The New Nomenklatura and the Party Cartel
On a rule that no longer needs a fence
The welfare state is not the parties’ only redistribution machine. The second one distributes not benefits but access. It has an old name.
I. The second machine
In his morning briefing Gabor Steingart drew a distinction worth remembering. Alongside the great redistribution machine for pensions, child benefit and citizen’s income, he wrote, the governing parties run a second, more exclusive one: a boutique for the aristocracy of the party state, which distributes positions, status and influence. His figures support this. According to a study by Bernd Raffelhüschen and Tim Meyer for the Stiftung Marktwirtschaft, the number of established civil-service posts in the federal ministries has grown by 47 per cent since 2013, from around 15,000 to more than 22,000, mainly in the higher pay grades. According to the draft budget for 2027, the federal administration as a whole is to grow to 310,487 posts, although the coalition agreement promises at least eight per cent fewer by 2029.
One has to say where the figures come from. The Stiftung Marktwirtschaft and the Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft are close to employers and want less state. The data come from the federal budgets and are correct. The interpretation is driven by interests. And part of the growth stems from tasks that did not yet exist in 2013.
But Steingart only counts posts in ministries. That is the most visible part of a larger system, and for this system there is a term that people in Germany are reluctant to use.
II. What a nomenklatura is
In the Soviet system the nomenklatura was first of all a list. It recorded all important posts whose filling was decided by the party, from the ministry to the factory director, the editor-in-chief and the university rector. Alongside it the party kept a second list: that of the persons eligible for these posts. The Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas, once Tito’s deputy, called the people on this list “The New Class” in 1957 and was imprisoned for it. The Soviet historian Michael Voslensky, after his emigration, described them in 1980 in his book “Nomenklatura” as the actual ruling class.
Its essence was not wealth. When journalists were allowed into the Wandlitz forest settlement for the first time in November 1989, where the GDR Politburo lived, they found no palace, but detached houses, a swimming pool and a shop selling Western goods at East German prices. The country laughed more than it was outraged. The luxury was pitiful. What mattered was something else: the settlement was closed. Whoever was on the list had access, and whoever had once been on the list never entirely fell off it. He was transferred, not dismissed.
III. The cartel
In 1995 the political scientists Richard Katz and Peter Mair put forward a thesis that has been much discussed and often confirmed since. The parties of Western democracies, they wrote, are anchored less and less in society and more and more in the state. They lose members and ties to their voters, but are increasingly financed from public funds, share the posts of the state among themselves and jointly protect themselves against newcomers. They called this the cartel party.
A cartel is not an alliance. Its members do compete, for customers, for market share, for headlines. But they agree on the rules of the market. So it is here. In the election campaign the parties fight each other. On access to the state they come to an understanding.
IV. The list today
State funding of political parties in Germany may amount to no more than 232.4 million euros in 2026. The ceiling rises automatically every year, according to a specially calculated “party-relevant price index”. The party-affiliated foundations additionally receive 148 million euros a year in general grants from the federal budget, project funds not included. On both, the parties in the Bundestag decide themselves.
In the ministries there are the political civil servants, state secretaries and heads of directorates-general, who can be sent into temporary retirement at any time without giving reasons, with a pension. After every change of government they are exchanged. Then there are the commissioners, the councils, the commissions.
In the public broadcasters, the parties sit on the supervisory bodies. How far this reached became evident in 2009. The Hessian minister-president Roland Koch used the ZDF administrative council to block the renewal of the contract of its editor-in-chief Nikolaus Brender, a journalist with no reputation for party affiliation. Only in 2014 did the Federal Constitutional Court rule that no more than one third of the members of these bodies may be close to the state. The parties had to be forced to withdraw.
The judges of the Federal Constitutional Court are elected by a two-thirds majority, and the parties share the right to nominate them according to an unwritten key. How this works became visible in July 2025, when the SPD nominated the legal scholar Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, the CDU/CSU withdrew its consent shortly before the vote and the election was taken off the agenda. In August she withdrew. The dispute was not about whether parties should choose constitutional judges, but about which party may choose which one.
On the administrative boards of the savings banks sit district administrators and mayors; on the supervisory boards of municipal utilities, transport companies and housing associations sit city councillors; on those of the regional state banks sit state ministers. Each of these posts is harmless in itself and often sensibly justified. Together they make up a list that reaches far beyond the ministries.
V. The soft landing
The old nomenklatura could be recognised by the fact that nobody fell off entirely. The new one can be recognised by the same thing. Ronald Pofalla was head of the Federal Chancellery until the end of 2013. In 2015 he joined Deutsche Bahn, a company owned by the federal government, and in 2017 its board. Eckart von Klaeden, minister of state in the Chancellery, moved to Daimler in 2013 to head its political relations. Only afterwards, in 2015, did the Bundestag adopt a cooling-off period of up to 18 months for members of the government. Whether it is imposed, however, is decided by the federal government itself, on the recommendation of a body whose members are appointed on its proposal.
Whoever was on the list lands softly: in the association, in the corporation, in the foundation, in the lobbying agency, on the supervisory board. This is not a breach of the law. It is the system.
VI. The other side
The list grows. Competence shrinks. That is the half missing from Steingart. In “The Hollowed-Out State” we described how over thirty years the state cut back the engineers who could plan and inspect bridges and assess construction contracts, and how consultants took their place. “The Reminder Has Arrived” describes what came of it: sixteen bridge construction sites on 145 kilometres of the A 45.
Both happened at the same time. What grew were the management, coordination and desk-officer posts in the ministries, not the inspection engineers in the authorities. The Federal Court of Audit, which is supposed to control the apparatus, has lost around 16 per cent of its posts since 2017, according to the INSM’s figures. And the Chancellery is building an extension with 400 offices whose cost ceiling is 636.8 million euros and whose costs the federal government itself now estimates at 777 million.
The head grows, the body shrinks. Whoever responds to this by demanding “less state”, as Steingart’s sources do, experience shows, hits the body and not the head. For it is the head that decides on the cuts.
VII. Where the comparison limps
One must be merciless with one’s own comparison too. The Federal Republic is neither the Soviet Union nor the GDR. There are elections that actually vote governments out. There are courts that set limits to the parties, as the ZDF ruling shows. There is a press that can deliver Wandlitz pictures, and Steingart is delivering them right now. There is not a single party, but several, and no fence around the settlement.
And there is a party that uses the word “old-party cartel” as a weapon. The AfD describes the cartel in order to take it over, not to abolish it. How it is built and how it keeps its own list we described in “The Waiting Structure”. Criticism of the cartel is no argument for those who merely want to become its leaders.
Precisely because the nomenklatura no longer needs a fence, it hardly attracts attention. It has spread across hundreds of bodies, each inconspicuous in itself, and it is spread across all the established parties, so that none can reproach another with it without hitting itself.
VIII. The thesis
The new nomenklatura needs no wall, no special shop and no single party. It only needs a tacit agreement that the posts of the state belong to the parties currently sitting in parliament. About that they do not argue. They argue only about the distribution.
The remedy is therefore not less state, but fewer parties in the state. A cooling-off period not decided by the government that benefits from it. Supervisory bodies not filled according to party proportion. A public call for applications for every post that no law expressly declares political. Party financing whose level is not decided by its recipients. None of this is revolutionary. It would only make the list shorter. And that is exactly why nobody on it will ever decide it.
Further reading: The Hollowed-Out State · The Reminder Has Arrived · Whose Servants? · Tending the Landscape · The Anachronistic Structures and Rules of the Parties · The Settled Parties · The Waiting Structure · The In-Between Realm