Can Germany Still Call Itself a Democracy?

What happens when Europe’s ruling class can’t defeat their opponents at the ballot box?

In this week’s MCC Brussels podcast we begin in Germany, where the intelligence services have officially branded the AFD as "extremist" – just as a new coalition government struggles to form under Friedrich Merz. Is this militant democracy or just democracy in name only?

Next, we turn to Romania, where right-wing candidate George Simion has surged to victory in the presidential election's first round –just months after the previous vote was annulled. The establishment is panicking. Is Romania becoming Brussels' next problem child?

And finally, we land in Hungary, where the European Commission is once again attacking Hungary’s immigration policy. Why? Because Budapest won’t keep convicted people-smugglers on its soil. It’s another case of EU overreach – and an attack on national sovereignty.

Join guests Frank Furedi, Executive Director of MCC Brussels, and Richard Schenk, Research Fellow, and host Jacob Reynolds to unpack an explosive set of developments across the continent.

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0:00 – Welcome & Europe in Crisis: Germany, Romania, Hungary
0:46 – Germany Declares AfD "Extremist"
2:59 – Ethno-Cultural Identity Debate
4:04 – Militant Democracy & Thought Policing
6:08 – Politicisation of Intelligence in Germany
9:03 – Merz’s Chancellorship Collapses
16:54 – Romania: Simeon Surges After Rigged Election
24:50 – Hungary vs Brussels: Smugglers & Sovereignty
28:35 – What Europe’s Political Chaos Means

Transcript

(0:00 - 0:09)

So hello and welcome back to the MCC Brussels podcast. I'm Jacob Reynolds, delighted to return to the podcast our Executive Director Frank Frady, welcome. Great to be here.

(0:09 - 0:28)

And also returning our Research Fellow Richard Schenk, welcome. Happy to be here. So this week on the podcast we're going to be starting with Germany where firstly the AFD have been branded officially by the intelligence services as extremists, and this coming in the same week as it looks like Friedrich Merz's chancellorship might be over even before it's begun.

(0:28 - 1:01)

We're also going to take a look at Romania where Georges Simeon has taken the lead in the first round of the presidential election there, we'll be discussing what that means for Romania and Europe more generally. And we'll also come to Hungary where yet again the European Commission is launching proceedings against Hungary over immigration issues. So first coming to Germany and the week began with really outrageous news that the intelligence services have officially declared on the basis of a somewhat secret thousand page report that the AFD are an officially extremist organisation.

(1:02 - 1:43)

Some bits of it will leak to friendly journalists but it looks like an assembly of kind of quotes taken from Twitter and elsewhere about various AFD politicians. But this is very significant because it not only opens up the possibility of greater spying activities on the AFD but also throws open the question into mainstream political debate about banning the AFD altogether. Richard could you tell us what kind of alleging about the AFD and why this matters? Yeah the core argument we know so far from this report that this has not been fully published is that they accuse the AFD of having an ethno-cultural definition of Germans.

(1:43 - 2:17)

So besides being a German citizen the AFD claims that there is something like a ethno-cultural German that you can identify even if this person maybe is not a German passport, or if there is a German passport holder who is not of this German identity in the UK, you should be able to identify this. And they claim that this is basically degrading people who are German passport holders or German citizens but not of German ethnic origin into a second-rate citizen status. This is the core argument they make.

(2:18 - 2:59)

I mean it sounds bad but if you think about it, I mean most people in the entire world can say that there are Germans who are identifiable as Germans even before you ask them about their citizenship status. And also it's very interesting because I mean it's the federal bureau that is supposed to protect the constitution and if you look in the German constitution article 116 clearly states that there are Germans defined by belonging to the German people that are equal to German citizens. So this is a concept that is baked into the German constitution and how this is supposed to be unconstitutional is currently a riddle.

(2:59 - 4:04)

We are waiting for this report. Yeah and Frank I mean it's true even a kind of naive outside observer it seems quite obvious what this is about which is delegitimising the AFD who have become the largest opposition party and according to some polls the most supported party in Germany. You know I'm not really surprised because if you look at German history since the second world war, it's been the one country where what's called militant democracy has been institutionalised and what militant democracy basically means is that the state has got the right to preempt the emergence and the rise of political movements that it deems to be the threat to democracy which basically gives the state authorities the freedom to decide who is and who isn't a threat to democracy and that's why I think it's this what's happening here is a very dangerous consequence of that kind of ideological orientation because it basically allows the secret services and the police to make decisions not on the basis of any crime you've committed but on your political outlook.

