A smile so sweet it will melt your heart, a handshake so earnest it will make you want to buy him a beer, and a stare from deep-set eyes so intense you will tremble for your children’s future: Dominik Arndt has the suave moves and terrifying looks typical of the rightwing politicians that are knocking on the gates of power all over Europe. Specifically, the lanky and youthful actor who plays Arndt, Fabian Hinrichs, looks a lot like Björn Höcke, the Thuringian politician many see as the boss in all but title behind Germany’s ascendant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.
But what makes Arndt so unsettling – and the play A Citizen of the People one of the more interesting theatrical contributions to the current political moment – is that he doesn’t speak like a rightwinger at all.
On the eve of his landslide victory in an unnamed German federal state, the political leader does not taunt his opponents, but vows to focus “on what we share, rather than what divides us”. The three pillars of his movement are not wedge issues like immigration, LGBT+ issues or anti-wokeness but “education, infrastructure, digitisation”. His party is not the AfD but the fictional Democratic Alliance, which has pegged back the far right to 10% of the vote: if it wasn’t for him, he reminds the audience at one point, “you know who would be sitting up here instead”.
The threat that Arndt poses to liberal democracy is nonetheless real, and even more dangerous because it is so insidious. By the end of A Citizen of the People, the Democratic Alliance has staged a coup without firing a shot.
“Of course someone like Björn Höcke is a rightwing extremist and extremely dangerous,” says Maximilian Steinbeis, a legal journalist who wrote the play. “But I don’t think the radical rhetoric is the key ingredient to what makes an authoritarian populist. A constitution can not only be upended from the political fringes, but also through the centre.”
Under the direction of Nicola Hümpel, A Citizen of the People tells the story of Arndt’s rise through a series of press conferences – staged at the end of September at the Berlin media centre where the real German government faces the media three times a week. It is now streaming for free with English and French subtitles on Franco-German culture channel Arte.
The play’s strength lies precisely in not falling back on familiar tropes about the rise of fascism, but looking closely at what populists in power actually do. Since 2009, Steinbeis has edited verfassungsblog.de (“constitution blog”), a forum for debates around democratic states’ legal frameworks, which is mostly written in English.
“From the beginning, our focus was on authoritarian populism, especially of the type that we saw developing in Hungary,” he recalls. “Leaders like Viktor Orbán claim that there is such a thing as a true and authentic people, who are distinct from the political elite and their ‘system’. And they successfully pursue a strategy whereby every major political decision shores up that claim and makes it seem more real.”
In Hungary’s case, he says, Orbán was able to bend to his will a constitution that was particularly weak, amendable with a two-third majority in parliament. “But we were interested in whether the same political strategy could also work in countries with a supposedly stronger constitution, such as Germany.”
In 2019, Steinbeis published an essay in Süddeutsche Zeitung called The People’s Chancellor, which played through a scenario whereby a populist German leader bloats the constitutional court with a third senate made up of eight additional, politically loyal judges, and then limits its power to restrain the executive branch of government.
“Until then, the view in Germany was that we have had this great democracy for 75 years because of our Basic Law, and the constitutional court will protect it,” Steinbeis says. “But we said: look, the constitutional court is actually quite easy to crack.”
The essay, and a play by the same name, caused a stir, and kickstarted a political motion to close the loopholes it identified. A new law aimed to prevent “court packing” scenarios is expected to pass the German parliament before the end of the year, in spite of the recent collapse of chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government.
A Citizen of the People is an update on the same thought experiment, based on what currently looks a more likely scenario. In September, Höcke’s AfD gained a historic 32% of the vote at state elections in Thuringia. When the new state parliament convened three weeks later, it used its new strength to systematically block parliamentary procedures. “The AfD created its own kind of theatrical spectacle, all aimed at furthering the impression of a ‘people’s will’ frustrated by ‘the system’.”
In the play, the Democratic Alliance moves in a similarly sly manner. Arndt instructs his states’ immigration authorities to no longer process asylum applications, while shifting the blame to the central government: migrants no longer receive benefits and end up on the streets, homeless. When Berlin sends out a special commissioner to enforce compliance with federal rules, he is denied access to the rebelling state government’s offices. “The people elected me and not some kind of poodle,” Arndt bellows in a press conference.
A Citizen of the People is even more troubling than A People’s Chancellor, because unlike Steinbeis’s previous “what if?” scenario, it doesn’t suggest any easy fixes.
“I didn’t want to point out another loophole but demonstrate a dynamic process, and shake the audience out of their complacency,” Steinbeis says. “It’s an illusion to think that we can build a constitution that is so watertight that it can never be abused. Constitutions won’t protect societies; it’s society that has to protect the constitution.”
