The Anachronistic Structures and Rules of the Parties

I. The form from the nineteenth century

In their load-bearing structures, Germany's political parties are inventions of the nineteenth century. Social democracy, liberalism, political Catholicism, conservatism — all of them developed their basic forms between 1848 and 1900, in a world that had little in common with today's. There was no telephone that would have allowed mass communication. There was no radio. There was no way for an individual citizen to inform himself about the conditions in his country or to get in touch with others who shared his concerns beyond his own village or town. Under these conditions the mass party was not one possibility among others, but the only form in which many individuals could become a political force.

It was at once an apparatus of information, of mobilisation and of representation. It printed newspapers, organised meetings, trained functionaries, sent delegates, collected dues. Its basic unit was the local section — the local association, the local group, later the district association — because without this local anchoring no communication was possible. Whoever wanted to belong had to go there; whoever could not go did not belong. The hierarchy of the party, which Robert Michels described in 1911 as the iron law of oligarchy, was under these conditions not merely a side effect but a condition of functioning: information had to pass through levels because there was no other way of spreading it, and the levels needed full-time functionaries who coordinated the voluntary members over long distances.

For its time this form was beyond criticism. It was functional. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it made democracy possible in the first place. Whoever wanted to connect the farmer in Holstein, the miner in Upper Silesia and the printer in Berlin politically needed an apparatus that established this connection organisationally. The mass party was that apparatus. The question is not whether it was necessary then. The question is what remains of it when the conditions for which it was built disappear.

II. The loss of function

These conditions have disappeared. The farmer in Holstein, the miner in Upper Silesia — if he still exists — and the programmer in Berlin can today inform themselves in seconds, coordinate with each other and act together without an apparatus having to establish the connection organisationally. The three functions that the mass party once bundled have been technically decoupled: information is provided by the internet, coordination by platforms and social media, visibility is a question of attention, not of apparatus. What the party once achieved, the party no longer achieves today — it happens without it.

What then remains for the party? One function remains: the right to put candidates on the ballot paper. That is a legal threshold set up by German electoral law, and it is considerable. But it is the only function left — and it could be fulfilled by a much leaner organisation than the mass party with its apparatuses, local branches, district conferences, executive committees and staffs of functionaries. The form outlives its function. What survives is not the task but the organisation that once fulfilled the task.

That is the precise definition of an anachronism: a form that has outlived its function and continues to run only as a form. It is not maintained by malice, nor by the inertia of individuals. It maintains itself. The members defend the party because they are members. The functionaries defend the apparatus because they live from the apparatus. The voters keep voting because they know no other form. What was reasonable for six generations remains reasonable because it was reasonable for six generations. Until it no longer works.

III. Who governs: professional dominance and the qualification gap

The party organisation recruits its personnel according to the rules that made sense in the nineteenth century. Advancement in the party runs through long honorary offices, through executive posts in local branches, through places on the list, through loyalties within the party. Whoever wants to take this path needs time, patience, and a career compatible with years of sitting in meetings. Whoever brings all this is as a rule a lawyer, an administrative specialist or a teacher; in the economic-policy wing, business graduates and economists join them. These are professions whose work can be shifted into the evening hours and whose language is closely related to the language of administering and legislating.

In the German Bundestag, around twenty-seven per cent of the members with a university degree studied law. Then follow economics, political science, teaching. Engineers account for a small single-digit share. Natural scientists are rare. There are physicians, but politically they almost never work in the portfolios that have to do with medicine. The spokespersons for digital policy, energy, climate, research, transport, construction — the overwhelming majority of them are lawyers or economists. They decide about bridges without ever having built one. They decide about software without ever having written any. They decide about energy systems without ever having worked in one. With few exceptions they are not incompetent — they are unqualified in the literal sense: not trained for what they have to decide about.

