Thirteen men and two women make up the Christian Democratic Union’s group in the newly constituted state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt. On Tuesday, four of them helped elect a right-wing extremist as President of the Landtag. In protocol, and in politics too, this office carries exceptional weight. Who exactly they were, and what exactly their motives were, I do not know. Nor do I care. I am equally uninterested in what the episode reveals about the divisions within the new group and the authority of its leader. What interests me is the fact (and what else could it be, crackpot conspiracy theories aside) that in a state governed by CDU Minister-Presidents for a quarter of a century, one in four Christian Democratic MPs gives their vote to a right-wing extremist.

Right-wing extremist: what could be more Christian Democratic than this term of demarcation? Not the ‘right-wing’ part. The CDU is on the right itself. It is the ‘extremist’. The insistence that there is a difference between the centre and the extreme. And that this difference is constitutive. Of the political system of the Federal Republic. Of the protection of its constitution. Of their own identity.

Through the distinction between centre and extreme, the Union recognises itself as something that remains identical with itself over time. When it looks in the mirror, it sees a bundle of opposites: it unites Catholics and Protestants, workers and entrepreneurs, farmers and financial investors – that is why it is called a Union, after all. People who have little in common beyond the conviction that the distribution of power and property in this country is, by and large, fine as it is, and that government is best left in the hands of their own kind: sensible, respectable pillars of society. The centre, in short.

Its boundaries also mark out the space within which the Union remains capable of alliances, compromise and coalition. Anyone who wants to govern with it – which usually means anyone who wants to govern at all – has to enter that space. They have to become as sensible, respectable and moderate as the Union itself, so that the programme of government can be assembled from practical solutions to real problems on whose description one can always reach agreement in the end, across whatever differences of interest and habitus remain. Because and as long as this works, Liberals, Greens and Social Democrats identify and integrate themselves as parties of the centre, and so does the Union: Look, we told you so. Organising majorities, staying sensible, being fit to govern. That’s us!

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2500 Jahre Demokratie

Das diesjährige Symposion des Dimitris-Tsatsos-Instituts greift ein Projekt wieder auf, das der Gründer Dimitris Tsatsos zu seinen Lebzeiten nicht mehr verwirklichen konnte, eine Besinnung auf eine Spanne von 2500 Jahren politischer Theorie und Praxis, die im Diskurs über Demokratie ihren Niederschlag findet. Diese Besinnung dient nicht einem theoretischen Ziel, etwa den über 200 Varianten einer Begriffsbestimmung eine weitere hinzuzufügen oder gar eine Bestimmung mit Anspruch auf Verbindlichkeit herauszuarbeiten. Ihre Absicht ist vielmehr, einen Evolutionsprozess der politischen und der Verfassungskultur nachzuzeichnen, der sich über lange Dauer und verschiedene Epochen erstreckt hat.

6. & 7. November 2026, FernUniversität in Hagen und online über Zoom. Näheres unter www.fernuni-hagen.de/dtiev/veranstaltungen/symposion-2026.shtml.

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‘The End of the Centre’ was the title of the editorial Florian Meinel and I wrote in February last year, when the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag, led by Friedrich Merz, suddenly set about forming a new majority on migration together with the AfD. For me, our text was above all an expression of disbelief: Why are they doing this? Why are they destroying the very thing that defines them? And if that thing really is destroyed, what follows?

The response to our text was, shall we say, interesting. A few days after it appeared, I sat on a panel at Bucerius Law School with a former judge of the Federal Constitutional Court whom I had known and respected for many years. Afterwards in the foyer, over canapés and wine, he suddenly laid into me coram publico. With our editorial, he charged, we had insinuated that the CDU was making common cause with Nazis. He took this as a personal insult to himself as a CDU member. He wanted nothing more to do with me. We practically shouted at each other. Earlier this week I was back at Bucerius Law School to discuss academic freedom – the subject of a project we are starting together with Bucerius Law School and the University of Oxford, to be officially launched in Berlin in early November. Several people brought up that encounter with the former constitutional judge. It had been completely mad, they said. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Nor had I, to be honest.

Back then, Florian Meinel and I considered two possible conclusions from the Union’s abandonment of the centre. One: the Social Democratic and Green remnant of the centre, together with the dense institutional network of the pre-political sphere, forces the Union to reverse course. The other: give up the destroyed centre as lost and integrate towards the left – a German Nouveau Front Populaire that takes on the right and organises majorities against it.

It soon became clear that nothing would come of the first. The second, however, is now emerging as a possibility at state level, in the federal capital, Berlin. There, Die Linke was the only party that had managed to describe a reality its voters could relate to. Take the explosion in rents. One can argue about the costs and benefits of socialising housing and thereby removing it permanently from the market as a tradeable commodity and an object of investment and speculation. But at least it is an idea! And this idea had already convinced a clear majority of Berlin voters once before. Developing a description of real problems that can command a majority, along with concrete ideas for solving them, sometimes daring but never unreasonable: that used to be the hallmark of the centre.

Its remnants, however, seem to have settled on a third option long ago. The centre is neither restored nor abandoned but transformed into something else. It is being rebuilt as a kind of identitarian assembly hall, where people gather to feel themselves as a community of fate. The centre no longer defines itself by keeping its distance from subversives, firebrands and radicals, but by excluding everyone who disputes this community of fate and/or does not belong to it and/or poses a threat to it. It no longer finds its identity in successfully processing and reconciling opposites, in the robust, sensible purr of its well-oiled engine of compromise, but in the opposite: it wants to feel at one with itself. Its identity is a matter of feeling. Wallowing in its own emotion, it stands together in this space, cocooned by red lines, and woe betide anyone who challenges it. The CDU takes it personally when hundreds of thousands suddenly take to the streets, merely because it and the AfD see eye to eye on migration. The former constitutional judge sees his personal honour tainted by the notion that he should suddenly find himself in the same room with Nazis. He is very much offended indeed.

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This is a space that patrols its margins instead of integrating them. It compels those it finds there not to compromise but to profess. Die Linke won the Berlin election partly because, in the city with Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora, it alone had dared to describe the genocide in Gaza as a real problem. The clear winner of the election, just to get a seat at the negotiation table, first had to profess the Staatsräson orthodoxy by which the identitarian centre recognises its own.

Meanwhile in Magdeburg, the newly minted President of the Landtag, who apparently intends to stay on as general secretary of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, only needs to look suitably guileless in his cream-coloured suit and read out a meek little speech full of Steinmeier-style democratic set phrases, and everyone says: Oh, he’s quite moderate really. Not a nasty one like his deputy, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, who likewise received more votes than the AfD group has members. Unlike the President, though, the deputy will have little say by virtue of his office beyond chairing sittings (until he becomes Minister of Culture and Science, that is. Then he will).

And speaking of antisemitism, and speaking of Tillschneider: today in Halle he was kept out of the synagogue courtyard at the commemoration of the attempted massacre of Jews in Germany by a Nazi seven years ago. Protesters at the gate. He could not get through and had to leave again, the right-wing extremist Dr Tillschneider. That is how you protect Jewish life in Germany!

In Berlin, coalition talks are now getting under way. In Magdeburg, the AfD is three votes short of an absolute majority. My suggestion: let’s talk about real problems.

With thanks to Hanna Pfeifer and Florian Meinel for their valuable comments.

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