Too much democracy... or not enough?

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

It was not so long ago that Germany was governed by a series of ‘grand coalitions’ made up of the two major Volksparteien (people’s parties). With the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) in charge and the Social Democrats as their assistants, these coalitions managed to get their work done with the least amount of noise.

Admittedly, they were characterised by an almost complete lack of ambition. Nonetheless, disputes, if they ever arose, were largely kept behind closed doors.

The only fight that comes to mind from this soporific era of German politics was on the question of border controls between the chancellor, Angela Merkel, and her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, both of whom belonged to the same Bundestag faction!

At the time, if a columnist was struggling to come up with an idea, a piece on whether the lack of public disagreement between the two major parties was bad for democracy was always a safe bet. For newspapers on the lef…