chief democracy

Post photo: Indian Chief | © Tanison Pachtanom, Shutterstock

Especially when you look at the USA under the presidency of Joe Biden one sees how well a federal state can function. It also shows once again that the federal state is the better solution for everyone — including us Europeans.

Originally, the founding fathers of the European Communities and also those of the Federal Republic of Germany were firmly convinced of this and anchored the federal state at least in the preambles of the Basic Law or the treaties of today's European Union.

But even their successors — the first to profit from this earth-shattering insight — secretly, slowly but surely, distanced themselves from a federal state and thereby created today's "chieftain democracy". Always on the pulse of "their" citizens, they knew that the "Europeans", in contrast to the "Americans", will not be able to completely shed their tendency towards totalitarianism. and that's the way it was Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who, with the consent Helmut Schmidts, happily proclaimed in 1974: "The summit is dead, long live the European Council!" and thus ushered in today's European chief democracy.

From now on, the regular parade of our democratically crowned heads replaced European politics; slowly but surely, the Commission mutated into a “court” and the European Parliament, beginning with the election of the youngest Commission President, finally became the staffage that the first enlightened princes had imagined back then.

And with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, this successful model was also adopted in Germany — we listen, almost every week, to the results of the crisis summit of our seventeen "princes", who alone decide on the weal and woe of our republic and its citizens. The respective parliaments come together when it is necessary to give these decisions a kind of legitimacy through applause.

This time we can follow quite well what ultimately comes out of this kind of "chieftain democracy" - although it is actually about existential problems for all of us - and we realize that each of these summits plunges us further into the crisis.

Good court reporters also note that a certain sovereign sits on the chancellor's lap at every summit, probably with the aim of conveying to the citizen by the next election that he has "inherited" the chancellorship and that not voting would be tantamount to blasphemy.

Only our parliaments could save us from this misery, not only by putting our governments in their place, but also by starting to legislate once again instead of just indulging in their privileges and chasing after their own good.

Should our representatives of the people not succeed in this, and their more assertive colleagues with star airs continue to chase after the "cult of the chief", we need not be surprised if soon in Europe our "little princes" are replaced one after the other by a leader who meets the totalitarian needs many of our fellow citizens better served.