Against the Firewall
Leftists Should Retire a Failed Strategy
Having just joined a political party (Die Linke) in my native country of Germany, I have become significantly more attuned to the specific particularities which define the political conflict in my home country. One of the most noteworthy is the extraordinarily high resistance to letting far-right populists become part of the established political system. The “firewall”, a political strategy of keeping the far right out of power by temporarily forming alliances between otherwise opposed political factions, has thus far proved uniquely impregnable in Germany, even if it has played a role in pretty much every Western European democracy in the 21st century. Yet while this strategy has worked so far, I’m becoming ever more convinced that it is based on a series of severe strategic miscalculations. Admirable as the motives behind this strategy may be, it is becoming increasingly clear that it has completely failed to deliver the desired outcomes. In the following article, I seek to make a case as to why leftists especially should abandon this approach, and why the temporary ability to keep the far right from power is only helping its case in the long run.
Deferral of the Will
The case I’m making in this article has already been made by numerous other commentators, rendering my contribution somewhat redundant at first glance. However, I do believe I can add something new by examining this strategy from a specifically leftist perspective. The political left is usually the constituency most likely to support maintenance of the firewall (even if this isn’t always acknowledged by centrists who persistently like to accuse the Left of secretly rooting for a far-right victory), as it objects the most to the political projects of right-wing extremism. Yet this very objection should make the left hesitant to embrace this very strategy. Before I go on, I would also like to state that I do not object to the firewall in totality and would set very specific conditions on its abandonment. Insofar as the firewall remains a good-faith interpretation of the democratic will, I find its use acceptable, even if not necessarily advisable. Yet where I strongly object to it, and would criticise its use on democratic grounds, is in a circumstance where, absent this strategy, the democratic will would clearly be interpreted as favouring the far right. Staying within the political system of my home country (and comparable systems abroad), I would say that if two conditions are met, political precedent would strongly indicate a far-right government. The two conditions are:
The far-right party is the strongest party in terms of vote share.
The sitting government no longer commands a parliamentary majority in its current iteration.
The reason for me mentioning these two conditions is that they would make the firewall strategy politically unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic (though not legally prohibited). Some would point to the first condition being enough, but precedent suggests that a government not containing the strongest force in the Bundestag remaining in power is acceptable (with the social-liberal coalition of Chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt excluding the CDU/CSU despite its status as the strongest party from 1969–1972 and again from 1976–1982). However, what made this setup acceptable from the perspective of democratic legitimacy was the fact that, despite the Social Democrats not being the strongest force in parliament, the government as a whole was supported by a majority of the electorate in the following federal elections. One might add that the second condition alone should also suffice to render a government illegitimate, but political precedent once more exists for the governing party remaining in power even as the coalition it oversaw lost its parliamentary majority. The liberal-conservative coalition governing between 2009 and 2013 lost its parliamentary majority following that year’s federal election, with the Free Democrats losing representation in the Bundestag and requiring the formation of a new conservative-led coalition. Yet in this instance Chancellor Angela Merkel could still derive legitimacy from the fact that the CDU/CSU was the preferred choice of a sizeable plurality of the electorate, having attained a higher share of the vote than any other party since the country’s reunification. Thus, if one, but not both, of the conditions are met, precedent would exist for forming a government excluding the far right. But if both are met, upholding the firewall would create a situation legally feasible, but difficult to justify from a democratic legitimacy perspective, as a government which had faith clearly withdrawn by the electorate would at least partially remain in power, despite a necessary reconfiguration.
While these conditions may appear excessively theoretical at first, they could very plausibly become a reality in the next five years. The 2024 Austrian legislative elections, illustrative for the German case due to the relatively similar electoral systems, robbed the conservative–Green coalition (ÖVP + Greens) of its parliamentary majority, with the far-right FPÖ coming in first. Despite the government losing its majority, the centre-right ÖVP once more managed to provide the next chancellor, forming a new coalition with the Social Democrats and NEOS (a upstart liberal political party). While legally defensible, this type of manoeuvre is difficult to reconcile with the idea of upholding the popular will. One might say that in a multi-party parliamentary democracy parties have every right to form the coalitions they wish, and that the fact that the far right doesn’t have an outright majority reflects a popular consensus against it coming to power, but this could have been said for literally every election but one in the history of the Federal Republic. Only once did German voters deliver an outright parliamentary majority to a single party (Konrad Adenauer winning this feat for the CDU/CSU in 1957), yet this didn’t impede clear interpretations of the popular will. Proportional representation, frequently cited as the most democratic electoral model, still requires elite decisions to play along with the popular will. Attempting to blunt the momentum of the populist right largely through elite coordination is likely to be a fool’s errand.