(4:04 - 6:07)

So you criminalise people's political outlook to the point at which a more sensible proposition the fact that there is an ethnic relationship to being part of a nation is seen as somehow a cultural crime and you know if you look at the way that nation nations and nationalism has evolved even with the most civic democratic forms of nationalism there's always been a recognition that there is an ethnic underpinning to that so basically you know you could come to Germany from Turkey or wherever and become a German citizen and become even German but you have Germans that are ethnically and historically part of German society there's going to be no Germany and it seems to me that unless we recognise that there is always an ethno element to any kind of national consciousness and that's quite consistent with democracy unless you recognise that you end up with denationalising people's identity altogether which is what is the assumption behind this particular charge against the AFD. Yeah I mean I remember when people on the liberals on the left used to be quite suspicious of the intelligence services and the police but when it comes to the AFD you have to swallow everything that they say wholesale and Richard it's interesting that this comes as the culmination of an enquiry that was launched by Nancy Fraser the interior minister there and just as she's stepping down from that post or kind of being forced out this is kind of a parting shot against her that obviously the arch enemies not just of her but of the German political establishment. Yeah I mean Nancy Fraser began the presentation of this entire report with a giant lie she said that this is an independent investigation it is not it was the federal bureau for the protection of the constitution is part of the portfolio of the ministry of the interior it's under her direct political control and something that is so significant would have been never released by this authority without the approval of the minister.

(6:08 - 29:03)

So this sets the tone for the entire proceedings and the timing is very suspicious because we were about to see the shift of the minister of the interior from the social democrats to the christian social party from Bavaria and the first ones they're in favour of banning the AFD as the second ones are much more sceptical about it so they needed to propel these investigations now before this happens to basically force the new incoming government into dealing with this problem further so this is this was clearly what the timing was clearly motivated by the elections and the government formation so this is already highlights the politicised nature of this independent investigation. Yeah and Frank it's hard not to put this into context of what's happening more generally across Europe I mean Romania which we're going to talk about later cancelled an election because the wrong person won there in France we had the legal case against Marine Le Pen this is a growing trend of not being able to deal with your political opponents politically and instead using the courts or the intelligence services. It's a very worrying development because it basically means that you're trying to get around democratic decision making by introducing other factors other considerations and it basically means you end up policing the electorate you end up policing political parties and the idea that there is a sovereign independent electorate who is able to make decisions who have real consequences is directly undercut by the fact that at the end of the day a single judge or two or three judges have more power and more influence over political outcomes than millions and millions of people who voted for a particular kind of party.

