Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). Federal President Steinmeier likes to play the role of the guardian of ‘democracy’. In his most recent speech, he threatened, between the lines, to annul the next election in February if the German people did not vote the way he wanted them to.
Last week, in accordance with his duties, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier announced the dissolution of the Bundestag and new elections in February, but not without accompanying this action with barely veiled threats to the German people: because in the event that the people vote ‘wrongly’, that is, right-wing parties win the election, he could simply annul the whole election. Of course, to save democracy, why else?
In fact, Steinmeier is not a particularly popular Federal President. Quite a few even see him as the worst we have ever had. After all, in his speeches he does not try to unite the citizens, but to divide them, by praising some and insulting and abusing the others as ‘right-wing’.
Let’s take a look at the most important statements with the cleverly packaged, anti-democratic threat: 1) ‘I expect this contest [the federal election] to be conducted with respect and decency, if only because after the election the art of compromise will be needed to form a stable government.’
When Steinmeier conjures up the image of a ‘stable government’, it is already an act of hypocrisy, because it is he himself who, with his SPD, is preventing a stable majority in government by politically insisting on the undemocratic ‘firewall’ to exclude the AfD.
As a great advocate of this ‘firewall’, Steinmeier automatically excludes large sections of the population from the democratic process in parliament. And when it becomes difficult to find a stable majority, see the examples of Thuringia and Saxony, then you can’t blame the AfD for it as well. He continues in his speech with these ominous words: 2) ‘And I also expect the election campaign to be conducted with fair and transparent means. Outside influence is a danger to democracy, whether it is covert, as was recently evident in the elections in Romania, or open and blatant, as is currently being practised particularly intensively on platform X.’
Here, Steinmeier talks about the great danger to democracy posed by external interference. And each of us thinks of the courageous SPD member of the Bundestag, Michael Roth, who travelled to the capital, Tbilisi, in the midst of the failed ‘colour revolution’ in Georgia to actively campaign for the opposition there, which was acting quite violently towards the democratically elected government. Roth gave public speeches there, thus actively intervening in the Georgian election campaign from the outside, doing exactly what, according to Steinmeier, is considered particularly evil and a threat to democracy.
Or there is the SPD veteran Ralf Stegner, who actively campaigned and stirred up sentiment against Donald Trump in the USA. And not to be forgotten is the manifold interference of the neoliberal/woke billionaire George Soros and his organisations in the political-media complex of the Federal Republic of Germany and other EU countries on the side of the established parties. People like Steinmeier seem to be more pleased about this than they are upset.
Of course, active external interference in the election campaign in favour of the AfD, as Elon Musk recently did in an article in the Welt and on his platform X, is a completely different matter. This is, of course, very, very bad and must be prevented! And if it can’t be prevented, then the negative consequences that arise from it must be combated, for example by annulling the election results if the AfD gets too many votes in February. A few weeks ago, the President of Romania showed how it’s done.
In the presidential election in Romania, a right-wing politician and opponent of the war in Ukraine surprisingly came in first, which the ‘West of values’ and its puppets in Romania did not like at all. So they simply cancelled the election! Full stop! And the reason given for this was external influence, allegedly Russian TikTok, YouTube and Twitter operators had spread too much disinformation. Of course, there was no need to present any evidence for the allegations of external interference, because every child knows anyway that it was the Russians.
Now, Steinmeier sees exactly the same kind of foreign interference in Germany in the form of Elon Musk on X, and he seems prepared to use the same argument to cancel the elections if right-wing parties win. Steinmeier’s message between the lines was clear enough: in Germany, too, there could be consequences like those in Romania. In his speech at Berlin’s Humboldt University, he explicitly refers to the ‘elections in Romania’, to ‘the danger for democracy’ and to the ‘exertion of influence from outside’, which ‘covertly or openly and blatantly […] is currently being practised particularly intensively on platform X’. However, there is a difference: this time it is not the Russians, but the American Musk and other Trumpists.
A president who publicly speculates about the possible cancellation of elections – that is unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic. No one in the major ‘quality media’, who otherwise quickly take up position as defenders of democracy, seems to be interested in the incredible, implicit threat of election cancellation by Steinmeier.
