The Unequal Democracy of Germany

Americans often imagine Germany as the model liberal democracy: institutional, consensus-oriented, post-national, and morally disciplined by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Yet Germany also offers a warning—and perhaps a fruitful lesson—for the United States. Modern democracies increasingly preserve the appearance of electoral competition while building vast state-supported ideological infrastructures that quietly entrench the political establishment and marginalize populist opposition.

Read more Trump, China, and the Third World

In Germany, this process is simply more visible than it is in America.

The country operates one of the largest systems of taxpayer-funded ideological patronage in the Western world. Its major political parties are surrounded by sprawling state-funded foundations—officially independent, but in practice deeply intertwined with the parties themselves. These organizations finance political education, scholarships, conferences, publications, international offices, academic networks, activist ecosystems, and elite formation. They shape discourse, cultivate future ruling classes, influence universities, support NGOs, and project German political influence abroad.

And almost all of it is financed by taxpayers.

Over the last decade, these party-affiliated foundations have collectively received several billion euros in public money. Annual funding levels have steadily expanded. By 2023, public funding for political foundations had reached roughly €660 million annually when all institutional and ministerial funding streams were combined. Even the narrower category of direct institutional funding alone now approaches €200 million per year.

The foundations connected to Germany’s establishment parties—the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (CDU), Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (SPD), Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Greens), Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung (FDP), and Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (Left Party)—have become quasi-permanent institutions of political and cultural power. Germany’s Unequal Democracy in Numbers:

Three and a half billion euros from the German government for the political foundations of establishment parties within just three and a half years—including massive taxpayer support for socialist (SPD) and even post-communist (Left Party) political infrastructure—while the foundation affiliated with the conservative opposition party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), representing more than one fifth of German voters, received not a single cent.

This is the central contradiction of contemporary Germany’s “liberal democracy”:
the state massively finances the ideological ecosystem of the established political order while systematically excluding the largest right-wing opposition force from the same institutional infrastructure.

The issue is therefore no longer merely one of budgeting. It is a question of democratic equality itself.

Although the AfD has been represented in the Bundestag since 2017 and is now one of the strongest political parties in the country—currently even leading in some national polls—its affiliated foundation, the Desiderius-Erasmus-Stiftung (DES), has received essentially nothing. Not reduced funding. Not limited access. Nothing.

The asymmetry is staggering.

While establishment foundations operate with annual budgets in the tens or even hundreds of millions, the DES has reportedly functioned largely on private donations amounting to only around €200,000. Yet under the same allocation formulas applied to the other foundations, the DES would likely qualify for more than €25 million annually in institutional funding.

This is not merely a bureaucratic dispute. It is a structural mechanism of political inequality.

The German political class often describes these foundations as neutral instruments of “civic education.” In reality, they function as state-funded ideological ecosystems. They cultivate journalists, academics, policy experts, scholarship recipients, cultural actors, international partners, and activist networks aligned with the worldview of the parties that created them.

In effect, German taxpayers finance the long-term reproduction of the ideological establishment.

The right-wing opposition, however, is expected to compete without access to this infrastructure.

Imagine a system in which major establishment parties and their aligned networks receive hundreds of millions of dollars annually in direct or indirect taxpayer support—through public grants, tax-exempt status, university funding, and institutional patronage—for political education, academic influence, international advocacy, and elite networking. Now imagine a major populist opposition movement, representing tens of millions of voters and the interests of legacy Americans, largely locked out of equivalent public infrastructure and forced to rely almost entirely on private donations while its supporters’ taxes subsidize the opposing side. In important respects, this is already a feature of the American landscape. Germany simply makes the mechanism more explicit, obvious, and constitutionally entrenched.

Read more Out on a Limb, but Unmoved: Trump Will Finish the Job in Iran

This is precisely why the constitutional contradiction in Germany has become increasingly difficult to conceal. In 2023, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the existing funding system lacked an adequate legal basis and violated principles of equal political opportunity. The court forced parliament to pass a dedicated foundation financing law.

But even after the ruling, the practical exclusion of the DES largely continued.

The German legal scholar and constitutional lawyer Ulrich Vosgerau, who has represented the foundation in court, has repeatedly argued that the issue is fundamentally about political equality. His core point is devastatingly simple: if political foundations are financed because they represent enduring political currents within German society, then the AfD—now supported by millions of voters over multiple election cycles—clearly qualifies under the same criteria historically applied to every other party foundation.

And this is precisely where the democratic façade begins to crack.

Because the exclusion increasingly appears not legal, but political.

Germany’s establishment parties and their surrounding NGO ecosystem openly campaign against any funding of the DES. Activist organizations warn that public money must never flow to a right-wing foundation. The argument is no longer about neutral procedural standards. It is about preventing an opposition movement from gaining access to the same instruments of long-term cultural influence that establishment parties themselves have enjoyed for decades.

This reveals the deeper truth about the modern German political system: power is no longer exercised only through elections, parliamentary majorities, or government ministries. It is exercised through publicly financed pre-political infrastructure—through foundations, educational institutions, NGO networks, media ecosystems, and academic patronage.

The foundations are not peripheral to German democracy. They are part of its operating system.

And in this operating system, not all political actors are treated equally.

The consequences are profound. The establishment parties possess taxpayer-funded mechanisms for elite reproduction extending far beyond electoral cycles. They can finance conferences, sponsor intellectuals, shape educational narratives, support international networks, and maintain permanent ideological infrastructures regardless of temporary electoral setbacks.

The opposition must build everything from scratch while simultaneously competing against institutions financed by its own voters’ taxes.

That is why the dispute surrounding the Desiderius-Erasmus-Stiftung matters far beyond Germany itself. It exposes a central contradiction increasingly visible across Western democracies: systems that formally preserve electoral competition while informally insulating established ideological structures from genuine opposition.

Germany still holds elections. Opposition parties can still win millions of votes. But the broader machinery of institutional legitimacy, cultural influence, and publicly financed ideological production remains overwhelmingly monopolized by the established political order.

The issue, therefore, is no longer simply whether one particular foundation should receive state funding.

The real question is whether a democracy can still call itself fully democratic when the state itself finances one side of the ideological battlefield while systematically denying equal institutional access to the other.

* * *

Frank-Christian Hansel is a member of the Berlin state parliament (Abgeordnetenhaus) for the Alternative for Germany (AfD). He writes on German political theory, European order, and the property-economic tradition of Gunnar Heinsohn and is completing a book-length essay on the post-liberal interregnum.

Read more Trump, China, and the Third World