Tending the Landscape

I. The word

The expression is not ours. It comes from Eberhard von Brauchitsch, general manager of the Flick group, who used it for his company’s payments to parties, institutes and individual politicians: cultivation of the political landscape. Some 26 million marks went in the 1970s to the CDU/CSU, the FDP and the SPD.

Anyone wanting to know what was cultivated need not speculate. It stands in the company’s internal notes, read out before the parliamentary committee of inquiry. One man was at their disposal at any time, glad to help. Another was attending to the matter in the same way as the other gentlemen. A third was ready to open doors in the neighbouring house. And one had said in closing that he would be available at any hour of the day or night.

Not one of these sentences promises a decision. All four promise availability.

II. Why nothing could be proved

The Flick committee of inquiry sat from 1983 to 1985. Around 1,800 investigations were opened. The President of the Bundestag resigned; the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs resigned. The governing coalition’s attempt to amnesty donors and recipients retroactively by statute failed in May 1984 against public outrage.

And in 1987 the verdicts came down: tax evasion. Bribery could not be proved; on the basis of testimony and documents, no quid pro quo was demonstrable.

This is not a failure of the courts. It is a property of the goods. Whoever buys a decision leaves a quid pro quo behind — two parties, one moment, one object. Whoever buys availability leaves nothing of the kind. There is no date on which delivery took place, because delivery is continuous, and what is delivered is nothing but presence. In the end the participants could be held to account only for not having paid tax on the money.

A gardener fertilises. He does not give orders. That is precisely why he cannot be caught.

III. The same goods, now legally obtainable

Forty years later, the same job description, this time published by the company itself.

When the world’s largest asset manager appointed a German chairman for the supervisory board of its local subsidiary in 2016, it announced that he was to be more than a supervisory board member: he would take a broader advisory role in which he would cultivate relations with important clients, authorities and government bodies in Germany. During his term he met, among others, the then finance minister, a former economics minister and the responsible state secretary. The mandate ended at the close of the first quarter of 2020 — shortly after he had stood for the party chairmanship a second time.

It was not this one mandate. At the same time, or in the same years: supervisory board member of a bank, an insurer, the German stock exchange, a property group, a Swiss rail vehicle manufacturer, a paper manufacturer, an airport; chairman of a transatlantic association; founder of the supporting association of a business-aligned initiative. That is not employment. That is a flower bed.

And here is the distinction without which this text is worthless. With Flick, cash flowed from secret accounts; that was a criminal offence and was punished as one. Here a salary flowed, disclosed, taxed, entirely legal. Whoever throws the two together has been refuted in a single sentence. The claim is not that it is the same offence. It is: these are the same goods — and today they can be had legally. That is the sharper finding, because no denial reaches it.

IV. Asked three times, three times without consequence

The question of conflicts of interest was put. In 2018 during the first candidacy for the party chairmanship, in 2020 on leaving the mandate, in 2025 during the election campaign; it still stands in the dossiers of the relevant organisations.

Each time it was answered with the same formula: he had never accepted a lobbying mandate; after leaving parliament he had merely returned to his profession as a lawyer. And then things went on.

This is not suppression. It is ineffectiveness, and that is more thorough. A question one is allowed to ask three times, and which three times produces nothing, is more reliably disposed of than a forbidden one. A forbidden question generates resistance. A consequence-free one generates habit.

V. Four operations

Planting. The gardener does not know which seedling will come to something, and does not need to know. He invests in as many options as possible, preferably in all of them on the horizon. One does not buy certainty; one buys presence at every place where something might grow. And it happens from every side: associations, churches, trade unions, foundations, state banks tend the same landscape by the same means. The finding is therefore not that a particular firm bought a particular man. It is: whoever might rise within the political personnel is, long before any election, the object of someone else’s cultivation.

Watering. Mandates, advisory boards, chairmanships, speaking engagements, networks. None of it is forbidden; most of it is on public registers. What arises is not an instruction but a market value: the cultivated man becomes more interesting to others because he is cultivated.

Weeding. Material can be found on almost anyone; the collecting of it is a trade with firms and fees. What separates the thing that becomes a scandal from the thing that stays in the drawer is therefore rarely its gravity. It is the carrier and the timing, and both can be steered without anyone having to invent a thing.

The control case is in this text. On one man, dossiers, evidence and his employer’s own job description have been available since 2018 — consequence: none. Another resigned in July over a single matter and was back on the budget committee in September. The same material works entirely differently depending on whether watering or weeding is under way. And which of the two is happening is not decided by the material.