What I really worry about is that this trend seems to have acquired great momentum and it's a momentum that's underwritten by the European Commission I think they really are very much on board with this kind of shift this lawfare shift that's occurring within public life and what I really worry about is that this is going to create a situation of tremendous intense polarisation which can often create the worst possible outcomes for everybody concerned because if people think that their votes do not matter they're ignored and trampled upon they may well decide to adopt another more violent way of trying to make their voices heard and this is almost like an invitation for some kind of rebellion because if millions of people are thwarted in this kind of way there will be some people who will resort to using more direct means which I'm not in favour of but which is very much of a possibility when you adopt this kind of repressive political tactic. Certainly is a dangerous increasingly dangerous moment for European democracy but Richard I mean this came in the same week coincidentally or not maybe an argument as Maz was due to kind of be sworn in or receive the official backing of the parliament for his chancellorship after the coalition agreement has been inked by the SPD and the CSU-CDU but then that didn't happen in fact the further had to do another round of votings in the first round of voting he failed to meet the threshold of required votes what happened how this was it seemed that the CDU-CDU thought this was a kind of a shoo-in and they didn't have to worry about it but instead there was some kind of rebellion. Yeah well what happened is that for the first time in post-war German history the formal vote to elect the chancellor was the threshold was not met this was I mean they took the elections were in February until today they negotiated and the president waited with his nomination for the person of a chancellor until these negotiations were finished and a formal coalition agreement was signed so everything was was set up for the for the new cabinet but then in the very last minute they they failed to reach the because of 18 people and 18 members of parliament to to reach the required threshold of an absolute majority and this is unheard of in post-war Germany this never happened even when coalition negotiations broke down then the formal vote was fine so this this already shows that this new marriage of of of the christian democrats and social democrats is actually more like a forced marriage because many many people are very sceptical in both parties of the of this new alignment it also signals that Mercer's majority is even thinner than he than he thought basically this makes him as weak as if if we speak speak about today as weak as Olaf Scholz was in the beginning of November so the German political crisis will continue and we will see that once this new coalition is put to a test it will fail again and again to decide on on significant matters like migration economy and so forth yeah and frank i mean this was hugely significant not least because as soon as the German election had taken place and then the coalition looked like it was going to be finalised between the the christian and social democrats everybody has been parading Merz as the new saviour of Europe he's been out talking about European re-armament about even alternatives to NATO and all the rest of it he's been positioned as kind of the guy who's going to put European sensible centrist politics kind of back on track and yet he can't even command the necessary Germany yeah i mean it's very much a Macron Manque where he would like to be this dynamic figure who's going to make Europe great again and who's going to be able to pull together some kind of a legitimate and and credible you know German leadership within Europe itself i think what's what i think is interesting about the German political scene and the debates and the fragility of the coalition is that it very much represents the Italianisation of German politics because i think it's in Italy that we've had this phenomenon on numerous occasions where you've all this positioning between different parties to try to establish a coalition and in Italy what usually happens is that they then bring in a technocrat an unelected technocrat someone like Draghi or Monty to become the prime minister as a way of resolving this kind of tension and i wouldn't be surprised if Germany too would be more or less moving in that direction i don't know what form that it would take where you try to overcome the inherent instability of the present political arrangement by trying to put in a figure who's meant to be an expert a reliable banker somebody who's got the ears of the money market and the financiers and that would indicate that Germany in a sense downgraded itself into a second position status compared to where it was yeah i mean in some ways that was what Merz was supposed to be he was supposed to be the sensible guy with the the banking history and all the rest of it to come and kind of rescue German politics but Richard one of the interesting things but lots of recriminations about who's responsible for this maybe there were a few uh christian democrat defectors maybe the social democrats kind of stabbed them in in the back but in a way they'd already Merz's party had already given the game away with the coalition agreements and most specifically with reforming the debt break earlier on so he's already kind of signalling weakness yeah of course this is um i mean the first thing that he needed to form a coalition with the social democrats then he needed immediately a lot of money to finance all this weird economic policies that are that should continue that are causing the very the problems in the very very first place and for this day he needed uh the greens um so he expanded the coalition actually with one party to the left and now what happened that after the first round of voting uh failed in the in the parliament he even expanded the coalition even further to the left because now he needed a two-thirds majority to change the agenda of the current session and um it was actually um quite clear what happened that um the greens and the left tolerated at least the second round of voting helped Merz to to get over the finishing line which tells us a lot about this so-called cordon sanitaire it only works not to the left-wing extreme only to the to to the to the right of the cbu it's undermined the entire credibility of the this uh extremism clause in the in the cdu's uh programmes and i think this this this expanding the they have now nobody to expand to now so there's this is the entire political arena united against the afd it's it's insanely um insanely