Not everyone was in a celebratory mood when modern Germany’s parliamentary democracy marked its 75th birthday over the weekend.
The mood was not that different during the first Bundestag sitting in Bonn on September 7th, 1949, four years after the collapse of Nazi Germany.
Opening the session back then was the elder parliamentary president Paul Löbe. Imprisoned by the Nazis, the Social Democratic politician expressed the hope that the new parliament would establish “a stable government, a healthy economy, a new social order in a secure private life, leading our fatherland towards new prosperity”.
So what would Löbe have made of last weekend’s far-right election victory in the eastern state of Thuringia, the first such win since the Nazi era?
The extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) finished second in neighbouring Saxony and is on course for another strong result in two weeks in the state of Brandenburg, surrounding Berlin.
Rather than critical self-reflection, the reactions of many German politicians to the AfD surge recalls playwright Bertolt Brecht’s observation: “The people have betrayed the government’s trust: wouldn’t it be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”
Similarly, no one seemed to notice how, while West Germany’s Bundestag has made it to 75 in a united country, the same can’t be said about the old Bonn party model.
It was imported to eastern Germany in 1990 as part of the quickie unification deal that binned socialism and ushered in the Deutschmark and Grundig televisions for all.
Last month at a pre-election town meeting in Hoyerswerda, near Dresden, a former eastern town councillor remembered being bussed to Bonn for a crash course in democratic party politics.
“They told us it was the most precious thing they were giving us, that it would bring stability and must be defended at all costs,” recalled Horst, a former CDU functionary. “They never asked if it suited us.”
On September 1st last at 6pm, the postwar Bonn party system finally slid down the dumper to join the former German currency and Grundig electronics.
Eastern voters delivered a huge protest vote against a decade of immigration, 300,000 asylum seekers last year alone, a wave of stabbings, an extended recession and a bickering coalition in Berlin.
That one in two voters in Thuringia and Saxony backed populist new arrivals is significant. But have they – or their politicians – betrayed the parliamentary democracy terms and conditions outlined by Löbe: stable government, healthy economy and a secure social order?
Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) was founded in Saxony in 1863, last weekend it took just 7 per cent.
Rather than reflect on that, the SPD chancellor and his officials spent the post-election spin cycle insisting they need to communicate better.
Meanwhile the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), the alliance of Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel, took nearly a third of the vote last weekend and hopes for a speedy return to power in Berlin next year. Helping its hopes: winning power in three eastern state elections by embracing AfD-lite language and policies.
The CDU has ruled out governing with the AfD, which it views as a threat to democracy. The AfD has fired back that its exclusion from coalition talks in Saxony and Thuringia is itself an undemocratic act that voters will not forget.
Instead the local CDU is open to talks with the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), the coalition kingmaker in both states after impressive double-digit results on its first election outing.
The eastern CDU’s openness to the BSW – the same politicians they refused to work with when they were members of the post-communist Left party – has alarmed western CDU officials.
As one argued last week, that the BSW’s eponymous leader Sahra Wagenknecht contradicts “everything that the CDU has stood for since the founding of the federal republic: a united Europe, membership in Nato”.
With old political certainties withering and new populist parties surging, the 75th birthday party for parliamentary democracy is a festival of strange bedfellows.
While some see German democracy on a road to populist ruin, others see a sign of the times and eastern voters as a collective canary in the democratic coal-mine.
In the latter camp is Saxony-based literature professor Dirk Oschmann. Last year he wrote a scorching polemic titled The Easterners – a West German Invention; it became a runaway bestseller for firing back at western German readers every ignorant cliche that easterners have had to endure in the last 30 years.
He suggests Germany is shifting towards the political mainstream of France or Austria while giving a new twist to its own historical narrative.
His unified homeland will not settle into its new skin, Prof Oschmann tells The Irish Times, until all embrace a common historical understanding of the 1990 unification process as “a combination of takeover and handover”.
“We’ve seen these memory battles in Germany in the past and now we are going through another,” he added.
Refusal to accept this and give ground three decades after unification, he thinks, has allowed populist resentment merchants to tap into old post-unification narratives of ungrateful, lumpen easterners and arrogant, western carpetbaggers.
A similar analysis is offered by unsentimental eastern political analysts and sociologists, noting that the western German political system transplanted in 1990 has always struggled in the local eastern soil.
Roots remained shallow because of an incorrect assumption that, as in western Germany, these parties would find strength in social milieux of unions, churches and clubs.
With none of those a given in the east, the AfD and BSW have thrived by establishing, or capturing, local communities and political leaders to offer policies closer to largely conservative voters’ views: restrictive migration policies, pacifist populism and pro-Russian messaging.
Last Sunday’s elections have given extra momentum to a debate over what is actually under attack from the AfD-BSW surge: democracy itself, as one camp argues, or merely a left liberal version of democracy dominant since the 1990s?
Prof Philip Manow, political scientist at the University of Siegen, thinks the latter. Just as Germany’s political party landscape is changing – normalising – to resemble its neighbours’, Prof Manow suggests the debate about the future – and nature – of western democracy has arrived in Germany.
“Most observers today think it is obvious that a democracy is liberal or is not a democracy at all,” writes Prof Manow in his controversial new book Under Observation. “[But] democracy, both a concrete form of rule and our understanding of it, can only ever be understood historically, not as an abstract.”
Democratic history was made exactly 25 years ago, when the Bundestag packed its boxes in Bonn and moved back to Berlin. On Sunday evening, crowds gathered on the banks of the capital’s river Spree to watch a film – projected on the vast concrete facades of new parliamentary buildings – of their democracy’s birth.
As the sun set, black and white images flickered from long-ago Bonn, the old Bundestag chamber and the gaunt face of the first West German chancellor, Adenauer.
Exactly a year before voters choose a new parliament, most here agree that another shift is under way in Germany’s political system, bringing new opportunities and dilemmas.
“The AfD is really two parties, with one camp obsessed with German identity, race and all that old nonsense,” said Paul, a 56-year-old psychotherapist. “But the other camp in the AfD is probably just as conservative as Konrad Adenauer was back then. He was no liberal, but that didn’t make him less of a democrat.”