Democracy Is Harder Than It Looks

There’s a video of André Wendt, a member of the Saxon state parliament representing the AfD—Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s far-right nationalist party—attempting to introduce amendments on behalf of his caucus. It does not go well. It goes, in fact, spectacularly badly, in the way that only bureaucratic incompetence captured on official parliamentary footage can.

The AfD built its brand on contempt: contempt for Angela Merkel, contempt for refugees, contempt for the established political class and its procedures and its endless procedural tedium. What this video demonstrates is that contempt for procedures is considerably less useful once you’re actually inside the building and someone is asking you to follow them. Turns out, running a parliamentary motion requires more than knowing how to be angry about things.

One could make fun of this, wrote Ronny at Kraftfuttermischwerk. But that’s not what I’m going for, partly because it would be too easy. What this video illustrates is that the day-to-day business of politics is a great deal more than firing off a few polemic statements. And the belief that what those people do every day could be done by anyone, without preparation, may be somewhat premature.

The charitable read is that nobody in the AfD Saxon delegation had been adequately briefed on parliamentary procedure. The less charitable read—which I find more convincing—is that they genuinely don’t care, because the plan was never to participate in the system. The plan was to discredit it from the inside and wait. Democratic rulebooks are just obstacles until you have enough seats to stop pretending they matter.