The situation of many German politicians is currently one of desperation: right-wing extremist parties are massively popular, especially in the east of the country. There, in the upcoming state elections in September, conditions that Germany has never experienced before threaten with a possible victory for the new German right. It is not surprising that the German government, which is not exactly showered with praise by its population, has made the fight “against the right” one of its main tasks. A new democracy promotion law is intended to finance initiatives that promote “diversity, tolerance and democracy” with around 200 million euros of tax money per year. Those who made democracy come alive need to be supported, says the responsible Interior Minister, a Social Democrat. In order to promote this “long-term and reliably”, Minister Faeser is calling for the Democracy Promotion Act to finally be passed. So far, the liberal coalition partner from the FDP has been blocking.
However, the lead for the draft law does not lie with Faeser, but with the Green Family Minister Lisa Paus. A first reading of the draft took place in Parliament in March 2023. Nevertheless, the „traffic light“ coalition partners continue to argue about what the final version of the law could look like. They are right to argue, because there are now serious doubts as to whether such a law would even be constitutional.
Since 2015, the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs has been bundling various projects to prevent extremism and to “strengthen civil society”, which were previously financed from different sources, in a program called “Living Democracy!”. The project list today includes around 600 providers; the number of measures organized by them was stated by the Ministry of Family Affairs as 5,000 in a press release four years ago; there may have been more by now. Over the years, federal funding for this has increased significantly: While “Live Democracy!” only received 40 million euros from the federal budget in 2015, by 2022 it had already risen to 165 million. 182 million are planned for 2024.
However, many partner organizations have evidence of a wide variety of activities – not all of them have to do with combating right-wing extremism. An event on “gender apartheid” in Afghanistan recently took place in the Schleswig-Holstein state capital of Kiel. In another city last summer there was a “queer spectacle” for children and young people, where participants were able to design fabric bags, buttons and stickers under the guidance of the city’s municipal department.
The German Court of Auditors is already taking a very harsh approach to the “Living Democracy!” program. Its two main objections are: First, the goals of the program are unclear. A “proper monitoring of target achievement” is not possible in this way. And secondly, the federal government lacks “promotional authority”. This would only be the case if all of the supported measures were of supra-regional importance. There is explosive power in this second point of criticism.
In a current report, the Bundestag’s Research Service also came to the conclusion that the federal legislature has no power to regulate legally if democracy promotion can also be carried out at the state level. The Ministry of Family Affairs tries very hard to emphasize “national responsibility” and the “supra-regional significance” of its support measures.
The liberal Linda Teuteberg sharply criticized the draft law from the outset: Among other things, she complained that the funded organizations were not required to make a clear commitment to the constitution. And she fears that parliamentarism will be undermined by an opaque network of activist groups that ultimately do lobbying work.
CDU members of the Bundestag formulated them in a letter to the Union parliamentary group. They complain that “financial resources are being cut to a considerable extent” from child and youth welfare organizations, welfare associations, voluntary services and the Federal Agency for Civic Education – “in other words, precisely from the programs that are already actively working on site for our democracy and ours to promote social cohesion.”
In addition, it must be ensured that all organizations supported by “Live Democracy!” actually accept the basic values of German democracy. “We are currently experiencing, for example, that clubs are being supported that are being monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution because of their proximity to radical Islam,” says a CDU parliamentarian. Not all enemies of right-wing extremism are automatically friends of democracy.
When asked whether and, if so, why only left-wing projects are apparently funded, political scientists like to answer that it is primarily the critical people who are involved in civil society. And the local democracy partnerships then lovingly explain to these critical people how they can get the tax money that pays for their commitment. Many homepages focus on instructions for funding applications.
According to a report by the Federal Audit Office from November 2022, a hundred employees at the Federal Office for Family and Civil Society Affairs alone, an authority subordinate to the Ministry of Family Affairs, are busy processing the grant notices. In many cases, the providers received excessive funding, it says. And in more than a third of cases, they provide proof of how the money was used too late, without this having any consequences for them.
The government coalition’s draft law in Berlin does not require a commitment to the Basic Law, nor does it require proven non-profit status. Thomas Krüger, the long-time social democratic director of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, prefers not to comment publicly on the competing program “Living Democracy!” He should be happy to have fended off the worst budget cuts planned for his agency.
There are certainly things that Krüger could say: for example, that political education is ideally based on scientific standards. That it makes controversies and conflicting interests visible – while the activism of “Living Democracy!” conjures up a comfortable consensus that can be summed up in the cheesy formula “Together Country”.
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