Ursula von der Leyen should not have been appointed President of the European Union five years ago. With his re-election, Europe faces an authoritarian, militaristic turn

This text appeared first Berliner Zeitung.

Twenty years ago, the sociologist, European commissioner and (later) leading exponent of the liberal idea of ​​society and the state, Ralf Dahrendorf identified “crises of democracy”.

There is a good reason why apodictic crisis is put in the plural One The crisis – as we know from Lukács and others – is never really confined to an isolated sub-region, trying to reduce it linguistically. A real crisis – from a logical perspective – always affects the entirety of an organization.

“The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of control and legitimacy,” says Dahrendorf. The post-democratic age has begun – the crisis of nation-states (the existential condition of democracy), “fundamentally disinterested and apathetic people”, loss of importance and loss of control of parliaments, caused by non-emergent contests. -Government institutions and think tanks, multinationals and individuals – in short: the emerging global class. This is associated with a loss of transparency in the political decision-making process, which (necessarily) leads to “creeping authoritarianism.”

Twenty years on, the “platform” of political party leaders newly recognized by the last EU elections is coming together to put in place an anti-democrat who has suffered many irregularities in the latest attempt by the EU’s highly paid idiots. Parliamentary PR Department. “Democracy in action,” 25 blue billboards at the gates of the Strasbourg European Parliament scream this latest self-promotional platitude (in half-heartedly simulated national languages). , the most toxic of these political associations, works to perpetuate its exercise of power.

The EPP has ruled Brussels for 25 years. That’s a full quarter of a century longer than Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong — perhaps even longer than all three combined.

Contrary to the impression created with the help of the media, this European People’s Party is not a party, but an “international association” under Belgian law. A union! A bright leader who likes to style CSU power accountant and EPP leader Manfred Weber as the badass club leader he really is.

It was Manfred Weber and his lack of political charisma that first ruined van der Leyen’s first five years, because without him, only van der Leyen would have had power. Centers of the European Union seen from the inside in a dream. The heads of state and government gathered at the Council waved Weber, who was the official top candidate of his political association, to the Commission presidency in 2019 without much fanfare.

Well, as we know, everything turned out differently – at least on the surface, because the individual user interface for using the continuous power of the same club no longer plays a role – Weber, van der Leyen, some others no intelligence has ever heard of, it doesn’t matter. The beam of public light can be shifted from one form to another without the slightest change in the structure of power.

There are many stirrup holders: social democrats, notorious for self-deprecation, liberals traditionally associated with lobbyists, power-hungry greens and elected representatives of so-called political right-wing extremists.

The EPP’s entire plan is nothing more than a well-oiled machine to maintain its own power, which naturally involves colluding with anyone and everyone who can provide the union with the formally required parliamentary majority.

EVP does that for everyone – no different than the guys they put above. Conan van der Leyen teams up with Italian neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni in an apricot-hued partner appearance that is, in many respects, a fundamentally tasteless spectacle.

Hand-in-hand with Mitsotakis, a Greek-American banker who spent years monitoring opposition politicians, journalists and NGOs with Israeli spy software. Alexandre de Groove, known only in Belgium, has joined hands with Biometric facial recognition, automated data retention and a range of illegal activities – to try to turn the so-called legal state into a flawless surveillance state. The list goes on and on.

What has become of the European Union in the last 25 years – Ms van der Leyen as the logical and final culminating point – her Jobs and their club: Americanization, NATOization, and militarization.

A poverty level of 25 percent has remained constant since EU data collection began, with the erosion of the middle classes and the impoverishment of the poor, and inequality growing immeasurably.

In addition, contempt for contracts, institutions and democracy: self-righteousness, flagrant violations of the law and nepotism, backroom dealings and outright bribery. In addition, there is a lack of transparency and an organized evasion of democratic accountability—colonial-academic arrogance that borders blatantly on contempt for citizens and democracy. Depression, industrialization, destruction of economic and social substance, liberalization of social discourse, authoritarian turn with censorship, information control and surveillance, US corporations, think tanks and special interests.

