FAR-RIGHT CULTURE WAR

Today’s right-wing culture warriors are polarisation entrepreneurs. Often armed with disinformation, they seek to sharpen conflicts and divide constituencies into friends and enemies, and this has led them to target the center right’s weak point

- Jan-Werner Mueller

Something just broke in Germany. A highly respected jurist whom the governing Social Democratic Party (SPD) nominated to sit on the country’s constitutional court has withdrawn herself from consideration after a relentless smear campaign by right-wing journalists and politicians.

Worse, it was the SPD’s own coalition partner, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), that suddenly shifted from supporting Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf’s candidacy to deeming her unacceptable.

This sabotage of a hitherto consensual procedure is a test run for bringing US-style culture-war politics to Germany. The goal is to peel away ever more members of the center right that former Chancellor Angela Merkel once led, and to move toward the arrangement that already was put in place in some other European democracies; an alliance of the center right and the populist far right.

True, Germany's constitutional court, though one of the world’s most respected and influential, has not always been above controversy. In the mid-1990s, it drew conservatives’ ire when it ruled that Bavarian nondenominational schools may not display crucifixes on their walls. But the process of appointing judges has always been spared from the spectacle that is all too familiar from the United States. Rather than holding highly publicised, televised, and reliably polarising hearings, parties meet behind closed doors to propose a balanced ticket of nominees, each of whom then must win super-majority support in the lower house.