Europe’s War on Democracy

This has been a bad year for European democracy. In the space of just 18 months, elections have been annulled, opposition leaders banned, and governments financially punished for carrying out the policies their voters chose.

Europe’s political elites have a knack for turning electoral processes into political theatre. When the establishment decides that the ‘wrong’ party is getting too popular, it isn’t shy about stepping in and correcting voters on their mistake. This is particularly clear in Germany, where the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite being the second most popular party in the Bundestag, has been battling against threats of a ban for years. 

From intelligence chiefs branding the AfD a “confirmed extremist” party, to cross-party motions openly exploring how to strip it of funding or outlaw it altogether, the idea of simply banning Germany’s main opposition is seen as a perfectly respectable talking point. Just a month ago, the federal president mused in a speech about whether democracy must defend itself by dissolving popular parties. 

Even if this is still mostly rhetoric at the national level, this experiment is already underway locally. By this September, a court had decided that residents of the city of Ludwigshafen in Rhineland-Palatinate should not be allowed to vote for an AfD candidate as mayor. Incumbent mayor Jutta Steinruck contacted the Rhineland-Palatinate Interior Ministry for information about the AfD mayoral candidate, Joachim Paul. The Social Democrat (SPD)-controlled ministry, which had also announced this year that it would ban civil servants who are AfD members from taking up state positions, duly obliged. The resulting report argued that Paul should be excluded from the mayoral ballot, due to his support for remigration, a photo on his Instagram taken with Austrian activist Martin Sellner, his reference to Lord of the Rings in an article he wrote, and his enjoyment of Wagner’s Nibelungenlied. This body of flimsy evidence was apparently enough for the city election committee—dominated by representatives of the SPD, Christian Union (CDU), Free Democratic Party (FDP), and a local independent group—to strike Paul from the ballot. This decision was then rubber-stamped by every court Paul appealed to, all the way up to the Federal Constitutional Court. Voters were instead given the same old, tired choices—a candidate from the CDU, one from the SPD, one independent (an SPD member), and one from the pro-EU group Volt.