Unlike in countries such as Russia, the US, or France, the German presidency is not a powerful office. At least not in terms of what it can do directly or independently. Instead, Germany’s president is a largely representative figure, while real power to lead national policy belongs to the chancellor.
Yet the presidency is no mere decoration. According to a 2014 summary by Germany’s constitutional court, the authority of the office derives, above all, from the intellectual and moral influence it should exert, and whoever holds it “embodies the unity of the state.” In short, Germany’s president has two real jobs: to stand for national togetherness, especially when tensions increase and politics polarize, and to be a widely acknowledged moral authority.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the current president, has failed quite spectacularly on both counts, and his recent speech on the Day of German Unity has shown once again how and why. This is a scandal, but it is not a surprise. Even before his latest performance, Steinmeier had earned himself the nickname “Walter der Spalter,” which translates as Walter the Splitter.
And for good reasons: Although charged with integrating the nation, Steinmeier has a long record of explicitly calling for the marginalization and exclusion of large numbers of Germans, not only but in particularly those who dare represent or vote for the new-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Usually implicitly but always clearly, the president has repeatedly smeared them as extremists beyond the pale of political participation. Last year, for instance, he used a major speech on November 9 – a date with several historical associations, including the massive pogrom of 1938 and thus the Holocaust – to, in effect, single out the AfD and its supporters as at least the successors of Nazism if not simply its new embodiment.
This year, in a revealingly snobbish sally, he has labelled them “vulgar democrats.” For Steinmeier, clearly, there is not merely a distinction between “democrats” and “non-democrats,” but also one between inferior (“vulgar”) and superior (presumably sophisticated) democrats. Steinmeier clearly sees himself as a distinguished example of the latter. On a personal level, the obvious smugness of his attitude is merely deeply embarrassing. What is worse is that taking popular sovereignty seriously – as prescribed by the German constitution – would look vastly different.
Now, in his German Unity Day speech, Steinmeier has taken aim at what he himself described as large numbers of Germany’s citizens. They, the president has correctly noticed, are displaying “distrust toward the political order.” That, for Steinmeier, is no reason to seriously examine what might be wrong with that order or to make a genuine effort to understand the reasons for that distrust. His scant and general remarks on Berlin’s own mistakes and the anxieties of ordinary Germans illustrated not humility but aloof and patronizing disinterest.
Generously conceding that maybe not all of those who have lost trust in the status quo are “against democracy as such,” Steinmeier explicitly kept all of them under precisely that suspicion. In essence, he conflated many Germans’ very plausible discontent with the devastating policies imposed by radical-Centrist establishment parties with rejecting the constitutional order or even democracy as such: If you are not for us, so the message, you’re not just against us but a virtually criminal misfit.
How convenient – if, that is, you are Frank-Walter Steinmeier and your whole political biography happens to represent precisely that establishment, its privileges, its obstinate refusal to learn, and its failure.
Steinmeier also had harsh words for a whole catalog of horrors, of typical Centrist paranoia, blame-shifting, and scapegoating: the “unbearable demagoguery of extremist forces” and their “joy of destruction”; “outside powers that seek to divide and weaken us” (meaning Russia, obviously); the “predominance of the internet” (read social media that didn’t exist when he was young and escape mainstream control now that he is old); “conspiracy fantasies”; caricatures of Germany produced by “Kremlin trolls,” “German right-wing extremists,” and “left-authoritarian cranks”; “unscrupulous internet oligarchs”; and, finally of course, simply “populists” and “Wutwahler” (literally, “rage-voters”) – a contemptuous term for those who dare articulate their frustration with Steinmeier’s establishment friends by actually voting against them.
Against this dark backdrop, the complacent, crusading president invoked the specter of Weimar – that is the collapse of interwar German democracy that was followed by the catastrophe of Nazism. Steinmeier insisted that today’s Germany is “not Weimar,” but he also made clear that he believes it could end in a similar crash.
That was ironic, as Steinmeier also warned that historical ignorance is unforgivable. Indeed. But then he should know that Weimar was destroyed by many things, yet it could have survived all of them, if its people had not been hit by the mass immiseration of the Great Depression. Yes, Nazis – and conservatives foolishly promoting them – killed that first German democracy. But they could only do so because the country was sinking into ruin, misery, and mass despair, while its establishment elites pursued a hopelessly misguided economic policy and – even if that is often forgotten now – massively curtailed democracy well before the Nazis finished off what was left of it.
Say what you will about the AfD; it is not the equivalent of the Nazi party. That is where Steinmeier’s implied analogy makes no sense. Indeed – deliberately or not – he is misusing history as a cheap rhetorical, not to say demagogic device.
The real parallel between today and the last years of Weimar is invisible to Steinmeier because he lacks the humility needed for self-reflection. Just as between spring 1930 and early 1933, Germany’s establishment is offering nothing but “stay-the-course” to voters desperate not simply for change but help.
It was precisely that spirit of irresponsible, privileged aloofness that the president, in his Unity Day speech, displayed when promising nothing but empty phrases and the same all over again: more so-called “reforms” at home which many Germans recognize as what they really are, namely deep cuts into their welfare and life chances.
And abroad, of course, more support for Ukraine, that is, the ultra-corrupt Zelensky regime that has committed the worst act of terrorism against Germany in its history. That as well, more and more Germans see for what it really is: a perverse national self-humiliation and an absurd waste of money to finance a highly corrupt regime as well as an avoidable, unwinnable, and disastrous – also for ordinary Ukrainians – proxy war against Russia; an indirect (if barely) German war against Russia that constantly escalates the risk of an even worse direct war between Berlin and Moscow, as German intelligence services acknowledge, if in a biased manner.
Steinmeier delivers his polarizing and divisive messages while performing a tired patina of wise statesmanship that betrays at least a clumsy effort to impress. One day after Steinmeier’s unfortunate speech, Chancellor Friedrich Merz chose the bluntest way possible to convey, in essence, the same message. Traveling to visit the Kiev establishment, where Merz – with his bottomless wallet fed by German taxpayers – may enjoy the popularity he absolutely lacks at home, the chancellor made it rudely, brutally clear once more: Germany’s current rulers care more for the Kiev regime, which they may or may not genuinely mistake for Ukraine as a whole, than for their own country and the citizens who have elected and pay them. And this is just one, if striking, outcome of the true core of Germany’s malaise: a widespread and very plausible sense that Germany’s establishment does not care about Germans. Even if you dislike the AfD or “populists” in general, they are a response to this sense of abandonment.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.