Machttechnik Populismus

written on October 29, 2026, read 2025

I recently wrote in a text about a book on the Basic Law, Germany’s constitution , that I am a Basic Law ultra. Despite the weaknesses of our state, I allow myself to be very glad to live in Germany.¹ In some respects, the relationship status “It’s complicated” would admittedly be appropriate, but I like this country nonetheless. Proud of it? All I did for that was to be born here – and I really didn’t contribute anything to that. I don’t know whether you can be proud of having drawn a very good ticket in the great birth lottery.²

You can be proud of your own work, of what you have created yourself. But not of what you simply are.³ I have achieved things in my life that I am proud of. I have also done things I am not proud of at all.⁴ But that’s probably unavoidable after more than 50 years on this planet and in this country. There’s a reason why, in a glass house, the toilet is in the basement.

So I like this country. All the more it pains me that populism is catching on in Germany, too. Which inevitably raises the question: “Why, actually?” Basically, we should have learned our lesson. Very helpful in looking for an answer was a small book I bought some time ago: “Machttechnik Populismus” (“Populism as a Technique of Power”) by Robert Müller.

There are two things to understand, and Müller sets them out in his book: first, populism is not politics but a technique of power (hence the title). I can follow Müller’s argument very well here. Wanting to build an alternative to populism with arguments is roughly like trying to nail jelly to the wall – and jelly that can’t be put in the freezer first, at that. Drive a nail into populism, and it simply flows around it and looks for a new target.

And second, populism has no interest in solving problems (p. 31) – it is actually interested in their continued existence. If you follow this thesis, cooperation is even pointless, because the other side isn’t interested in a solution at all.

What I took away from the book for myself is that the only way to counter populism is not to play its game.

If you then hold Müller’s book in one hand and the news of the last few days in the other, you notice how much all of it follows a pattern that the author lays out very clearly. And this doesn’t only apply to the problem we have in Germany with a right-wing populist party. With autocratic regimes (or would-be ones), it becomes even clearer that populism is an instrument for gaining and keeping power and not a political project for the future – and certainly no alternative.

It wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t discover this pattern all around you and didn’t know how hard it is to recover from a populist success. I’m looking over at Hungary, for example – a country that is still very close to my heart because of friends there – where, after Orbán was voted out in April, people now face the task of undoing 16 years of restructuring of the state or replacing it with something better.

I consider Robert Müller’s book well worth reading because it shows that populism is a destructive force based on base instincts, and that the fight against populism is also a fight for the good in people. Müller himself admits that the latter sounds a little lofty, but I’m inclined to agree with him.

When I say that I am a Basic Law ultra, that for me also includes spirited political debate – with the aim of finding a compromise in the end that truly represents a solution. That is our democratic system. And for many years it basically worked quite well.

But politics can’t mean telling people what they want to hear and presenting plans that are as simplistic as they are unworkable – just because they are convenient. In the end, politics has to find a compromise and make the case for it. That the established parties nowadays revolve more around the former and are then surprised that people vote for the “original”, instead of tackling the latter, is in my view one of the big problems.

The attempt by one of the established parties to halve another party by taking positions in some respects that differed from that party’s positions only in wording and nuance unfortunately backfired.

Fighting the power technique of populism cannot mean using the same power technique. That goes wrong, because the party that ignores boundaries always wins. Fight fire with fire … and in the end you’re still left with plenty of scorched earth. And if you’re unlucky, you burn a lot more than just your eyebrows.

It can only mean taking seriously the problems that populism exploits, but above all solving those that really affect people: pensions, affordable housing, fears about the future in a world that is becoming ever harder to understand. And not with short-term pseudo-solutions that at best look good but change nothing, and at worst create even more problems. Once the real problems are solved, people will quickly stop caring about populist pseudo-problems. That this isn’t working at the moment is the tragedy of the situation.

My copy is a special edition for the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education. Unfortunately, it is no longer available there. Even so, the agency regularly offers very good books and texts for really little money, and I can only recommend dropping by bpb.de (in German) regularly to see whether there’s something interesting. Incidentally, I only became aware of the book through a post in the Fediverse that pointed me to the agency.