unstable situation now and i don't know where this is going to continue yeah and that seems a bit of instability in germany is the order of the nine it is and there's a logic here which is more pronounced in germany than anywhere else which is this at the moment the main dividing line uh in politics is between populism and anti-populism whatever those two terms mean the anti-populist uh basically it brings together political parties that are meant to be quite distinct and different i mean the greens are meant to be different than the cdu uh the social democrats are meant to be different than the left the link l rest of that but when it comes to populism and fighting it they all come together under one umbrella and i think that this this kind of dividing line that we see in germany being so pronounced is going to become really really important all over europe in in the in the years ahead because the political difference to all intents and purposes between the legacy parties in germany is paper thin it's not really a real difference it's basically one of emphasis and because of their pragmatism and opportunism those differences can be ignored for all practical purposes because that's the only way that they can feel that they're under one roof so watch this space this is what germany is really in a sense uh uh acting as a precursor of a dynamic that's going to be much more important all over the european continent yeah this actually mirrors uh if you look into the european commission in 2014 jean-claude juncker was elected by the european people's party and the social democrats 2019 von der leyen was elected by people's party social democrats and the liberals now in 2024 secondary election of von der leyen epp social democrats liberals and greens so we see this pattern emerging all across europe right coming to romania somewhere where that attempt to kind of enforce the court on sunday broke down in spectacular fashion after they cancelled uh the feud must go now the first round of the presidential elections which kevin georgescu had stormed to a somewhat unexpected lead of they now rerun the elections the first round of these new elections is completed and we've we've got nikas or dan the kind of centrist figure mayor figure up against the definitely much more radical uh definitely much more radical george simeon richard what happened in in this election what what do we expect to happen next i mean in romania everything happened at once so uh they and all the first round of elections and we have spoken about this and you can find this in many other publications what's happened there because the unexpected lead was not the establishment party's candidate who came in first but uh the right-wing george georgescu and the liberal lascony so they had to annul the entire elections from from from the beginning to the end we unrolled an entire new uh procedure for candidates and georgescu was banned from running um conveniently enough lascony was ousted by her own party during the during the process so we had a completely new field of candidates and the romanians were very sceptical of this all in the new round of elections only half of them showed up so it was not like what they have uh what the establishment political establishment in bucharest has hoped for that all these people will go to the to the ballot box because they were alarmed by this frightening populist win on the contrary people who most people were fed up with this constant struggling and meddling and they just stayed at home the establishment candidate krina antonescu performed very badly didn't manage to get into the second round and uh it is george singman who won the first round with over 40 percent so he was performing now better than georgescu uh in in december and it again it was the liberal candidate uh this time nico shot done who um managed to get into the second round and now it's quite clear it's uh because he is the mayor of the of the much more liberal capital he will lose the countryside in the second round and george simon is in a in a pole position to to the presidency no wonder that um current government the prime minister already resigned yeah and frank is it's a sign that sometimes the i mean they would like to in the establishments like we'll just ignore the will of the people but even if they ban the candidates people will find a similar candidate to work for well also romania is a very special case because there the political establishment is entirely dependent on the european commission their survival is is not based upon their support within the romanian society it's based upon their contacts and connection with the elites in brussels so they are really out of touch uh the parties that they represent are in fact zombie parties you know they're not parties that have a mass movement behind them and therefore uh that kind of uh you know sort of potemkin kind of political movements that they represent have been exposed very very directly and very very clearly by by essentially a number of individuals you know i mean first of all in the first presidential election through jesku was just an individual he didn't have a party behind him yet he could get a much better result than these establishment parties and now simeon more or less done even better i think that it does tell us that the romanian political system a very corrupt political system that's based upon that kind of neo-colonial relationship with brussels is in for a rough ride because no matter what happens and even if simeon does get to be the president of romania i think there's going to be a lot of law back against that you know sort of either simeon will have to uh through the line or he's going to invite a lot of uh a lot of attention unpleasant attention from the powers that be in europe and richard tell us a bit about simeon i mean it seems like a slightly difficult to understand figure in many respects he wants to take on the legacy of or take on the mantle of calendar rescue is banned calendar which rescue is a very strongly anti-atlanticist anti-nato canada very critical of the european uh the commission etc is simeon like this or is it something slightly different well there is there there was always a um certain amount of right-wing nationalism in uh in romania that simeon started with but he has left this uh his political movement expanded way way behind this so his party was founded in 2019 um in an anti-hungarian um uh out of anti-hungarian sentiment and in uh in transylvania but now he has actually transformed his movement into something much much bigger which makes him a more dangerous opponent than calling georgescu was uh was an independent um unlike georgescu our his party has a parliamentary group he had they have