The Grateful Party

I. Resubmission

In February 2026 an essay appeared on beyond-decay.org under the title The End Product, which set out the following finding: the German political system has no competence filter; it selects its leaders according to qualities that have nothing to do with the matters on which those leaders have to decide; and in the end it rewards whoever has survived with promotion — regardless of whether he has achieved anything or not. Jens Spahn served as the illustration. The essay's subtitle read: A system that enables rise without substance will inevitably produce a Spahn.

Three months later it is worth testing the same hypothesis against a second case. If it is correct, the system ought to produce not one Spahn but a series of them — at regular intervals, with the same qualities, in the same places. A hypothesis that explains only one case is weak. One that explains several cases and predicts further ones is sound.

II. The Second Test

Philipp Amthor, born 1992 in Ueckermünde, single mother, father (a soldier) gone early. Joins the CDU and the Junge Union in 2008 at the age of sixteen. At seventeen on the state executive of the Junge Union Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. At twenty district chairman of the Junge Union Vorpommern-Greifswald. From 2012 studies law in Greifswald, financed by a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation — that is, the CDU's party-affiliated foundation. In 2017 passes the First State Examination in Law with distinction. He does not obtain the Second State Examination. The doctoral thesis he begins in the same year remains unfinished — for nine years he has described himself as a "doctoral candidate". Professional activities outside politics in his CV: a few months as a research assistant at the university and at a Berlin commercial law firm, between the end of his studies and his entry into the Bundestag. Nothing else.

In October 2017, at the age of twenty-four, he sits in the Bundestag. In 2018, as a member of parliament, he writes a letter beginning "Dear Peter" on Bundestag letterhead to the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs, Altmaier, in which he promotes the New York start-up Augustus Intelligence. A few months later he receives share options and a directorship in the company. In June 2020 the matter becomes public. Amthor gives up the posts and apologises. The Berlin public prosecutor's office refrains from opening an investigation. In May 2025, at the age of thirty-two, he becomes Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister for Digital Affairs and State Modernisation. In the same year he becomes a member of the CDU federal executive and the party's commissioner for members.

Spahn, born 1980, bank apprenticeship, member of the Bundestag in 2002 at twenty-two, thereafter nothing but politics, the masks affair, chairmanship of the parliamentary group. Amthor, born 1992, half a lawyer, member of the Bundestag in 2017 at twenty-four, thereafter nothing but politics, the Augustus affair, a state secretaryship. Between the two careers lie twelve years and exactly the same architecture.

III. What Is Identical Is System

A single correspondence is chance. Two identical career paths in the same party, twelve years apart, are not. They are the result of a procedure that in both cases rewards the same qualities and in both cases produces the same consequences: early entry, a life lived exclusively within the apparatus, an early seat in parliament, an affair entangled with lobbying, no consequences, promotion.

What the February End Product showed for Spahn applies to Amthor in identical form. We shall not repeat that analysis here. We note: when the same procedure produces the same figure twelve years later, it is no longer merely a procedure. It is a logic of selection that reliably delivers its results, and the results will go on being delivered as long as the logic remains in force.

IV. The Lesser Cases

It would be premature to confine the diagnosis to two CDU men. Anyone who looks into other parties finds the same pattern in varying degrees of sharpness.

Kevin Kühnert, born 1989, degree in journalism and communication studies abandoned, distance-learning degree in political science suspended, career entirely through the Jusos, member of the Bundestag in 2021, SPD general secretary from 2021 to 2024. No lobbying affair. But the same socialisation curve: a professional career exclusively within the apparatus, no outside world in the CV.

Ricarda Lang, born 1993, law studies not completed, career through the Grüne Jugend, in 2022 at the age of twenty-eight party chair of the Greens without ever having been a member of the Bundestag. No affair, the same path of socialisation.

