The Firewall is Backfiring

There’s a subtle, little-discussed but very bizarre political phenomenon that has interested me ever since I started blogging and paying serious attention to politics.

I first noticed it during Covid. Back in those dark days, virus understanders sold measures like lockdowns and masking to the public first as a means of keeping hospitals at capacity by slowing virus infections, then as a means of slowing virus infections just because, and finally as rituals that we had to do more of whenever infections rose, regardless of what effect they had on anything. Mass vaccination followed a nearly identical arc. At first the vaccinators said everyone had to be vaccinated to stop the virus, but by late Autumn 2021 they wanted to vaccinate everybody as much as possible because reasons. In both cases you could see, in real time, the ends towards which we were striving regressing, until finally the means became unquestionable ends in themselves.

I propose to call this phenomenon endification, and I think it is very significant. It seems to happen whenever you mobilise large, complex systems towards goals that sooner or later prove unattainable. As these goals pass out of reach but the system remains mobilised, basic understandings of what we are even trying to do shift. The erstwhile means become almost sacred, worthy of pursuing in themselves, often for moral reasons. This can go on for a very long time even though it makes no sense and is painfully retarded.

Germany seems especially prone to endification, probably for cultural reasons stemming from our pathological commitment to thoroughness. We have to do things longer and harder than everybody else, always with an aura of breathless moral urgency and self-importance. Imagine shades of Covid idiocy happening in many different political domains all the time. Our climate policies have long since become endified, the nuclear phaseout was endified and many aspects of mass migration have been endified.

The brings me to the crazy and ridiculous firewall against the AfD – the unending Antifa-enforced political taboo upon achieving anything with AfD votes at the state or federal level. AfD support is held to be contaminating, regardless of whatever it is the AfD happens to be supporting. It can turn even the most ordinary routine legislation into dark evil malicious fascism.

The firewall against the AfD splits the Right and so it is a great gift to the Left. For example, it’s the only reason the SPD has a say in the federal government after its disastrous showing in the traffic light coalition. It’s the only reason the Left is still a force in East Germany outside Brandenburg at all. Should we get new elections, the firewall will probably bring the Greens into government too. If it didn’t exist, the Left would have to invent it, that is how well the firewall is working out for it.

The AfD also benefits enormously from the firewall, even though it’s not of its making. The last 10 years of German politics have been one unending nightmarish festival of failure and stupidity. All the Establishment parties have taken turns implicating themselves in this amazing shitshow, while religiously sparing the AfD any association with their unprecedented failures. The firewall lends truth to the AfD’s name; it has allowed Alternative für Deutschland to become the only conceivable political alternative in Germany. As things get worse and voters grow more desperate for alternatives, the AfD just becomes stronger. The firewall is an AfD-maximising machine.

The firewall is only really bad for the people who invented it and who alone have the power to end it. I speak here of the centre-Right Union parties, the CDU and the CSU. They maintain the firewall not because it helps them or because it is a good idea or even because the AfD consists of evil fascists, but because the firewall has been endified.

In 2018, when the CDU first set up the firewall, it had a coherent purpose. It was supposed to be a means of keeping the AfD small by dissuading CDU supporters from defecting to their upstart rival. CDU leaders had seen how the rising Green Party ate into the support of the SPD after reunification, and they thought they could prevent the same thing from happening to them. They would have been better off doing nothing at all, because after seven years of firewall the AfD is stronger than the Greens ever were. The whole thing has become a lesson in why you should avoid heavy-handed interventions in complex systems and just govern pragmatically with whatever majorities are at hand.

Let us survey the damage. The firewall has helped the AfD supplant the CDU as the standard Right-of-centre party across the entire East. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Sachsen-Anhalt, the Evil Hitler Fascists are within striking distance of outright majorities. Ballooning AfD popularity is fuelled by the failures of Merz’s federal Government, where the firewall has locked the Union into a doomed coalition with the radicalised and hostile Social Democrats. The SPD have so far obstructed all major federal initiatives, probably for the purpose of hurting the CDU still further and driving it into the arms of the AfD. It is a strategy the Left first tried during the federal election campaign, and one it has so far refused to abandon.

