For Preventing the Voters of Eastern Germany from Being a Burden to Their Betters, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Union
For the sarcasm impaired: This is not a policy proposal. Read every recommendation below as its opposite.
It is a melancholy object to those who read the better newspapers of London and Brussels, to see the opinion pages crowded with persons of the first quality, all of them weeping, and all of them weeping about Magdeburg.
On the sixth of September, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the Alternative for Germany received 43.8 percent of the vote. The governing Christian Democrats, who supply the Chancellor of the Federal Republic, received 17.2. The offending party took thirty-nine seats, and required forty-two, so that the Republic survives by three chairs and a coalition arithmetic problem.
I do not raise these numbers to alarm anyone. I raise them because they establish the difficulty precisely.
The voters of Saxony-Anhalt were informed in advance. The domestic intelligence service had classified the state branch as a confirmed right-wing extremist effort. The classification was published. The broadcasters carried it. The Chancellor spoke. Museum directors, grandmothers, and the whole civic apparatus of the Federal Republic marched, petitioned, and explained. The voters were told what the party was, and then they went out on a Sunday and voted for it by a margin of more than two to one over the government.
Here we arrive at the true nature of the emergency:
The instrument of democracy has been discovered in the hands of persons not qualified to operate it.
THE FAILURE OF PREVIOUS EXPEDIENTS
I have turned my thoughts upon this subject for many years, and I find the projects of other men wholly mistaken in their computation.
The firewall was tried. The cordon was maintained with great discipline, at considerable cost to every governing coalition in the Republic, and the effect upon the offending vote share was to double it. Surveillance was authorized and telephones were tapped under the lowered legal threshold that the extremist classification so conveniently provides. Documentaries were commissioned. School curricula were revised. Ten thousand articles were written explaining to the population of the eastern states what the eastern states were about to do, and why they must not.
And on the sixth of September they did it, in the largest numbers ever recorded, in a state that Berlin has been explaining things to for thirty-six years.
The lesson is not that the explanations failed. The lesson is that explanation, as a technology, has reached the limit of what it can accomplish against a citizen who has decided that his electricity bill is a political document.
THE CONTAGION
The danger of spread is now acknowledged by every responsible authority. The French finance minister has called the result a very, very worrying signal for Europe. The Prime Minister of Poland has observed that only fools and traitors could welcome it. From Washington, the ambassadorial class has cheered, which settles the question of authorship.
In the autumn of 2022 the Italian Republic elected Giorgia Meloni, and we were assured by the same publications, in the same typeface, that the Duce had returned and that the Constitution of 1948 would be waste paper by Christmas. Four years have passed. The Constitution is intact. The lady sits at every summit, is photographed beside every head of government, and is now described in the serious press as a moderate and a pragmatist.
This is the most frightening feature of the disease. The contagion does not kill its host. It governs the host, competently enough that after a few years nobody can remember what the emergency was.
From Rome the sickness passed to the Netherlands, then to the Nordic countries, then across the Atlantic, where it has taken the form of an American president who cannot be blamed for the weather during most news cycles, but is blamed for everything else. It has reached Canada. It threatens France, where the socialist paradise built by three generations of enlightened administrators may be overturned by capitalism. Even the European Council, that last citadel of governance by persons nobody elected, may fall.
All of it under the false populist banner of freedom, which is the word the disease uses when it wants to be let in.
THE ROMANIAN PRECEDENT
I anticipate the objection that my scheme is novel and untried. It is neither. It has been done, it worked, and the sky remained where it was.
In November of 2024, the Romanian people held the first round of a presidential election. An obscure gentleman named Calin Georgescu came first, having been assembled almost entirely out of TikTok. On the sixth of December, two days before the runoff, with diaspora voting already under way, the Constitutional Court of Romania set the whole round aside. Intelligence findings were declassified concerning coordinated social media manipulation and undeclared campaign funding.
No party was banned that week, and no citizen was turned away from any ballot box. The votes were cast in perfect freedom, counted in public, and then correctly understood. What had appeared on Sunday evening to be a tally became, upon expert inspection, evidence of foreign interference, which is a far more useful thing for a tally to be. A number can only be counted. Evidence can be interpreted, appealed, published, and used.
When the election was held again in May, the labor of a second interpretation was spared by the simpler expedient of removing the leading candidate from the ballot. Therefore, the correct man won with 53.6 percent. Brussels congratulated Bucharest on the resilience of Romanian democracy, and the resilience was undeniable, since Romanian democracy had proved capable of surviving a Romanian election.
The method was even announced in advance, which is the mark of a confident administration. In January of 2025, the former commissioner Thierry Breton observed on French radio that “We did it in Romania,” and added that the same would obviously have to be done in Germany if it became necessary. A written question was duly put to the Commission in the Parliament. Mr. Breton then clarified that the Union possesses no mechanism whatever for annulling any election, which is entirely correct, and is the very reason the mechanism performs so well. An instrument that does not exist requires no legal basis, no right of appeal, and no budget line.
I note in passing, and without any wish to alarm, that the Romanian election was voided over a TikTok operation, and that the gentleman who has just carried Saxony-Anhalt is himself a product of TikTok, thirty-five years old, formerly employed in marketing, and reportedly amiable. The precedent is therefore not merely applicable. It is exact.
