The People Have Become a Nuisance

Last weekend, at a conference of the North Rhine-Westphalian Christian Democrats, the German chancellor stepped to the lectern and issued his critics an order. Cultural pessimists, prophets of doom, whiners, grumblers, professionally outraged critics — dismissed. The hall applauded. The word is military; it releases from the formation, it tolerates no reply.

This text is not about the man who spoke that sentence. He will be replaced — when exactly, we do not know, but it will happen, as every chancellor is replaced. Anyone reading this in ten years will remember only vaguely which of the recent chancellors it was. We are not describing a person but a position, and the reflexes that position produces. The person is a variable, the position is the constant.

The sentence from the weekend stands here, therefore, not as an indictment but as a symptom — as the visible surface of a process unfolding simultaneously on several levels. Three of them deserve to be laid out in their plainness.

The Law

The federal government is planning a reform of the Freedom of Information Act. That law, which came into force in 2005, grants every citizen a claim to information on the administrative business of federal authorities. The citizen need not explain why he is asking; the duty to disclose is the rule, the refusal to disclose the exception that requires justification. The burden of proof lies with the state.

The planned reform inverts this relationship. Information is to be given only to natural persons; foundations and media organisations — that is, the entities that could turn many individual inquiries into a pattern — are excluded. The citizen who remains entitled to information will have to demonstrate a legitimate interest. The burden of proof migrates from the administrative authority to the citizen who asks.

The official justification is that the complicated law is being made more understandable and more transparent for the citizen. This wording deserves to be noted. It claims as its goal the opposite of the result to be expected. The process remains the same — it is being renamed.

The Paragraph

Paragraph 188 of the German Criminal Code was introduced in 2021. Its explicit purpose was the protection of local politicians from hostility — mayors, town councillors, that is: persons who are close to the citizens and, precisely because of that closeness, vulnerable. The paragraph was a response to cases of real threat.

In practice it has since migrated upward. It is used extensively by the highest ranks of federal politics. In one of the more recent documented cases, a pensioner was criminally prosecuted for having called the chancellor a Pinocchio on a social platform. The instrument that was to protect the exposed small from the wrath of the anonymous is now used by the largest to punish insults of the schoolyard-name category.

The migration of the instrument from its intended purpose to its actual use is rarely so clearly documented. It is also not new — it is the classical movement in which a tool leaves its occasion and falls under the reach of those who formally administer it.

The Convergence

Three processes, without any common plan connecting them: the chancellor telling his critics to fall out; the reform hollowing out the right to information; the paragraph making citizen criticism a criminal offence. It is unlikely that these three moves were coordinated. They come from different ministries, different occasions, different political signatures.

And precisely that is the observation to be made. For when three uncoordinated processes point in the same direction, the common denominator is not a plan but a structure. All three processes reverse the same relation: the direction of accountability. It is no longer the government that must explain to the citizen why it acts or why it refuses information. The citizen must explain why he is asking, why he is criticising, why he is answering at all in this language. The sovereign — that was the classical fiction — has been transformed into a petitioner.

It is remarkable that this is possible without a single constitutional norm being formally changed. Article 20, paragraph 2 of the Basic Law, according to which all state authority derives from the people, stands unaltered in the text. Only its exercisability is being quietly dismantled in the manner of administrative practice. The facade remains; the foundation is hollowed out — the same movement we have elsewhere called the hollowed-out instance.

The Style of Governing

At this point we can say precisely what we mean by a style of governing. It is not about the demeanour of a person, not about the choice of words in a speech. It is about the condition an institution enters when it begins to regard its own addressees as a source of interference.

Not as enemies — that would be the more dramatic and, in this sense, the more honest category. An enemy justifies war, and war requires declaration. The citizen does not become an enemy; he becomes a nuisance. He submits inquiries that tie up staff. He insults politicians with expressions that disturb the operation. He curses publicly and makes the administration look worse than it inwardly considers itself to be.

The vocabulary betrays the condition. The language of politics now has words for the citizen that come, not by accident, from the workflow: processing burden, administrative cost, misuse of the right to petition. The citizen is not fought; he is managed — and where the management reaches its limits, he is dismissed.

No single ruler decided this condition. It settled in, as conditions settle in ageing institutions. The chancellor articulates it because he feels it; his justice apparatus uses the paragraph because it has it; the interior ministry plans the reform because the backlog in its jurisdiction has been growing for years. Each individual acts reasonably from within his role. Taken together, this becomes something no one decided.

The Proposal of 1953

There is an old literary proposal for this condition. Bertolt Brecht wrote it down after 17 June 1953, when the Politburo of the East German Socialist Unity Party asked itself, after the strikes in East Berlin, whether it had squandered the trust of the people. Brecht's answer was a thought experiment: would it not be the simplest solution if the government chose itself a different people instead — one that would place more trust in it?

The sentence is burdened by the place of its origin, and we use it here not as an allusion to that system but as a descriptive question. What would be the logical consequence if a government behaved as though the people had become a nuisance to it? Historically, the answer to that question is known, and it has two forms: one in which the government ceases to govern, and one in which the people cease to be what was meant by the word. Both are uncomfortable exits.

Between the two there is a third, slower path, and it is this one we are describing. It consists in continuing formally to name the people as sovereign while dismantling their sovereignty piece by piece into administrative procedures, each of which, taken by itself, remains inconspicuous. Not dissolution of the people but administration of them. Not overthrow but renaming.

What Remains

The chancellor will go. His successor will find other words for the same movement. Perhaps he will speak more softly, more empathetically; perhaps he will not say dismissed but will speak of a constructive dialogue to be sought with constructive critics — which comes to the same thing, since the sorting then simply runs through different filters. The person changes, the position remains, and with it the structure that produces the citizen as a source of interference.

This is why the title sentence of this text is meant neither as indictment nor as prophecy. It is an observation that was due this spring, and one that could have been made in similar form under another chancellor on another occasion. The people become a nuisance because the government administers the people, and whoever administers finds inquiries a nuisance — from the administrative point of view, they are disturbances in the workflow.

There is no recipe at the end of this text. Recipes belong in government declarations. What we hold fast is the condition we find ourselves in — in the hope that observing it does not sanction it but only makes it visible. That, as we have said elsewhere, is all that observation can do: name the thing. What follows from the naming is a question the government does not decide alone. It is decided, precisely, by the people.