Annalena Baerbock, born 1980, two degrees (bachelor's in Hamburg, master's at the LSE), doctorate not completed, thereafter assistant to a Member of the European Parliament, adviser to the Bundestag parliamentary group, state party chair, member of the Bundestag. Academically better equipped than the others, but in the same sense without an outside profession — as a Yahoo profile soberly notes, she never learned any other profession. The affair of the embellished CV (memberships that were never active, passages in a book without attribution of sources) is in a different class from the Augustus files, but it lies in the same field: in the gap between what the CV promises and what it actually contains.

Paul Ziemiak, born 1985, career through the Junge Union (federal chairman), studies not completed, member of the Bundestag in 2017, in 2018 the youngest CDU general secretary of all time. No affair, the same path of socialisation.

These four are not villains, and the point here is not to judge their careers. They are something else: the broader class in which Spahn and Amthor are the more sharply defined special cases. The class cuts across parties. It is not a CDU problem. It is a problem of the German party apparatus as such.

V. The Real Question

With this the question shifts. It is no longer a matter of what is going on with Spahn, Amthor, Kühnert, Lang, Baerbock or Ziemiak individually. It is a matter of how it comes about that the top positions of all the major parties are occupied by people with this one biography — and not by a cross-section of the society they claim to represent.

An honest answer begins with an observation that is trivial in itself and has its point precisely in that: a reasonably normally socialised person only very rarely aspires to a career in a party. Whoever joins a party at fourteen, sixteen or eighteen does not belong to the majority of his peers. Whoever sits on the state executive of the youth organisation at twenty belongs to an even smaller subset. Whoever wants to enter parliament at twenty-two or twenty-four belongs to the top of a subset of that subset.

This is not a value judgement on these people. It is a statistical observation. Most young adults do not want to sit on a party executive at twenty. They want to learn, travel, find a profession, earn money, start a family, enlarge their world. Politics within the apparatus is hard to reconcile with this programme, because it demands the opposite: long meetings, loyalty, early commitment, putting up with conditions inside the party, the willingness to sit opposite the same functionaries for half a lifetime.

Whoever takes this on at twenty has a reason for it. The reason may be noble — the wish to change something, a political cause, a conviction. The reason may also be banal — the career as such, the office, the status, the attention. In most cases it is a mixture. What is found only rarely is the third type: the person who has first learned something, practised a profession, come to know a world beyond politics — and then goes into politics at thirty or thirty-five because he wants to contribute something specific. It is precisely this third type that is the exception among Germany's top political personnel. The rule is the first or the second.

VI. The Grateful Party

From this situation follows a structural characteristic of the party that is seldom named in political reporting, because it is uncomfortable. The party cannot choose its personnel. It has no rich pool of applicants from which to pick the most suitable. It has a very thin pool of applicants, and it must be glad of whatever it finds there.

A presentable young person who joins at sixteen, can give a fluent speech at eighteen, functions in the youth organisation at twenty and wants to stand for election at twenty-two is, in this situation, a stroke of luck. The party is grateful. It promotes him. It gives him scholarships, places on the list, posts as an adviser, campaign support. It sends him onto the talk shows. It makes him a brand, because it has no other young brands it could build up as quickly.

This gratitude has a consequence that the February End Product already hinted at and that is to be named explicitly here: the party cannot afford the luxury of reacting to incidents involving its sponsored protégés as it would with members who are readily replaceable. When the twenty-four-year-old climber produces a lobbying affair, the reaction is not the obvious one — withdrawal from office, end of career, search for a successor. The reaction is the one we were able to observe with Amthor in 2020 and with Spahn after the mask deals: brief distancing on the matter itself, preservation of the person, promotion to the next career step as soon as media attention has subsided. That is not leniency. It is resource management. The party has no better candidate in the drawer.

VII. What the File Achieves

But with this the mechanism has not yet been fully described. From outside, the affair without consequences looks like generosity on the part of the apparatus towards its protégé. Anyone who observes the apparatus for longer comes to know a second reading.

