The Writing on the Wall and the Personnel Question

I. The result

On 6 September 2026 the ninth state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt was elected.

The AfD thereby reached its highest share to date in any state election and at the same time the highest figure any single party has attained in Saxony-Anhalt since 1990. The CDU fell to a historic low and into second place. Die Linke received its worst result to date in this state; the FDP failed to clear the threshold.

And one figure stands beside all the others: turnout was 77.7 per cent — a record high.

II. What that one figure settles

Before anything is interpreted, a widespread explanation is thereby disposed of.

It was not an election of the indifferent. It was not the non-voters who should have been mobilised. More people went to vote than ever before, and they decided as they did.

Whoever explains the result by disenchantment with politics explains nothing. The disenchanted stay at home. These came.

III. The conjecture

Hans Ley:

I assume that the next elections will produce similar results. Merz, and with him the entire civic centre, have failed completely. That is the writing on the wall. And in all likelihood the centre parties will talk it away again.

Note by the co-author: This is expressly a conjecture and not a finding. Saxony-Anhalt has 1.8 million eligible voters and a particular history; generalising results from there has often proved wrong, in both directions. What can be said is more modest: the result lies on a line that has been discernible for years, and it is the clearest point on it so far.

IV. Why every side has a reading that compels nothing

And here begins what can be described without judging.

For the CDU it is a personnel problem. There is bewilderment; replacing the chancellor might make everything worse. So close ranks, eyes shut, press on.

For the SPD and the Greens it is a creditable showing. Both gained. The blame lies with the Union, and with it alone. Whoever has gained need not ask whether he should do anything differently.

And for Die Linke? It recorded its worst result in this state — in the same ballot that produced a record turnout.

None of these readings is false. Each of them can be argued. And none of them leads to anything happening.

That is the actual finding of election night, and it holds regardless of which party one prefers.

V. What is actually negotiated

Hans Ley:

Nothing is changed, because apart from changes of personnel nobody has any idea what could be changed at all.

This sentence describes a mechanism, and the mechanism can be named.

A change of personnel is the available quantity. It has a date, a face, a headline. It can be decided, announced and counted. It produces an event.

Everything else — the question of how elections are held, what is voted on, how assent and refusal can be expressed at all — produces none. There is no body that rules on it, no date on which it would be decided, and no figure by which progress could be read.

That is why people are talked about. Not because people matter more, but because they are the only quantity a procedure built around events can take hold of.

VI. Fifty years

There is evidence for this, and it does not come from us.

The social philosopher Johannes Heinrichs, born 1942, has been treating the systemic levels of society since 1975. In the 1990s a model of democracy grew out of it: four domain-specific, directly elected parliaments — for economy, politics, culture and fundamental values — related to one another by a logic of reflection, with a framing rule of precedence. Parties would in the process turn into issue parties, with cartel formation across the levels prohibited.

One may hold the model to be right or to be unrealistic. That is not what is at issue here.

What is at issue is that it has been available for half a century and appears in no debate. It has not been refuted. It has not been rejected. It has not been dealt with.

And it does not even have an entry of its own in the encyclopaedia — whoever searches for the term finds it only by way of its originator’s name.

That is not suppression. For an entry of its own the encyclopaedia requires a certain reception in the specialist literature, and where that is lacking no article comes into being. That is a rule, not an intention.

But it describes a closed circle: without reception no entry, without an entry less findability, without findability less reception.

And it shows the same construction once more, this time in the filing: the proposal exists not as a matter but as an appendage of a person. Whoever wants to reach it must know the name. And whoever reaches it only through the person negotiates it only with that person — it stands and falls with them.

VII. The smaller version is not dealt with either

It might be objected that the model simply asks too much. Four new parliaments, a new law on political parties, an altered constitution — the most far-reaching conceivable rebuilding and therefore the politically most remote. Who is supposed to begin that?

The objection carries weight. Only it does not answer the question, for there is also the smaller version.

One can hold the same thought without presupposing the rebuilding. An issue mandate — a member of parliament who commits publicly to one field and is measured by it — needs no new parliament, no constitutional amendment and no majority for a new architecture. It needs candidates who commit themselves, and citizens who examine them.

Were twenty such members to sit in the present Bundestag, two each for climate, health, digital affairs, education, foreign policy, social security, infrastructure and the rule of law, the functional differentiation would arise in fact — without anything being rebuilt.

And the effect would not only be structural. Whoever commits to one subject can be measured by it. An all-round mandate can hide behind the complexity of the whole; an issue mandate cannot.

This proposal too is not dealt with. It requires no constitutional amendment, costs nothing and could be tried at the next election. It appears in no debate all the same.

With that the objection about far-reachingness is disposed of. It is not because the proposals are too large.

VIII. The connection

Elsewhere we have recorded: for a condition there is no metric, for an event there is. That is why responses come to events and not to creeping conditions.

An election result is an event. It has a date, a figure, a picture.

What preceded it had none.

And from that follows the uncomfortable part: the agitation comes now because now a measurement was taken — not because anything changed yesterday. The condition is the same as the week before last. It is merely visible now.

We have likewise recorded that there is no box on the ballot paper for the statement: I have voted, and I reject all those on offer. Whoever is dissatisfied today has only one vessel — a vote for somebody who promises change. He must thereby say more than he means.

Whether that played a part in this election we do not know. It is no explanation of the result and is not meant as one.

IX. What follows

Not the claim that a different electoral procedure would have prevented anything. That cannot be known, and whoever asserts it does not know it either.

Rather the sober observation that in the days after this election night people will be talked about and procedures will not — from every side, with good reasons and without result.

And the question that will not be asked is the only one that would lead anywhere: not who will stand next time, but how it is decided what stands for election.

For fifty years somebody has been making a proposal about that. And there is a smaller version of it that costs nobody anything.

Neither is being rejected. Neither is being noticed.