Caution is needed here, or the thought tips over. Whoever reads every scandal as a spraying makes every genuine disclosure suspect and every exposed man a victim. That serves the wrong people. The testable part is not whether, but why now.

And the sprayer need not be used at all. It is enough that everyone knows it stands in the shed.

Burning. The fourth operation is not one. It has no agent. „He is burned“ is not a verdict but a report of how others are already judging — and in being uttered, it becomes true. Nothing is examined, nothing is argued, nothing is decided.

The phrase is current everywhere, in the trades as in commerce as in politics, and it comes from a time when people were literally burned. There the fire had a purpose of its own beyond killing: the body was to be destroyed so completely that no relics remained which might later be venerated. Hanging would also have been bloodless and would have satisfied the canonical rule. Burning was chosen so that nothing would remain to which anyone could later appeal.

And the execution was arranged so that the court passed sentence, the secular authority took custody, and the executioner carried it out — each his part, none the whole.

Both have survived into the phrase. Whoever is burned today is not excluded; he merely ceases to be citable. His cause is not refuted but rendered unquotable — it may well continue, only without him. And nobody did it. The question about the person is answered before the question about the matter, and after that the question about the matter never comes up again.

VI. The goat and the wilderness

On 20 February 2026, in Stuttgart, a party chairman was re-elected. 878 of 963 valid votes. His second-best result.

Seven months later: 16 per cent satisfied with his work, 81 per cent dissatisfied — the lowest figure ever recorded for a sitting German chancellor. After the defeat in Saxony-Anhalt, calls for his resignation are being made openly from within his own party for the first time; in a regional association polling at seven per cent, a long-serving former deputy state chairman demands that he step down. The federal treasurer of the party’s youth organisation says no elections can be won with this chancellor — but adds that they are not yet at that point.

The procedure is known from Leviticus 16. The community lays its hands on the goat, confesses its transgressions over it and drives it into the wilderness. The sense of the ritual is that the guilt goes with the animal while the community stays as it was.

And the two German sayings currently in circulation do exactly that between them. „Making the goat the gardener“ retroactively converts one’s own choice into somebody else’s obvious error — it was plain to see, only not who put him there. „Driving him into the wilderness“ converts the consequences into the property of the one driven out.

Only he was never the gardener. He was a particularly well-tended plant.

VII. What is not said

Two things, so that this text does not itself become an exculpation.

He is not solely guilty, and he is not innocent. At one point the structural analysis does not relieve him: the justification — saying what it is all for — was taken out of his hands by neither the coalition agreement nor the Bundesrat nor Brussels. He said himself a few days ago that he had remained in debt for it.

And the cultivation is not the cause of his failure. He is failing not because he was cultivated but because in twenty years nobody asked whether he had ever run anything. The flower bed and the sieve are two different procedures. They meet at one point only: neither examines what a person can do. One examines whom he knows. The other examines whether he causes trouble.

VIII. No gardener

Planting, watering, weeding, burning — four operations, and only the first three have someone who performs them. The fourth happens as soon as enough people say it to one another.

The goat is not led out. He goes because nobody wants to see him in the garden any longer, and no one decided it. After him another will be planted, from the same bed, under the same care, and the question of who maintains the garden will not come up next time either.

For in this garden there is no gardener for the thing that matters most. There is only tending.

IX. A Greek word

In the really existing democracies anyone may become a landscape gardener. There is no prohibition, no entrance examination, no class excluded from it. Only two things are required: the appropriate equipment and the necessary means.

If this state of affairs is fine as it is, then by all means carry on.

It remains only to note what the ancient Greeks, who were more experimental with constitutions than we are, called a form of rule in which participation depends on means.

In the Politics Aristotle expressly denied that the number of rulers is what matters. That in one form few rule and in the other many is incidental. The distinguishing mark, he says, is wealth: democracy when the free and unpropertied hold power; oligarchy when the propertied hold it. And oligarchy he lists not as one order among others but as a parekbasis — a deviant form.

This disposes of the obvious objection. Nobody is excluded, after all: anyone may vote, stand for office, associate, donate within the law. But it is not exclusion that makes an oligarchy. It is the condition.

One limitation, or the claim becomes too large. The finding does not concern the constitution as a whole. The franchise, candidacy and freedom of association are open to all, and there is nothing oligarchic in that. It concerns one procedure within it — the tending of the landscape. Only that is the procedure which decides, long in advance, who ends up on the ballot paper.

It is therefore not an accusation but a question of terms. Whoever wishes to keep this state of affairs should keep it. He should only call it by its name — and that name was assigned two and a half thousand years ago.