Various preeminent Union personalities, eager to stop the destruction of their party, have demanded a change in course. These firewall-rethinkers include former CDU General Secretary Peter Tauber – the very man who played a leading role in devising the firewall strategy in the first place. Shortly after Stern published Tauber’s mild and very careful dissent, a series of CDU politicians from East Germany lined up to say that they, too, would desperately like to see a new approach to the AfD. As I type this, CDU leaders have withdrawn for a highly secret meeting to discuss this dilemma and how they will deal with the AfD in the future.

Alas, endification is a powerful force. You can’t just turn it off. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose political instincts rival those of most earthworms, has used the days and hours ahead of this meeting to sing the praises of the firewall. In response to a journalist’s question last Tuesday, Merz intoned absurdly and for no reason at all that “We are the firewall!” And yesterday, at some political event in Sauerland, he ruled out cooperation with the AfD in any form – “at least not under me as party leader of the CDU”. Merz further claimed that “there is no common ground between the CDU and the AfD” and complained that AfD opposition to the European Union, NATO and the European Monetary Union means that the party “is against everything that has made the Federal Republic of Germany great and strong over the past eight decades”.

An inability to articulate why we have to keep doing a senseless thing, and the proliferation of obviously fake reasons for said senseless thing, are among the most telltale symptoms of endification. Thus I invite you to appreciate how dumb Merz’s arguments are.

Whatever they got us in the past, EU initiatives and NATO-driven foreign policy are killing German industry. EU rules are presently blocking our attempts to increase natural gas power generation, without which our electricity grid will become totally unstable. The EU’s expanded Emissions Trading System (ETS2) from 2027 is set to make heating and transportation wildly more expensive than they have to be for zero reason. None of this is making Germany strong, but that’s not even the half of it. Lest you hope too hard that the AfD can fix any of this, you must remember that it can only govern federally with the CDU, and the Union will never go along with dropping the Euro, withdrawing from the EU or leaving NATO, even if the AfD was clearly demanding these things (which it’s mostly not). Merz’s objections are entirely moot.

The firewall has caused an enormous amount of potential energy to accumulate in the German political system. Only three resolutions are conceivable:

1. The CDU convinces the SPD or other partners on the Left to implement some bare minimum of the reforms necessary to slow or even stop deindustrialisation, rein in the runaway costs of the social welfare state and do something about mass migration. This would reduce AfD support, particularly in the West, and ease pressure on the party system more generally.
2. The Left parties goad the Union into successfully requesting that the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe ban the AfD. In an instant, the SPD, the Greens and Die Linke would have de facto majorities not only in the Bundestag but across the state parliaments. After this judicial revolution, we would probably find ourselves in a second DDR-style regime, ruled by an unpopular, threatened and highly repressive Left.
3. The firewall breaks down and after a substantial internal struggle, the CDU pursues some form of cooperation with the AfD federally. The Left parties would turn on the Union across Germany, and the CDU would have to seek outright coalitions or toleration arrangements with the AfD in many state parliaments too. The political realignment would happen suddenly, in less than a few months.

Of these three possibilities, (1) seems stupid and inconceivable. If the Left was committed to governing with the Union, it would already be doing that. The nightmare disaster of (2) can only happen if the Union is dumb enough to let it, which indeed is possible, but I still favour (3) as the most likely outcome. At some point, in a way that is as yet unimaginable to us, the firewall will probably come down. The sooner this happens, the better it will be for the CDU. As the Union dithers, it is losing ground it may never regain and all the while more explosive energy is accumulating in the party system.

If Union leaders were minimally rational, they would stop making public statements about how bad the AfD is and begin preparing this strategic shift behind the scenes, with all the bullying, bribing, threatening and coaxing that will require. Ten years of AfD demonisation have made this a mammoth task. But they are not doing that, because endification has made them stupid. They have to make things much, much worse for themselves first, only to end up in the same place two or three years later than they would have otherwise – poorer, weaker and worse off.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.