What happened in the German Bundestag on Friday, January 31, was an instructive lesson that in a modern parliamentary democracy, one cannot practice “Machiavellianism,” according to which “the end justifies the means.” The political theater in the Bundestag, which was “directed” by the candidate for chancellor of the conservative German party CDU, Friedrich Merz, ultimately became his fiasco. In fact, he crossed the “Rubicon” two days earlier. Then, with the votes of the extreme AfD, he “pushed through” a draft of a new asylum law prepared by the CDU, which envisages measures similar to those demanded by the AfD. To express her concern about his inconsistency in his actions, former Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself from the CDU, reminded Merz in her appeal that in November 2024, he had proposed in the Bundestag to the Social Democrats and the Greens to reach an agreement with the CDU that they would not make any decisions that risk being voted on “with the votes of those over there, those from the AfD.” Merkel confirms that with this proposal he demonstrated “great statesmanship,” which, unfortunately, he betrayed when on January 29, 2025, “he consciously, for the first time in the history of the German Bundestag, enabled a majority with the votes of the AfD.”

Merkel's appeal did not change Merz's mind. On the contrary, two days later, on Friday (January 31.01), he and his party stubbornly stuck to their plan and demanded that the Bundestag vote on the controversial law, even though the Social Democrats and the Greens offered compromise solutions, just to avoid a second precedent, where the law would be passed with AfD votes.

The Social Democrats and the Greens, the CDU's two possible future coalition partners, perceived Merz's behavior as blackmail. According to the CDU, if they had not agreed to vote for the law, then they would have been to blame for the law being passed with the AfD's votes. Merz himself exposed himself as a "Machiavellian", because he argued for the urgency of passing the restrictive law before the elections with populist slogans that had so far been typical only of the AfD. Therefore, after the vote on the draft on Wednesday, only the AfD deputies were happy. In the end, Merz and the CDU, wanting to take hostages from the democratic parties in the Bundestag, got themselves caught in the "noose".

Michel Friedman, a German Jew, a well-known journalist, philosopher and long-time member of the CDU, left the party in protest, and in an interview with the weekly Zeit, said that the CDU, with its behavior and defeat in the Bundestag, "wrote a theatrical play entitled: 'Death by suicide.'" He emphasizes that the CDU is not a victim, because it unnecessarily "broke the taboo" that it was not allowed to cooperate with the AfD. Because after the elections it would have been able to count on a majority for its proposals. "But he didn't want to wait until then. And now Mr. Merz is surprised, because his fingers stink, because he caught something that stinks."

The debate in the Bundestag on Friday can truly be called historic. The speeches of the Social Democrats and Greens who appealed to Merz and the CDU to postpone the vote testified to the awareness that democracy was under threat, which arose from the CDU's desire to attract many of its voters to itself with the populist slogans of the AfD. After all, they knew that such a law would never pass the state parliament – ​​the Bundesrat. And if, with Merz's "poker", the law were to be passed with the votes of the AfD, then it would mean a real caesura in German politics. The CDU would "legitimize" the AfD as a "normal" democratic party. But, according to its extreme right-wing ideology, it is not a democratic party. With his behavior, Merz has jeopardized the previous credo of all democratic German politicians, from Adenauer and Brandt to Merkel and Scholz, according to which no one is allowed to enter into a coalition with the extreme right, which, in the face of the AfD, does not hide its sympathy for Hitler's Nazis.

The defeat of the “first democracy” in German history, the Weimar Republic, resulted from the disunity of political parties, and this helped the Nazis to attract many of the disillusioned citizens to their side. That is why until now all democratic parties in Germany have placed “statesmanship” above the bare struggle for power. The Weimar Republic did not have a “fireproof wall” against Hitler’s Nazis. That is why, just a few years after the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the Nazis came to power in a coalition with the conservatives in Thuringia. Until now, the consensus was that all German democratic parties should build, not tear down, the “fireproof wall” (Brandmauer) between the extreme right and the democratic parties in the Bundestag. Today, Friedrich Merz’s CDU is rightly accused of tearing down that defensive wall, which helped to isolate the extreme right, even when they were members of the Bundestag.

What happened in the Bundestag on Friday shook the entire democratic public. Suddenly, German citizens understood the truth of the saying, according to which no society has, in itself, a guarantee of democracy, but it must be defended, always anew and with all the force of civil protest. In the aforementioned interview, when asked whether he would now switch to another party, Michel Friedman replied that he was now even more motivated to fight for democracy as a citizen. "I have a good argument on my side: only in democracy is there respect and love for people. In a dictatorship, a person is worth nothing," he emphasizes. As a Jew, from whose family 50 relatives were killed in Auschwitz, and his mother, grandmother and father were saved because Oskar Schindler put them on his list, Friedman testifies to the meaning of democracy with his biography.

"Wehret den Anfängen" is the political slogan of the German Democrats. It means that when democracy is in danger, resistance should be expressed immediately, right from the start. Even when populism is just an idea, still in its infancy, so as not to let it grow into a real threat to democracy. That is why thousands of citizens took to the streets in all major German cities over the past weekend. In Berlin, according to the police, there were 160.000 citizens, and according to the organizers of the protest, 250.000. Mass protests by tens of thousands of citizens against the AfD and against the risky political game of Friedrich Merz and the CDU were also held in Hamburg, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Cologne and many other German cities. Democracy is not in danger as long as there are conscious, courageous citizens who are united in their desire to preserve it. Michelle Friedman says about herself that "as long as there is one person protesting and standing on the street with a banner in his hand, he will not stop fighting: "I will stand by him. And then there are two of us."

Yesterday's protests were not against the CDU party, but against its attempt, due to a power struggle, to endanger democracy itself. That is why the citizens clearly indicated at the protests that they do not want "cooperation with the AfD". Because the controversial law stipulates that refugees who do not have personal documents should be returned at the German border. This means that the CDU is demanding that controls be reintroduced at the German border. This would in turn violate the Schengen Agreement, but would also threaten the unity of the EU. So far, only the AfD has envisaged such measures, but it clearly advocates that Germany leave the EU. Only the AfD has so far planned drastic measures in asylum policy, so when the CDU's candidate for chancellor came forward with similar measures, it caused an avalanche of civil protests. At one protest, they lucidly played with the pronunciation of the name "März", which is identical to the pronunciation of the noun "März", the name for the month of March: "Kein Merz ab März", which means, "From March, without Merz".

Deutsche Welle

(The author is a philosopher and Macedonian and German writer)

THE LANGUAGE IN WHICH THEY ARE WRITTEN, AS WELL AS THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THE COLUMNS, DO NOT ALWAYS REFLECT THE EDITORIAL POLICY OF "FREE PRESS"