What happens when the right governs?

While a ‘people's chancellor’ wins the election in Austria, a ‘people's citizen’ enters Germany's media heartland in Berlin. The top candidate of the recently founded ‘Democratic Alliance’ (DA) party makes his first appearance at the Federal Press Conference Centre. He has just achieved an absolute majority in the ‘Free State’ and can therefore govern without coalition partners.

‘Arndt’ is written on the nameplate, which a member of staff conscientiously places where the new Prime Minister is about to take his seat. When he enters the room, however, his bodyguard is the first to replace it with: ‘Dominik Arndt’ - it is important to the new man that people know his first name. In general, he talks a lot about dialogue and eye level, about direct conversation and open interaction. His political programme starts where most people's everyday lives begin: with dead spots, education issues and rural exodus.

The language he speaks also sounds more tangible than that of the previous speakers in this room. He is imbued with ‘passion for our country’, says Arndt and places a bottle of mineral water from his ‘Free State’ on the table. His party is liberal, social, alternative and, yes, also national. But that doesn't mean much more than what most people in his country feel: Belonging.

Branded a stylistic sin

The way Fabian Hinrichs plays this beaming election winner, there is nothing unbelievable about him. The idea that a new party with a reasonably charismatic leader could make huge electoral gains in a German federal state in a very short space of time may no longer surprise anyone who has followed the BSW's recent electoral successes, for example. At first, it is only his shirt that reveals something about the specific type of politician that Hinrichs wants to present on this theatre evening. It is the white shirt with dark-coloured marker buttons that is often worn by AfD politicians and branded a ‘style sin’ by capital city fashion critics, ‘whose deeper meaning remains hidden’ (‘Berliner Zeitung’).

Yet at least one meaning would be quite obvious - namely the desire to flaunt the claimed non-conformism by breaking the conventional innocent white with a rebellious colour element. Is this the aesthetic of resistance today? In any case, Hinrichs, who is currently writing a book on aesthetics himself, plays this man of power more as an implicit usurper. There can be no talk of a ‘seizure of power’ - even the Federal Chancellor congratulates him and the government spokeswoman readily admits that Arndt is ‘democratically elected and therefore to be taken seriously’.

But it is precisely this adjective, the concrete liability of the trust category ‘democratic’, that is the subject of the rest of this play, written by the committed lawyer Maximilian Steinbeis, which initially comes across as a bit schirky, but then provides interesting answers for the layman in constitutional law to the question that is currently being debated everywhere: ‘What if the populists come to power?’

For as soon as Arndt takes office, there are increasing indications that a ‘change of course’ in asylum policy is emerging in his federal state and that the law is being broken in immigration authorities. Of course, it is a journalist - the former Handelsblatt editor Steinbeis still has that much faith in his own guild - who uncovers abuses that were initially dismissed as ‘regrettable individual cases’ and has her research confirmed by the representative of an NGO. It is telling how director Nicola Hümpel stages the closeness between the capital's journalists and moral confidants: Business cards are exchanged and bribes are exchanged. But when guests from outside the milieu enter the room, facial expressions quickly harden. For example, a district administrator who talks about ‘Ukrainians in SUVs’ or ‘multicultural cities’ is immediately met with angry shaking of heads - not only from the actors, but also from the audience in the capital.

Dissolve the people?

The fact that fanfare music is always played during the district administrator's appearances corresponds to the negligent willingness to disparage everything down-to-earth as morally backward, which has caused a lot of political damage. And yet the theatre evening not only presents its own prejudices, but also spells out the escalation that would be possible if a prime minister defied the applicable federal law: first the federal government tries crisis diplomacy, then a commissioner and finally a (successful) lawsuit in Karlsruhe. When Arndt also disregarded this supreme judgement, Berlin sent the federal police to the ‘Free State’ to confiscate files and arrest the Minister President. He flees abroad and quotes Brecht: ‘Wouldn't it be easier if the government dissolved the people and elected another one?’

The performance collective ‘Nico and the Navigators’ and Fabian Hinrichs present an evening of political tutoring on the dangers of democracy. In the end, it is an ominous distinction on which everything hinges - namely that between ‘political responsibility’, which Arndt claims for himself, and the ‘specialised legal problems’, which he considers to be of secondary importance. This corresponds almost literally to what the leader of the strongest political force in Austria since Sunday is promising: If he comes to power, says Herbert Kickl, he would no longer accept any asylum applications - no matter what the law says.