You know it now: If the Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier Bellevue to the Forum loads, as follows the word on Sunday for the democracy. In times like these, how so much is said, is not this series of talks but perhaps the worst impulse: The Corona-crisis calls for democracy in so far unknown dimensions, and not only in great political questions, such as through a burning glass, where the Strengths and weaknesses of existing structures.
Hannah Bethke
feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.
F. A. Z.
Germany performs well in international comparison: political scientist Daniel Ziblatt speaks of a “resilient democracy”, which I have mastered, in contrast to polarizing democracies such as the United States or Brazil, the crisis successfully. Steinmeier also attracts a predominantly positive balance. The trust of citizens in democratic institutions and politicians was grown by the majority; the policy was directly been experienced and been seriously understood; reason and science were particular sources of power of democracy. Just as significantly, anti-forth were but of democratic tendencies: hate on the state, conspiracy theories, growing inequality.
the discontent in Parts of the population, a policy, after all, a theoretical principle reading: Political decisions, the justification must be in writing. How, then, a Lockdown in a democratic society, legitimize that restricts the rights and freedoms of its citizens? The political scientist Rainer Forst detects to think in a “certain flirtation with the absolutist State”, the sideboard, but only harm, if it does not succeed, the democratic Interpretation of the measures to recapture. Because of the amazing process, the iron laws, to change the polarity on only one justification – the containment of the Virus, could not unfold its effect only when political rationality turns into a hostile mood in the System, in a Foreign and Different the culprit for the own losses.
On the way to the contactless democracy
The Nobel prize in literature winner Herta Müller sees this as yet no danger for the democracy. Political denunciation look different; we are not unfree in a political sense. And the majority knew that too: “We want to live. That’s what makes people so understanding.“
But it will remain? This is likely to also depend on not only the Lockdown, but also the progressive lifting of the measures are justified. For Steinmeier, it is clear that we could make after the crisis, where we had stopped: “We need the will to change course.” For the sociologist Heinz Bude, everything is important, to overcome our fear of the own courage, we have shown that by Acting in solidarity in the crisis already.
