“The first projection confirms the forecast – the CDU is gaining ground and will definitely finish second! Red-Red-Green is voted out! We thank all voters, helpers and supporters in the country and from all over Germany! We will seek talks to explore the possibilities of forming a government. The following still applies: There will be no cooperation with the AfD,” wrote a seemingly over-caffeinated teenager running the account of the right-wing establishment party still mostly known for its former leader, ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel. 

Easy there, sports. Nothing quite screams “respect for democracy” like loading your post up with emojis and telling voters that although you’re pleased that they reduced your establishment left opponents (and Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s national governing socialist/green “stoplight coalition”) to a rump of 6.5%, you’ll nonetheless still have to do something about the fact that voters relegated you to second place (at 24%) behind the populist, anti-establishment right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) with 33%. And that “something” involves finding a way to keep the election’s actual winners away from the steering wheel. How? By making shady back-room deals with some of the other losers. 

Omid Nouripour, a leader of Scholz’s federal coalition partner, the Greens, told the Associated Press that “an openly right-wing extremist party has become the strongest force in a state parliament for the first time since 1949, and that causes many people very deep concern and fear.” People can’t be that scared if they literally just voted for them, huh? 

“The results for the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia are worrying,” Scholz told Reuters. “The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation.” This guy’s projection is more powerful than an IMAX cinema. Replace “Germany” or “the country” with “me” and it makes a lot more sense. 

The idea of electoral losers adamantly working to deny voters their democratic choice seems to be a new trend in Europe as the populist right- and left-wing parties start racking up electoral wins.

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Here in France, for example, French President Emmanuel Macron pitched a fit after his party lost the European parliamentary elections to Marine Le Pen’s anti-establishment right National Rally. So he called a totally unnecessary legislative election slated right before the Paris Summer Olympic Games. Because who wouldn’t want to appease their ego before heading into a major international event. Tough to enjoy it otherwise. In an attempt to block the National Rally, Team Macron did something right out in the open that would have been impeachment-worthy if it had been done behind closed doors: they arranged with the anti-establishment left New Popular Front (NPF) coalition to strategically withdraw candidates to focus on a single one between them in districts where the right-wing looked likely to win a seat otherwise. Way to deny voters a legitimate democratic choice.

The plan worked so well that the National Rally won the popular vote but was denied the chance of governing because it was the left-wing NPF that won the most seats.

And despite Team Macron engineering that outcome, he’s now refusing to approve the prime ministerial choice of the coalition with the most seats – something that former Presidents from Jacques Chirac to Francois Mitterrand had no problem doing. Probably because it didn’t occur to them to spend weeks using the events calendar – Macron cited the Olympics and spend his summer jacking around on the water with his pals – to drag their feet in doing anything other than what convention dictates.

Sure, “cohabitation” of a president with a prime minister from a party that isn’t his is annoying, but you’re supposed to put on your big boy pants and deal with it, not pretend that it’s some kind of college dorm assignment that you can wriggle out of. Which is what Macron is now doing, citing the need for “institutional stability” in trying to justify his refusal to appoint a left-wing prime minister – even one with an elite institutional senior civil servant background – for fear that the new prime minister would appoint a left-wing government that would implement a left-wing program. You know, the same one that your team deliberately decided to manipulate voters into choosing because you didn’t like the right-wing program, either. 

Macron has been dragging his feet so long that the left has taken up an impeachment process against him, whose chances of actually succeeding with the required two-thirds support of both the National Assembly and the Senate increase every day that he fails to find a solution to his conundrum that doesn’t flagrantly fly in the face of electoral will – which could best be described as a routing of the establishment. The same establishment from which Macron would really love to handpick a puppet to carry out an agenda that voters roundly rejected.

The German establishment is sounding at a lot like the French one right now in the wake of these state elections in Thuringia and Saxony. Over in Saxony, the CDU barely squeaked out a win against the AfD, with results currently showing them both at 31%. There, again, the governing establishment Social Democrats were clobbered, coming in at just 7.5% support. The anti-establishment left split the vote between Bundestag parliamentarian Sahra Wagenknecht’s brand new BSW coalition (15.6% in Thuringia and 11.5% in Saxony) and Die Linkie, whose collective success suggests that the vote was more about a rejection of the establishment on all sides and only secondarily a right/left ideological one – just like in France.

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There really wasn’t a ton of daylight between the anti-establishment right and left during the campaigns. Both called on the federal government to stop fueling the conflict in Ukraine with German weapons, and demanded security for German economic sovereignty, which has taken a wrong turn somewhere when you have German industry bailing out to the US because it can’t survive on the short cold showers that the German finance minister brags about taking himself. Another big issue that’s come up in this election campaign was the German establishment agreeing to have American long-range weapons move into Germany for the first time since the end of the Cold War. And this is the Eastern part of the country closest to Russia, which risks being directly impacted by those hosting plans to have the US, which already, with NATO, has bases all over Germany, move into yet another room and bring its weapons stash with it starting in 2026.

It doesn’t exactly scream independence when you’re trying to go about your business as a supposedly sovereign country and Uncle Sam is crashing on the couch with his cruise missiles. But hey, Chancellor Olaf Scholz zoned out and stared into space when US President Joe Biden threatened to blow up Nord Stream while standing right beside him, so chances were that he wasn’t going to exactly say no to some armed squatters. 

Eastern Germany has always collectively opposed whatever nonsense was brewing in the West, whether it was Nazis circa WWII or a subsequent expanding American influence that favored their Western compatriots and left them with a lower standard of living. The idea being peddled by critics of their electoral choice that they’re throwing themselves into the arms of some kind of right-wing Nazis is laughable, given the historical context. 

Apparently any excuse will do in an attempt to justify the inevitable post-electoral coup by the ruling establishment elites, so they can keep lecturing the rest of the world about democracy.