This is not an accidental deficit but a structural result of recruitment. Whoever builds, repairs, programmes or plans a country cannot attend party evenings for twenty years. Whoever can attend party evenings does not, as a rule, build, repair, programme or plan. The selection is not malicious, but it is biased. From the stream of the politically interested it filters out precisely those whose skills the country would need, and promotes precisely those whose skills the country already has in abundance. A country of engineers is governed by lawyers. That is not a conspiracy, it is the statistics of selection.

IV. Who does not get through: the filter layer

Even someone who finds the right addressee in this selection often fails at a second layer. Between the citizen and the elected representative stands an apparatus of secretariats, press offices, staff, outer offices, mailboxes. This layer fulfils a necessary function — no individual member of parliament can read a thousand emails a day — but it has its own logic, and this logic does not serve the matter at hand.

Whoever writes persistently becomes a troublemaker. Whoever raises complex concerns is set aside. Whoever warns becomes a burden. The filter, whether it operates mechanically as an email filter or humanly in the secretariat, optimises not for truth but for coping with the inbox. The perfidious thing about this logic is that it becomes immune to precisely what it ought to let through: whoever is right and repeats it looks like a repeat offender; whoever reports a danger that has not yet occurred looks like an alarmist. Two essays are devoted to this mechanism and its history, and they are not to be repeated here: SPAM — Oder: Wie man Kassandra zum Schweigen bringt and Das Kassandra-Syndrom on gu18.eu (both in German). Whoever wants to understand what stands between citizen and representative when the two actually ought to be talking to each other will find the full diagnosis there.

For the citizen this means a trap from which there is hardly any way out. Whoever writes once and receives no answer has not yet really tried. Whoever writes three times is considered intrusive. Whoever writes five times ends up in spam. The persistence the citizen needs to be heard at all is exactly what makes him unheard as soon as it sets in. The apparatus's answer is not rejection — rejection would be a decision. The answer is silting up: a polite acknowledgement, a forwarding to a foundation, a standard phrase, a silence. The concern disappears without anyone having ended it.

V. The local branch as a barrier

Whoever finds a contact person despite selection and filter comes up against the next peculiarity of the party organisation: its geographical binding. A party is organised by constituencies and local branches. A citizen who approaches the local party office with a concern is passed on to the local representative. That is the logic of the organisation, and in the nineteenth century it made sense: back then expertise and geography mostly coincided, because problems were decided locally and the local notable, as a local expert, was also the right addressee.

Today expertise and geography diverge. The problems are supra-regional, the expertise is supra-regional, only the mediation is still local. A citizen who raises a technical concern — say, a design solution for an infrastructure or construction problem — is referred by the party office of his region to the locally responsible member of parliament, who was elected because he represents the region, not because he understands the matter. The local member may be a capable man — a master craftsman, a teacher, a lawyer — and he will receive the concern with the goodwill due to a voter from his own constituency. But the professional judgement the matter requires he cannot contribute from his training.

The one engineer who may be a member of the same party — given how rare this profession is in the parties, there are often really only one or two per party and federal state — sits in another constituency, possibly in another federal state. He is not in sight as a contact, because the organisation sorts its citizens by geography, not by subject. The expertise exists in the party. It is simply not accessible to the citizen. The local branch, once a bridge between citizen and politics, is today a barrier between the citizen and the member of his own party who is expert in his concern.

This applies not only to one party, and pointing to individual party offices would be misleading. Whoever has experienced it with one party experiences it with every party. The organisational form is the same everywhere — it is the party organisation of the nineteenth century — and it creates the same barrier everywhere, because it is built according to the same logic.

VI. The territories

The separation that runs within a party through its local branches continues between the parties as a separation into territories. Each party cultivates its themes, its positions, its clientele, and treats the other parties as competitors with whom one does not coordinate. This too was functional in the nineteenth century, because the parties were separated into camps — the working class, the bourgeoisie, the Catholic milieu, agrarian interests — and the separation corresponded to real differences in living conditions. Whoever voted SPD did so because as a worker he had different interests from the civil servant who voted for the German People's Party. The territories made sense because real camps corresponded to them.