Contempt for mandatory EU procedures and binding regulations and a clear breach of European and international legal principles.

The destruction of material and intellectual infrastructures, education, wisdom, health, transportation, dialectic, governance, digital future matter.

Undisguised arrogance, political misjudgments, constant over-regulation. Geostrategic insignificance. Erosion and erosion of all their perceived values.

Without question, anyone who asks themselves such a thing owes the EPP the most disastrously unpleasant developments of their entire (political) career. If the same club always rules there, you really have to ask, will anything change in this EU, and how will it be for the better?

Seventy years after the start of the European project, all hopes are in one place Departure – better, fairer, more democratic, more transparent, citizen-oriented, common good and in peaceful times – disappeared without leaving any trace.

It is not enough for all the political forces in the EU Parliament that present themselves as “(pro-)Europeans” and “democrats” to cling to the intellectual and dehumanizing nature of the system they helped to create. Unmoved, they move from one extremism to the next: war, debt and surveillance must be the coordinated accompaniment (by an EU commission morally legitimized under Von der Leyen) to an unsavory war plate. Orderly explosion and controlled demolition consist of all the integral foundations of civilized social structures.

After the linguistic and symbolic turn that brought the dominance of the word and then the image, Europeans now face the totalitarian turn, the totalitarian military turn.

This is the ideological underpinning of this new Europe: the conglomeration of these nauseating twists, positioned as a brutal offensive weapon to which eager parliamentarians (and media trumpeters) routinely use their semantic opposites – peace, freedom, democracy – Orwell. for themselves – together with the elders in existence nothing, This – in Dahrendorf’s sense – is to say that the post-democratic, almost post-political, universal class has been thrown out, so complete, all-encompassing and indivisible that it was once existential and today gives way to a commission. A president like Van der Leyen. The philosophical and ethical nothingness it represents has not reached its (a) democratic tipping point, but has surpassed it with seven league boots.

van der Leyen and EPP. phrase and nothing.

The arrogant complacency that both ignores everything that can at least vaguely remind us of democracy or the European Union (as it once was supposed) no longer knows any bounds.

Ms van der Leyen should not have been appointed president of the EU Commission five years ago because of the messy consulting affair she left behind in Germany. Even then, he did not meet the stringent requirements placed on potential members of the Commission in terms of agreeable behavior and moral integrity. Even then, it was only through drugs that viewers could imagine her as the “best” of the 500 million EU citizens. Five years, numerous rule violations, contract violations and sordid affairs later, this is more unimaginable than ever.

The criteria set by Dahrendorf are put to an even tougher test when it comes to this EU ravaged by the EPP and von der Leyen: the possibility of bringing about non-violent change, comprehensive. One would expect the exercise of power to include control over those who wield power and genuine participation by citizens This is The EU is futile. The discomfort people give in to this power structure masquerading as “politics” is the result of a further disconnection of the political superstructure and civil society. To speak with Hegel, we see the (irreversible) decline of democratic morality.

Van der Leyen is a prominent and personal manifestation of the (moral) decline of democracy, a distorted caricature of the EU state, an allegory of the post-democratic crisis. What Dahrendorf described twenty years ago can easily be seen in the EU today – in Ms von der Leyen. No one better posits a system-level case of post-democratic political crisis than van der Leyen. And — not just in this sense — Joe Biden is perfect for his office.

The collapse of the external order inevitably goes hand in hand with the collapse of the internal one. “When the ruling class loses its consensus, it no longer “leads” but simply “rules,” and the crisis “is precisely what it is. are dying – Forgiveness: The “The old dies, the new cannot come into the world,” writes Gramsci, about the so-called interregnum, this political interim stage that produces the most peculiar symptoms of disease. It is the age of monsters.

No sane person can be surprised that the vision of those who lead the EU in this interval is not aligned with those for whom it was designed. This is – and it will be – a time of monsters and fools.

Now go to the swimming pool!