The Revolt of the Voting Cattle of the Voting Cattle Is Being Rehearsed

I. The Title

The doubling in the title is deliberate. In German, Stimmvieh, voting cattle, is the contemptuous word for voters as the parties see them at election time: driven to the ballot box every four years and back to pasture afterwards. The members of parliament these voters elect are voting cattle themselves once in parliament: they raise their hands when the leadership of their parliamentary group demands it. They are the voting cattle of the voting cattle.

This week the second herd moved without anyone driving it. That is remarkable enough to record. And the way it is being reported is telling.

II. The Beach Chair

In the second season of the ZDF documentary series “Inside CDU”, Philipp Amthor, newly appointed minister of state, shows off his office in the Federal Chancellery. He has a traditional wicker beach chair delivered from his home state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and placed in full view on the balcony. The outrage was considerable, and the beach chair has since been removed. One comment online said that by comparison Louis XIV looked like a down-to-earth guy.

One need not regard the beach chair as a scandal. It is rather a symptom. Amthor entered the Bundestag at 24, by the classic route through the party’s youth wing and district association. Someone who has spent his entire working life rising within a party has rarely experienced how things look from the outside. A CDU member of parliament put it precisely: it looks “like complete alienation from the ordinary voter”. In our essay “The Long March through the Party” we described how this route does not filter for talent but for time, patience and conformity. The beach chair on the balcony is what stands at the end of that route.

III. The Cooling Pond

Jens Spahn had lost the chairmanship of the parliamentary group. Shortly afterwards he moved to the budget committee, one of parliament’s most important bodies. One member of parliament remarked that it would have been wiser to send him to the “cooling pond” first.

The word comes from the nuclear power station. The cooling pond holds fuel elements that are still too hot to handle. One waits until the radiation subsides and can then use them again. There is no more precise description of how parties deal with their burnt-out people: they are not dismissed, they are cooled down. After a decent interval they are given another post, and the personnel carousel keeps turning.

IV. The Revolt

This time the cooling did not work. When Spahn missed a committee meeting, his colleagues’ patience ran out. The group’s chairman, Thorsten Frei, wanted to give him a period of grace. The members did not. Above all members of the budget committee, among them the budget expert Andreas Mattfeldt, made it clear to Spahn and the group’s leadership that things could not go on like this. On 28 September Spahn gave up his seat on the committee.

A political briefing from Berlin summed it up this way: the members had “taken the helm themselves”, Frei had a “leadership problem”, and this was becoming a risk for the Chancellor.

One can see it differently. Article 38 of the German Basic Law states that members of parliament are “representatives of the whole people, not bound by orders or instructions and responsible only to their conscience”. For once, members acted exactly like that: not on instructions from above but on their own judgement. And the reporting treats it as weakness. So self-evident has the parliamentary group as chain of command become that a parliament which moves of its own accord looks like a malfunction.

V. Why It Remains a Rehearsal

In 1966 Günter Grass wrote a play, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising. On 17 June 1953 a theatre director in East Berlin rehearses Shakespeare’s Coriolanus while outside the workers are actually rising up. He stays with the rehearsal.

The revolt in the CDU/CSU group also remains a rehearsal. It is directed against one individual who was already weakened, not against the rules by which the game is played. And it is harmless for those who dare it, because in this case the leadership can do nothing to them. At the next vote on the government’s course, the same voting cattle will raise their hands again. For whoever wants to be on the next state list is nominated not for having voted freely but for not having stood out.

DER SPIEGEL describes the relationship between the CDU and the public as a “broken partnership”: what passed for an endearing quirk in better times suddenly becomes a reason for heartfelt dislike. The image is apt. But in a broken marriage it does little good to carry a beach chair off the balcony.

VI. What Ought to Follow

DER SPIEGEL closes with a football saying that amounts to: once you are out of luck, you are out of luck. That explains nothing. It is not bad luck that a party keeps bringing people to the top who have lost touch with those who vote for them. It is the result of a route on which one rises only through conformity.

A member of parliament who does not depend on being renominated by the party would not need to rehearse a revolt. He could simply do what Article 38 asks of him. That is the idea behind our “Concept Paper for People’s Representatives” and the proposal “Mandate without a Place” (both in German): representatives without a party card whose mandate does not depend on a place on a list.

VII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: party discipline is not an evil but the precondition for a government to have a reliable majority. A parliament in which everyone votes as the mood takes them paralyses itself. That is true. But between mood and command lies a wide field, and the constitution deliberately placed the individual’s conscience above the parliamentary group.

The second objection: the members did not act out of conscience but out of fear for their own constituencies, because Spahn and Amthor cost votes. That may be true as well. Then at least we would have members who fear their voters more than their leadership. That would not be the worst beginning.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that members who act independently of their group’s leadership regularly make worse decisions than those who follow it.

VIII. The Rehearsal

A rehearsal is not nothing. Whoever rehearses learns that it can be done. This week the CDU/CSU members learned that they can move without the sky falling on their heads.

Whether the rehearsal ever becomes a performance will be decided not by the group’s leadership but by the question of what a member of parliament depends on.