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21 Trinity C.L. Rev. 136 (2018)
The Centre Cannot Hold: Reflections on Militant Democracy in Germany

handle is hein.journals/trinclr21 and id is 146 raw text is: THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD: REFLECTIONS ON MILITANT DEMOCRACY IN GERMANY BENJAMIN Low* Introduction On 24 September 2017, Germany went to the polls to elect the 19th Bundestag and, by extension, the next government of the Federal Republic. At the time of the election, most analysts and opinion polls were predicting a sizeable, albeit reduced, victory for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU/CSU) and more disconcertingly, electoral gains for the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD).1 The opinion polls were prescient: the CDU/CSU took 26.8% of the vote, its lowest share since 1949, while the AfD took 12.6% of the vote,2 easily surpassing the 5% electoral threshold needed to attain representation in the Bundestag and leapfrogged to become the third-largest party in the Bundestag after the CDU/CSU and the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). The results of the 2017 Federal Election are significant in that the present composition of the German parliament remains even more fragmented than ever, thereby making the task of forming a governing coalition extremely difficult.4 More importantly however, a far-right political party in Germany has managed to achieve parliamentary representation for the first time since the inception of the Federal Republic. While it remains to be seen whether the AfD can continue its present string of electoral successes, the 2017 election result raises questions as to the viability of Germany's constitutional-legal model of 'militant * Senior Freshman LLB Candidate, National University of Singapore. I am grateful to Agnes Lo for her unstinting support in this endeavour. All errors remain my own. 1 'Sonntagsfrage Bundestagswahl' (Wahlen, Wahlrecht und Wahlisysteme) <http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/index.htm> accessed 15 December 2017. 2 '2017 Bundestag Election: final result' (Federal Returning Officer, 12 October 2017) <https://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/en/info/presse/mitteilungen/bundestagswahl- 2017/34_17_endgueltiges-ergebnis.html> accessed 16 December 2017. 3 § 6, Federal Electoral Law (Bundeswahlgesetz, BWG) (FRG). 4 At the time this article was written, coalition talks between the CDU/CSU, the Free Democratic Party and the Green Party had collapsed, prompting the CDU/CSU to seek the possibility of another 'grand coalition' with the SPD. @ 2018 Benjamin Low and Dublin University Law Society

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