It doesn't look good for democracy. Not internationally, because autocrats are on the rise and want to prove that they can achieve prosperity for all without free elections, without freedom of expression and without a democratic constitution. Russia and China are the most powerful protagonists, Russia even with the intention of defeating the democratic ideals of the West by war.

Jasper von Altenbockum

Editor in charge of domestic policy.

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But not even in America, the model and refuge of many revolutionaries of 1848, and not even in the European Union, is liberal democracy immune to hostility. Berlusconi, Salvini, Le Pen, Kaczynski, Orbán – the list of illiberal democrats is getting longer and longer.

And nationally? Here, too, pessimism is spreading. For ten years, no speech supporting the state has failed to fail to point out that the German Republic should not rest on its laurels. That the opponents of democracy, the dividers, the populists, the agitators are on the rise. That the longing for simple solutions in a complicated and accelerated world allows extremism to flourish anew in all possible shades. That hatred is spreading and poisoning the culture of debate. And finally, no longer entirely new, but still largely unknown territory: that climate protection confronts democracy with the question of whether it is up to this challenge.

The Germans had also thought that they had reached the end of their history. After Hitler's dictatorship and division, the national question seemed to have been finally answered in 1989 with reunification, and the whole of Germany seemed to have arrived in democracy. After the Holocaust and World War, "Never Again" seemed to have remained as a great, never-ending historical mission. But if it were really "just" that, the Germans would make it too easy for themselves.

The battle cry is abused

Not even the battle cry of the 1989 revolution, which, with its dual claim to freedom and unity, seems like a reparation for 1848, "We are the people", has survived unscathed. At that time, he swept away the privileges of the ruling caste of the GDR, which, like the old feudal regime in the Vormärz, persecuted "demagogues" and allowed informers to swarm, prevented elections and tolerated a constitution only on paper.

A quarter of a century later, this battle cry returned in its populist perversion. "We are the people" now meant, in the transformation by "Pegida", the resistance against majorities and the mainstream, meant the identitarian claim of a minority to stand for the nation and to bring democracy to its true purpose. What that was, the people, the nation, democracy, was a matter that was not finally answered by the course of history in Germany as well, but – again or still – vagabonded homelessly.

Where did that come from? The question could be answered with East Germany, with Eastern Europe, with the last twitches of the belated nation, were it not for the tendency in all Western democracies to force liberalism from the days of 1848 into a libertarian, authoritarian or identitarian garb. Does this speak of a longing for pre-revolutionary conditions? In both East and West, nationalist thinking is returning, the longing for the strong man and, despite unbroken individualism, for a society in which individual and group rights are defined by origin, for a supposedly immovable identity. In 1848 one would have said: according to the stand.