NOVA Has Already Failed Five Times

The party Germany needs now has existed before. Once it was even called Nova.

I. A Party That Does Not Exist Yet

Funk, the youth service of the German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF, has published an opinion video called “This Is the Party Germany Needs Now”. The party does not exist yet; the author calls it NOVA. It is to do four things differently. Its leaders are to be chosen for their competence, not their party careers. It is to think in issues rather than camps. It is to plan politics from the end and be measured by goals achieved. And it is to be open: one can take part for a limited time, and experts come for a few years and then return to their professions.

The diagnosis is right. Many voters no longer choose a party but vote against the others. We described the single entrance into politics in “The Long March through the Party”. And the video is honest enough to ask at the end whether NOVA would not fail on the same problems.

That question can be answered, because NOVA is not a thought experiment. It has existed several times, with almost the same promises. Whoever wants to know whether it would be different this time need only look at what became of them.

II. Nova in Rome

In 2009 the comedian Beppe Grillo and the internet entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio founded the Five Star Movement in Italy. It did not want to be a party but a movement of citizens. Its principle was: one counts as much as any other. Decisions were made on an internet platform. Alliances with other parties were forbidden. And no one was allowed to serve more than two terms, so that politics would never become a profession.

The success was enormous. In 2018 the movement became the strongest force in the Italian parliament with almost a third of the vote. Then it governed, first with the right-wing Lega, then with the Social Democrats, then in the government of the former central bank president Mario Draghi. By then the ban on alliances was history.

In November 2024 the movement called its members to a constituent assembly. It bore the name “Nova”. The members voted by 72 per cent to change the two-term limit. By 81 per cent they rejected a ban on alliances. And by 63 per cent they abolished the office of guarantor held by the founder Grillo. In a repeat vote in December, 80 per cent confirmed it. The movement now belongs to the former prime minister Giuseppe Conte.

What is remarkable is not that the rules fell. It is who abolished them. It was no coup from above. It was the members themselves, in an online vote, exactly as the founders had wanted.

III. The Experts

The video wants a team of experts at the top of NOVA, each building teams of their own. That too has existed, twice and with very different outcomes.

In Germany in 2013 the Hamburg economics professor Bernd Lucke founded, with other economists, a party against the euro bailouts. It was called the professors’ party. It wanted to be factual, expert, beyond left and right. Two years later, in July 2015, the party congress in Essen voted Lucke out, and he left. The experts had founded a party whose members wanted something quite different from them. That party is called the AfD.

In France Emmanuel Macron founded the En Marche movement in April 2016. It was neither left nor right; it wanted people from society instead of career politicians. For the 2017 parliamentary election 19,000 people applied, 529 were chosen, and just over half had never held office. The movement won an absolute majority. Today it is called Renaissance, has lost its majority and is above all the party of one man. The experts from society came. Many have gone again. The one who brought them has stayed.

IV. The Joiners

The video wants people to be able to join NOVA for a limited time, without the long march through the party, and the party to be open and permeable.

The Pirate Party tried that. It was open, it was digital, it decided in online assemblies, and it thought in issues rather than camps. In 2011 it entered the Berlin state parliament with 8.9 per cent. All fifteen candidates on its list were elected; it had not fielded more. In 2016 it received 1.7 per cent in Berlin. It did not fail on oligarchy but on the opposite: without leadership it tore itself apart in public quarrels before it could produce any leadership.

And finally the Greens, the only party that knew the problem from the start. They entered the Bundestag in 1983 with rotation, separation of office and mandate, and grassroots democracy. In “The Founding of a New Party and Robert Michels’ Iron Law” (German only: „Die Gründung einer neuen Partei und das Eherne Gesetz von Robert Michels“) we described what remained of it: nothing. At the very first rotation in 1985, Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian, of all people the best-known members, refused to give up their seats.

V. What They All Failed On

The video has one point at which everything is decided, and it passes over it quickly. NOVA could be infiltrated, it says, and power would bring people to whom their own career matters more than the cause. A clever system could keep that under control. What this system would look like the video does not say; otherwise it would have become too long.

It is precisely on this system that all five failed. Robert Michels described why in 1911: every organisation that grows produces a leadership that perpetuates itself. The Five Star Movement shows the sharper form. It was not the leadership that abolished the rules but the members, and democratically. The reason is simple. As long as a movement is small, a rule against power costs no one anything. When it succeeds, there are suddenly people who would lose something through the rule: their seat, their income, their future. And these people vote too.

From this follows a sentence every new NOVA would have to answer first: a rule survives success only if the successful cannot change it. Members can change a statute. A chairman can forget a promise. What lasts must lie beyond the reach of those it is meant to bind.

There are examples of this, only not from parties. The limit of the American president to two terms has been in the constitution since 1951. No president can change it, for that requires Congress and three quarters of the states. Switzerland changes the chair of its government every year, and has done so since 1848, because it is in the law and not at the discretion of those governing.

VI. What Must Be Said in Fairness

In all five cases it was the party that failed, not its cause. The Greens carried environmental protection into every other party. The Pirates made transparency and internet policy an issue no one passes over today. In 2020 the Five Star Movement pushed through a reduction of the Italian parliament by more than a third, and that is now in the constitution, beyond its own reach. Even failed new parties can thus leave something lasting, if they bring it in time to where they themselves can no longer change it.

And the video is right in what it demands. Planning politics from the end, being measured by results and opening a way back into their professions for experts is right. We proposed something similar in “The Contest of Results” and in “Can the Young Untangle the Party?”.

VII. The Real Question

Whoever wants to found a new party today should not begin with the name or the programme, but with the question of which of its rules will survive the day it succeeds. A party cannot achieve that. It can only try to move the rules out of its own reach quickly enough: into electoral law, into the constitution, into a form it can no longer touch itself. That is why in our concept paper “Representatives Without Party” we did not propose a better party, but a way into parliament that needs no party as its master.

The next NOVA will come, for the gap is real. The question is not what it is called. The question is who may change its rules.