performed uh the second biggest group if i'm correct uh in the parliament currently so he can actually um move forward parliament emotions laws etc and um he he is kind of looking for the maloney role so he is not as that much on the right as he used to be he is looking into um a middle ground on pro-western pro-nato stances or or pro-russia ones um and he he hasn't developed his policies fully yet just like maloney has is a bit ambiguous girl in in italy no um but crucially enough he's from outside establishment his power resources are not coming from the established power established resources so which makes him dangerous for the for brussels or if you want to say that or on nato because he cannot be controlled through this traditional channels of influence that made romanian politics so subservient to international to the international order yeah and thanks does this mean that romania is going to become another problem child for the as far as the eu is concerned it depends i mean uh simeon said that he politically is in the same kind of uh camp or as orban is in hungary uh albeit you know his anti-hungarian political past i think is something that is would kind of separate the two you know quite quite fundamentally uh but if if simeon does uh hold on to his positions that he's been arguing for then obviously that will create a lot of problems for the european union because romania is potentially much more influential uh than let's say slovakia is you know so he would his role would be quite you know much more serious much more important but also romania is very you know significant significant uh because of its military relationship to the united states to nato it's got a relatively important uh military role to play given the the region that we're talking about so romania uh has is a much bigger actor uh potentially than any of the other troublemakers within the european union so yeah it could that could be quite interesting so the key question is is he going to go down of pragmatism and and become a good boy in the way that some people are hoping or is he going to become uh consistent with his outlook and uh and try to kind of promote a much more independent sovereigntist approach for romania yeah well it seems like he will win the runoff although given everything's happened in romanian politics recently we probably shouldn't bet on anything happening just yet but we'll yeah we'll we'll we'll we'll we'll analyse that when we get to it finally we're coming to hungary it seems that barely a month can go by without some kind of announcements from the european commission that they're that they found something wrong with what's going on hungary that needs to have a court case brought or funds suspended this time around it's uh the the role of a series of regulations and laws that hungary passed with regards to how it handles people smuggling and uh active stopping the activities of people smugglers on the on the hungarian border hungary basically his position seems to have been we deport criminals from our country we get rid of them we don't want them staying and even if those are people smugglers whereas the european commission seems to be suggesting that they have to uh keep the people smugglers in their country uh even if they're kind of contained frank is this just another kind of outburst of anti-hungarian sentiment yeah i mean if hunger didn't exist what would the european commission do i mean they're probably sitting around twiddling their thumbs saying we gotta have a reason for existence let's give hungary a hard time this week by raising yet another issue and i think in this particular case what they essentially are saying is that hungary hasn't got the right as a sovereign nation to determine how it handles uh criminals that enter its society and it seems to me that uh hungary's uh position on this question makes absolute sense for a small nation that you don't want to provide uh resorts and hotels and apartments uh and for all these kind of illegal a criminal uh sort of uh basically uh slave drivers uh but you want to get rid of them you know sort of and uh you know if hunger didn't do that then i think we create a lot of problems for itself so i just hope that uh hunger you know hungary has the the strength to be able to withstand this kind of pressure because what's going to happen is this will go to the european court of rights the judges are basically they got the memo from the commission as to how they should react they will find hungary guilty of something and they will probably say hungary will have to you know either meet their demand or if if it refuses to accept their judgement it will be basically penalised by paying i don't know five million euros a day until it changes its mind richard there's something ironic about this case particularly because after years of the european commission accusing hungary of enforcing his borders too strongly they're now trying to say that no actually yeah hungary somehow undermining europe's common borders by his actions with people smugglers i think this is a part of a bigger problem because they have uh created a international legal system that is basically encouraging a lot of um pro-migration ngos to punch one hole after the other into the into the legal system and it's one thing about hungary and and this the smugglers but on the other side it was um or even the uk is not deemed as a safe country to for a german court to send an albanian criminal back to it's insane we are not found many in criminals i think so this is this is um at one time they use you lord and it's the european court of human rights so there's always something where you cannot send back a criminal to to to another country into a prison where he belongs to and when because this prison is um understaffed this prison is uh whatever no not enough daylight so this is this is uh this is done on purpose by organisations they want to create legal uncertainty so that people actually can move across borders because all these procedures are taking so long and so complicated that in many many cases the authorities just give up throwing the towel and then they don't enforce the law whatever happens we'll we'll follow this case closely but we suspect as you say it'll be another kind of knock-in that they use use borders but uh for now that's it from us from the mcc brussels podcast thanks so much to frank for joining us pleasure richard thanks for joining us it was a pleasure as well thanks for watching and make sure if you enjoyed the mcc brussels podcast make sure you're subscribed on youtube give us a like and send us a comment we'd love to hear how you enjoy things and what topics you'd like us to tackle next but see you next week at the same time