From Democracy to Simulation: What is Happening in Germany?
It is a paradoxical spectacle currently unfolding in Germany: while democratic rituals are being ever more loudly celebrated in the name of democracy, that very democracy is increasingly losing its substance. The sovereign—the electorate—is still allowed to vote, but no longer truly decides. Democratic participation is reduced to a process propped up by illusions, in which outcomes are predictable, coalitions predetermined, and alternatives systematically excluded. The Republic has, without openly stating it, transformed into a simulation of democracy.
The most visible sign of this erosion is the so-called firewall (Brandmauer)—a term originally intended to serve political hygiene, but which has since ossified into dogma. What began as a distancing from a particular party has become a bulwark against any genuine political change. The firewall no longer protects democracy but rather its functionaries. It ensures that, despite massive electoral defeats of the old parties, the balance of power in government responsibility shifts only marginally. As a result, so-called loser coalitions are formed, in which parties, despite clear punishment by the electorate, continue governing undeterred—often against the explicit will of the voters.
This construction is not a coincidence, but the result of a political system increasingly organizing itself in a self-referential manner. Strategic exclusion replaces factual debate. Moral discrediting displaces political arguments. And ironically, those who stage themselves as guardians of democratic order cement a new, post-democratic stability—a system of inevitability. The party-state apparatus has become autonomous. It protects itself—even, if necessary, from the citizen.
At the same time, real power is shifting further and further away from elected parliaments. Decisions of enormous consequence—on debt policy, migration, or energy supply—are no longer made through open political will-formation but through ministries, EU bodies, courts, or so-called expert councils. Parliament becomes a stage for political theater, while the real scripts are written elsewhere.
The most recent example: the so-called debt turnaround (Schuldenwende). Before the election, the CDU under Friedrich Merz sternly promised to defend the debt brake. As soon as the election was won, the promise became void. At a frightening pace, the rollback of the Merkel era was itself rolled back. The Greens, de facto election losers, push through their policies with unabated chutzpah—flanked by an SPD that, despite historic losses, sees itself as a moral superpower. The climate agenda—enshrined at the constitutional level—is being played around the margins, while the actual majorities in the population are ignored. Democracy as a feedback-driven system of collective self-correction? No sign of it.
What is emerging is a structural immunization against the sovereign. The political process becomes resistant to change. The possibility of being voted out of office—a central characteristic of democratic systems—is being systematically hollowed out. The much-vaunted “defensive democracy” no longer defends the republic against its enemies, but against the citizen.
This self-immunization comes at a cost: the basis of legitimacy is eroding. What is declared as “democratic responsibility” is increasingly perceived by people as a power cartel. The crisis of trust is growing—not because people know too little about politics, but because they see too much of it through. The simulation only works as long as the illusion can be maintained. But trust in this staging is crumbling.
In this situation, the danger is not radicalization, but the continued erosion of democratic procedures. When political alternatives are no longer allowed on the playing field of institutions, a vacuum arises—a structural exclusion that, over time, does not stabilize but rather destabilizes. The “firewall” could ultimately turn out to be an accelerant.
What is needed now is not a new narrative of the “defensive democracy,” but a return to lived democracy. An order in which the citizen is once again the subject of political decisions—not the object of state-pedagogical re-education. An order in which political change is not a simulation, but a real possibility. An order in which the word opposition is no longer considered a threat, but as a necessary component of democracy itself.
But to achieve that, the firewall would have to be torn down—not for the benefit of a particular party, but for the benefit of democracy itself.