That too has disappeared. The camps have dissolved; most voters today are no longer tied to a party by class, denomination or region, but switch their votes. The problems to be solved — energy, climate, demography, digitalisation, migration, infrastructure — cut across every party profile and require solutions on which everyone would have to work together. The division into territories is no longer a help but an obstacle.

This becomes visible not only in election campaigns but every day in government. A coalition of two or three parties is the normal case in Germany today, and the normal case is also that the coalition partners hardly talk to each other. Each party manages its ministries, each fills its posts, each draws up its balance sheet for its own clientele. Cooperation exists, if at all, at the top — the coalition committee, the Chancellery, the leadership rounds — not in the breadth of parliamentary work. The expertise and experience distributed among the parties do not come together, because the territories prevent it. The most recent fractures too — the coalition that turned into an open pitched battle through an internal strategy paper entitled D-Day — are not isolated cases but manifestations of the same logic. Whoever thinks in territories plans against the partner, not with him.

The consequence is that the problems that would need solving disappear in the gaps between the territories. Energy policy belongs to the economics ministry of one party and the environment ministry of another, and between the two lies fallow what would actually be the main thing. Digitalisation formally belongs everywhere and de facto nowhere. Education belongs to the federal states, and between the states lies the country. The territories produce not only competition but gaps — spaces in which responsibility is assigned to no one and in which whatever reaches across them dies.

VII. The sum

The five components laid side by side here — the anachronism of the form, professional dominance, the filter, the local barrier, the territories — are not independent defects. They are five manifestations of the same thing: an organisational form constructed for the nineteenth century, in which recruitment of personnel, career paths, visibility and cooperation follow the conditions of that time.

What arises from these five components together is an apparatus that denies citizens access precisely where they would need it. Whoever has the right profession is not nominated. Whoever is nominated is shielded by filters. Whoever gets through the filter is directed to the geographically responsible but professionally unqualified member of parliament. Whatever goes beyond this member disappears in the spaces between the territories. That is not the failure of one party. That is how the form works.

This form cannot be reformed with the means contained within it. Better party rules, a tighter party office, faster replies to emails, a more skilful selection of personnel — all these are adjustments within the form, and they change nothing about the form. What would have to change is the form itself.

VIII. What follows

What could take the place of the party organisation is the subject of the three blueprints developed in The Founding of a New Party and the Iron Law of Robert Michels. They are not to be repeated here. But against the background of the diagnosis set out here they can now be placed more precisely, because each of the three blueprints answers one of the components described here.

The people's representative without a party answers professional dominance and the filter: he ends selection through party careers, because he is not recruited through local branches and list places, but directly by the citizens. An engineer, a nurse, an entrepreneur can stand for election without having gone through twenty years of local branch; and citizens reach them without having to pass through the party apparatus, because they have built no apparatus between themselves and their voters.

The mandate without a place answers the local barrier: it decouples the mandate from geography and links it to the subject matter. The subject mandate holder, who commits publicly to a field, is reachable by the citizens who have a concern in his field, no matter in which region they live. Expertise finds its way to the subject, because the local boundary that previously kept it away does not exist for this category of mandate.

The transparency council answers the territories: it makes visible what happens in the spaces between the parties — the lobbying contacts, the votes, the financial flows, the inconsistencies between promises and actions. What is visible can no longer disappear between the territories, because making things disappear presupposes that nobody is watching. The transparency council watches, and with that the silent assignment of responsibility to no one comes to an end.

The three blueprints are, in other words, the organisational form of the twenty-first century for precisely those functions that the party of the nineteenth can no longer fulfil: bringing people into parliament, thinking about the whole, making power visible. They are not abstract reform proposals but concrete answers to concrete pathologies. Which of these answers is right, in what order they would have to be implemented, how they could be fitted into the constitution — that is the subject of further discussion. But that something else must take the place of the anachronistic form if the liberal idea — and with it every other serious political idea — is to have a chance of being heard again, is the finding this essay presents.