THE PROPOSAL
I shall now therefore humbly offer my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.
I propose that elections in the afflicted states continue exactly as at present. The ballot papers shall be printed. The polling stations shall open at eight. The queues shall be photographed. The exit polls shall be broadcast at six with the customary music. Nothing whatever of the ceremony shall be diminished, for the ceremony is the part that the international community observes.
I propose only that the ballot boxes, upon closing, be forwarded unopened to a Commission of Qualified Interpreters sitting in Brussels, who shall determine what the voters meant. The count itself shall then be annulled, exactly as the Romanian count was annulled, and the finding of the Commission shall stand in its place as the result of the election. I would not have anyone call this an overturning. An election is not overturned by being interpreted. It is completed, since a vote that has not yet been correctly understood cannot be said to have finished happening.
The principle is already conceded in every article written since Sunday. We are told on all sides that a vote for this party is not really a vote for this party. It is a cry of pain. It is a howl of economic anxiety, a symptom of postindustrial dislocation, an artifact of Russian (dis)information operations, a wound left by reunification. Every serious commentator agrees that the ballot means something other than what is marked upon it.
A cry of pain is a clinical finding. Clinical findings require trained interpretation. No one would permit a patient to read his own scan and prescribe his own surgery, and yet we permit forty-three percent of a German state to interpret its own suffering and act upon the diagnosis.
The advantages are considerable, and I shall enumerate them.
First, the offending party is removed from every parliament at a stroke, without any party being banned, any ballot being denied, or any citizen being disenfranchised in the technical sense that matters for the annual reports. Democracy is preserved in its strongest and most durable form, which is the ceremonial form.
Second, employment is secured for the interpretive class: the extremism researchers, the disinformation scholars, the foundation officers, the correspondents who have spent a decade explaining eastern Germany to readers in west London. These persons have accumulated an expertise that no longer has any electoral outlet, and it would be a waste of public investment to strand it.
Third, the voters themselves are relieved of the anxiety of consequence. A man may mark his ballot with perfect freedom, knowing that his mark cannot injure his neighbor, his country, or the Union. He may vote as extravagantly as he wishes. Nothing follows. This is the greatest expansion of political liberty since the secret ballot.
Fourth, the pain, once properly interpreted, can be addressed by the instruments proper to pain: a listening tour, a regional fund, a museum of memory in Halle with a café.
Fifth, and I raise this with some delicacy, the Commission will put an end to the problem of cheerfulness. The lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt is thirty-five years old, a former marketing executive, and the correspondents keep reporting, with visible unease, that he is upbeat. He smiles on TikTok, packages the thing in positive slogans, and appears at rallies in the manner of a pop singer. This is far more dangerous than anger, because anger can be filmed and captioned. Under my proposal, no cheerfulness will ever again appear on a ballot, since no ballot will ever again be opened.
OBJECTIONS
Some will object that the scheme is undemocratic. This misunderstands the nature of a value. Democracy is a value, and values are not consumed by use; they are, if anything, better preserved by disuse, as with the good china, which survives precisely because it never comes down from the shelf.
Others will object that the population will not stand for it. Bucharest stood for it. The crowds came out in December, thinned by March, and were gone by summer, and the man they had voted for now describes himself as a passive observer of public life. Six months is the full natural lifespan of an annulled electorate.
Others will object that the eastern population will notice. They will not. They have been told for two decades that their votes were the product of Russian interference, economic frustration, and unresolved historical trauma. Being told at last that their votes will be professionally interpreted is a promotion.
Let no man speak to me of other expedients. Of asking why industrial electricity in Germany costs what it costs, and where the chemical plants went, and who signed the papers. Of asking why a man in Halle believes that nobody in Berlin has put a question to him in twenty years and waited for the answer. Of settling immigration by open legislative debate and a recorded vote, rather than by announcement followed by a decade of denouncing the objectors as morally defective. Of a governing party keeping one promise made at one election, as an experiment, to see what happens.
These are wild and visionary schemes. I would desire those politicians who dislike my overture to answer me one question first: whether they have ever, in living memory, asked 43.8 percent of a population what it wanted and then given it to them.
I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in promoting this necessary work. I hold no chair in extremism studies. I have no column to fill on Mondays. I sit on the board of no foundation established to defend the information space, and I have received no grant to study democratic resilience. My own country is distant and, I am assured by the same newspapers, already lost.
I offer the proposal from pure public spirit, and from tenderness toward the poor voters of Saxony-Anhalt, who have suffered the misfortune of being asked a question, and the far greater misfortune of answering it.
We know keyboard warriors. Bots and trolls are often challenged by satire, so let us be clear. This essay has been prepared in the style of Jonathan Swift’s classic political commentary, “A Modest Proposal”, penned in 1729. The authors propose nothing of the kind. Long live Freedom, Dammit!
MALONE.NEWS
No grant, no foundation, no chair in extremism studies. Jill and I read the primary documents ourselves, which is slow, and paid subscribers are what buys the time to do it.
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Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
A brilliant, biting editorial but alas I fear satire is wasted on the humorless.