Material that can be used against a candidate should he become rebellious is an age-old instrument of politics. It need not be used in order to take effect. It need only exist. Whoever has once been through an affair and still has his career only because others covered for him knows that the material lies in some drawer. The others know that he knows. Both know that both know. In the hour of decision — on the question of how a member of parliament votes, which hearing he requests, which matter he drops — this shared knowledge acts as a matter of course, not as a threat. Nobody needs to blackmail anyone. The state of affairs regulates the behaviour.

In the Bundestag, in June 2025, the Green member Andreas Audretsch made a remark to Spahn that captures this mechanism in a single sentence: "We do not know whether Spahn is open to blackmail to this day." The sentence was left standing. It was not answered. It could not be answered, because an answer would either have conceded the possibility or demanded an assurance that nobody can give.

In Amthor's case the question poses itself in its unspoken form. The Augustus files are not closed. The share options, the directorship, the contacts with the people behind the company — Maaßen, the Guttenberg circle in the One World Trade Center, the further personnel — all of this is documented but not worked through. Whoever is today Parliamentary State Secretary for Digital Affairs and State Modernisation and owes his career to such a state of the drawers will not, in any difficult decision of the hour, act against those in whose drawers the material lies. He does not have to. He knows that he does not have to. The knowledge suffices.

This is not a German peculiarity. It is one of the oldest instruments of political selection — Russian politics calls it kompromat, the Catholic Church knew it as the knowledge of the father confessor, the Stasi institutionalised it in its system of unofficial informants. Western European parliaments long organised it as back-room knowledge: one knew of one another what one knew, and this created a stability that arose not from conviction but from shared vulnerability. The affair without consequences is the modern equivalent. It does not produce the rescued politician. It produces the bound one.

VIII. What Follows from This

Whoever describes the mechanism in this way finds that reform of personnel changes nothing. As long as the apparatus draws its top personnel from a thin field of applicants in which the early-committed predominate, it will continue to produce the type we see in its sharper variant in Spahn and Amthor and in its milder variant in Kühnert, Lang, Baerbock and Ziemiak. And as long as the procedure depends on affairs without consequences to bind its candidates to the party, it will continue to produce the absence of consequences that creates this bond.

What would have to change is the procedure. The February End Product had formulated the diagnosis within the framework of Akerlof's market for lemons: where quality cannot be tested, bad offerings drive out the good. The present essay supplements this with the observation that the market suffers not only from a lack of quality testing but from a thin supply — and from a system of incentives that, out of this thin supply, additionally selects those who are compromised by being bound.

On beyond-decay.org three blueprints have been developed that address precisely the procedure: the people's representative without a party, who bypasses party-based selection and brings a person into parliament without his having to go through twenty years of socialisation in the apparatus; the mandate without a place, which binds expertise to the subject matter, not to the geography of local party branches; the transparency council, which sheds light into the drawers in which the material that binds candidates lies today. They are set out in The Founding of a New Party and the Iron Law of Robert Michels and in The Anachronistic Structures and Rules of the Parties. They are not panaceas. They are the direction in which thinking must proceed if the diagnosis is correct.

IX. The Tendency

In February Spahn was the end product. In May Amthor is the confirmation of the hypothesis. Who will it be in the spring of 2028? The answer is not speculative. Whoever knows the procedure knows the type. The career curve will once again run identically: entry at sixteen, state executive at nineteen, Bundestag at twenty-four, affair at twenty-seven, without consequences, state secretaryship at thirty-three. Only the person will be a different one.

The tendency that is emerging in Spahn and Amthor bodes no good. It shows that German politics has got into a situation in which the selection of its leaders is less a question of competition than a question of scarcity of resources; that the absence of consequences for the affairs is not leniency but binding; and that the coming generations will be recruited under the same conditions under which today's were recruited.

Whoever wants to change this cannot start with the personnel. He must start with the procedure. As long as that does not happen, the next generation will look like today's, and the one after that like the coming one. The grateful party will go on taking what it gets, and what it has taken will go on remaining bound.

That is not the secret of power. It is the sober description of its nature.