The Long March through the Party

I. A Question as an Open Goal

The FAZ asks whether the CDU has an oversupply of talent. The occasion is Jens Spahn, who is giving up his seat on the budget committee after his own parliamentary group no longer wanted him there. The question is meant ironically: a party that drives capable people away acts as if it had plenty of them.

But one can also take the question seriously, and then it becomes more interesting than its occasion. Does the CDU, does any German party, have an oversupply of talent? Probably not. It has an oversupply of people who have taken one particular path. And that path is the only one there is.

II. The Only Entrance

In Germany one becomes a member of parliament through what Germans call the Ochsentour, the ox’s trek: the long march through the party. One joins a party young, takes on posts in the local branch, sits on district committees, puts up posters, collects delegates’ votes and waits for a safe place on the list or a free constituency. It takes ten, fifteen, twenty years. Jens Spahn entered the Bundestag at twenty-two. He is not an exception but the pattern.

Electoral law itself shows that it could be otherwise: independents may win a constituency as individual candidates. That has happened exactly three times, all three in 1949 at the first federal election, and even those three were independent only in form. For more than seventy-five years no independent has been elected to the Bundestag. A path no one can take is not a path.

III. What the Long March Filters

The long march is a filter, but it does not filter for talent. It filters for time, patience and conformity.

For time, because only those who control their own time can endure years of evening meetings. Civil servants have a statutory right to return to their posts. Lawyers, parliamentary staff and employees of parties and associations have flexible days. A surgeon, a master craftsman with his own business, a teacher with three children or an engineer in development does not have that time.

For patience, because advancement follows years of service, not performance. Whoever speaks too clearly too early disturbs the order.

And for conformity, because candidacies are decided not by voters but by delegates who have taken the same path themselves. In 1911 Robert Michels described this as the iron law of oligarchy: every large organisation produces a small leadership group that renews itself.

The result is a parliament that is alike in one respect: almost everyone has learned how to rise in a party. Very few have learned how to make, heal, build or sell something.

IV. Why the Entrance Is So Narrow

There are reasons why there is only this one path, and none of them is a law of nature.

Electoral law gives the parties a monopoly on the state lists, through which half the seats are allocated. The money lies with the parties: state party funding, party foundations, parliamentary staff, campaign machinery. The mandate is a full-time job, and whoever loses it after four years is left without a profession. That makes members dependent on being renominated, and thus on the party.

And the most important reason: the rules are decided by those who rose under them. In our “Concept Paper for People’s Representatives” we put it this way: democracy places the repair of the system in the hands of those who profit from the defect.

V. Seen from the Inside

In 2016 Christian Lindner recruited me to the FDP, the Free Democratic Party. I did not come through the long march but with the hope of contributing, as an inventor and engineer, something that politics lacks. For six years I tried to convince leading figures that Germany needs a truly liberal party. Without success. In 2021, shortly before the federal election, I left again.

I was not the only one who tried from the outside. Thomas Sattelberger, formerly head of human resources at Deutsche Telekom, entered the Bundestag as a lateral entrant, became a state secretary and gave up his seat in 2022 after only a few years. Lateral entrants are gladly shown off. They rarely stay.

VI. How It Works Elsewhere

Other democracies show that there can be more than one entrance.

Switzerland has a militia parliament. Its members keep their professions and spend only part of their time as parliamentarians. That lowers the price of entry for everyone who can do something other than politics, and it takes away the members’ fear of the day after the election.

From 2016 to 2018 Ireland had a Citizens’ Assembly of 99 randomly selected citizens deliberate on difficult questions, including abortion. Its recommendations led to a referendum that won a clear majority. People chosen by lot can do serious work.

France experienced the opposite in 2017. Emmanuel Macron’s movement let candidates apply online, and around half of the new members came from civil society. It was a real breakthrough. But many of these newcomers had disappeared after one term, and the movement itself became a party, with its own long march. Michels in fast motion.

VII. What We Have Proposed

In two texts we have described a second entrance.

In the “Concept Paper for People’s Representatives” (in German) any citizen can apply, without a party. An AI-supported transparency review makes public what one ought to know about the candidates: career, income, connections, contradictions. The AI does not judge; it discloses. The citizens decide. Party membership disqualifies.

In “Mandate without a Place” (in German) we extended the idea: a small number of members elected nationwide, without a constituency and without a party. Some committed to the whole, others to a policy field on which they can be measured.

Both aim at the point the long march misses: that people with different knowledge and different life experience can enter parliament without sitting in a local branch for twenty years.

VIII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: the long march has a purpose. Whoever takes it learns the craft of politics: organising majorities, making compromises, dealing with defeat. Lateral entrants often fail not because of the party but because of politics itself. That is true, and Macron’s newcomers are the proof. But it follows that there must be ways of learning alongside lateral entry, not that only a single path may remain open.

The second objection: every new procedure will sooner or later become a long march of its own. Whoever runs the platform becomes the new party. That is the most serious objection, and our concepts must be measured against it. The answer can only lie in published rules, open source code and in the operators themselves being barred from standing.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that parliaments whose members come from broader backgrounds make no better decisions than those whose members have all taken the same path.

IX. The Question

Does the CDU have an oversupply of talent? It has an oversupply of people who came through the same door. The talents are standing outside because there is no door for them.

Perhaps it would be worth thinking about new paths for once, instead of merely spinning the parties’ personnel carousel ever faster.

The question is not who may pass through the door, but why a democracy has only one.