Treading Water
Thus far I have made a basic case of democratic legitimacy, without truly examining the issue from a leftist perspective. The political left tends to be profoundly alarmed (correctly so) by the prospect of the far right taking power, going so far as to enter into profoundly uncomfortable political alliances to keep it from doing so. Simply looking at the political conflict through the lens of the left–right spectrum, it makes sense to view the left as being the most opposed to far-right governance. This simple intuition is still correct but somewhat incomplete, given that it is likely more fitting to view the political conflict of today as evolving along two rather than just one axis. In addition to left–right, political forces today could also be grouped along an axis of low to high institutional trust. The far right does not just attract voters actually supporting its ideology but also those who feel alienated from elite institutions without this leading to any specific policy prescriptions. This contingent is a growing constituency in the vast majority of Western democracies, as trust in the system is rapidly eroding across the developed world. As the far right attracts more and more of these voters, it doesn’t just gain strength itself but also profoundly reshapes the constituency available to political forces opposing its rise. As low-trust voters become more permanently associated with the populist right, the constituencies attainable to the rest of the political spectrum become ever more dominated by those with higher institutional trust. This development has profoundly reshaped the political strategy of mainstream political forces; everyone from the Democrats, to the Labour Party, to the CDU/CSU have geared their political communications almost exclusively to the inclinations of the more upscale and often highly educated segments of society (in France, a new political movement around President Emmanuel Macron has entirely dedicated itself to such a strategy). Thus, the growing strength of the far right and the subsequent erection of the cordon sanitaire have made a political adjustment less likely. The populist left is thus ever more marginalised within the coalition of the cordon sanitaire, as voters potentially open to the possibility of a dramatic societal transformation become ever more enthralled by the political right.
Additionally, the firewall tends to make political radicalism more likely, both because of the internal dynamics of the political coalitions as well as the strategic advantages it confers on the right. The main way in which the firewall aids the far right is that it allows it to normalise its policies without ever having to take responsibility for them. This shows up in foreign and economic policy as well as migration and asylum. The latter issue is especially important because hardline immigration restrictionism is likely to carry significant negative economic consequences which any political party implementing such policies would have to oversee. The far right, however, doesn’t need to face this dilemma, as it remains safely behind the cordon sanitaire while mainstream political parties adopt its immigration policies. One might add that the issue here isn’t the firewall itself, but the proclivity of established forces to copy its policies. This may be true, but it remains a simple fact that this just isn’t occurring in reality. The past 10 years have shown that mainstream political parties continually copy the far right’s policies even while continuing to insist that the parties themselves remain entirely beyond the pale. Thus, the far right can slowly but surely normalise its ideology without having to be on the hook for its eventual consequences.
The final point made in favour of the firewall is the comparison with the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The catastrophic consequences of the mainstream right allowing Hitler to take power are assumed to illustrate the dangers of letting the firewall crack today. Yet for as much as drawing parallels between the political right of today and the Nazi movement are partially warranted, believing in a complete equivalence seems to me not fully grounded in reality. The primary difference is the absence of a coherent plan which would allow the populist right to quickly destroy democratic institutions. Repeated attacks on democratic institutions do occur, but thus far none of them have shown their ability to actually render democratic governance unfeasible. Both Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán, figures who have defined their nations’ history for more than a decade, still oversee electorates who could at least potentially subvert their political projects. Antidemocratic tendencies do exist, but they lack the potency which they had within the Nazi project. Ultimately, the ire of the far right is primarily trained on liberal rather than democratic values. Thus, by continuing to maintain the firewall under all circumstances, leftists are putting themselves in a position of having to defend a liberal project which they themselves would largely acknowledge as having failed. The impulse behind this strategy is noble, but it shouldn’t keep leftists from critically examining the actual impact of their choices. Every examination of the firewall strategy which isn’t based on simply stating the (very real) horrors of the far right would have to acknowledge that it has proved a severe strategic failure. Quite the opposite, the nations in which the firewall has proved the most impregnable have seen the most persistently radical far-right forces. Donald Trump’s political project is already in the process of losing support and political potency, while the AfD is more radical than ever before, likely much more capable of consistently implementing its agenda than the MAGA movement ever was. Horrible as the consequences of far-right governance are likely to prove (and I, for one, remain convinced that they would prove significantly worse than those of continued centrist governance), I do unfortunately believe that such governance at this point has become nigh inevitable. If one accepts that the far right will certainly take power, one should seek to bring this about at the point in time when it has the least amount of leverage and institutional capacity. Evidence to me strongly suggests that this point in time is likely the earliest one possible, while a further deferral only makes the inevitable governance more severe and competent. This isn’t to say that such governance should actively be brought about, but rather that it shouldn’t be sought to be avoided through measures which could be seen as subverting the democratic will. Power to the people, as a guiding philosophy, should remain in place, even when the people demand something abhorrent to the inclinations of the contemporary left.