RevDem Podcast · Review of Democracy

An Authoritarian Turn in Contemporary Germany? – In Conversation with Robin Celikates

·39 min·2 clips

Germany has a long tradition of “anticipatory obedience,” Celikates says.

Konstantin Kipp begins by asking whether Germany is moving through an authoritarian turn. He sets that question against the country's postwar self-image and its claim to have learned the lessons of history. The rise of the AfD becomes the main pressure point in that story. He also points to the way centrist actors can invoke anti-fascist memory while bringing far-right policies into the mainstream and adopting habits that look a lot like an autocratic playbook. The conversation then turns to government actions. These include the decision to ignore the International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. They also include attacks on academic freedom through funding cuts aimed at critical scholars, crackdowns on NGOs and civil society, and restrictions on freedom of assembly and expression, especially around pro-Palestinian protests and voices. Selikates responds by focusing on how protest gets framed as a threat. He argues that police action can become the trigger for escalation. In that pattern, the state can help produce the violence it says it wants to prevent, which he describes as radicalization from above. That logic is reinforced, he says, by panic about protest and by anticipatory obedience inside German political culture. The interview keeps coming back to the need to separate legitimate protest and civil disobedience from terrorism. Selikates warns that the category of terrorism is often stretched in arbitrary ways to cover dissent. Climate activism and the Palestine solidarity movement appear as current test cases. The discussion broadens further to the role of political elites and the media in blurring those distinctions. Selikates closes by comparing the weakness of German academic solidarity with the costs borne by dissident scholars in Turkey, Hong Kong, and China, and suggests that this reluctance sits awkwardly with democratic commitments.

As heard by us

A sharp look at how democratic language can sit beside repressive practice.

This episode lays out Germany's split-screen politics with unusual clarity: a country that prides itself on learning from history, yet one where leaders have leaned harder on protest, civil liberties, academic freedom, NGOs, and pro-Palestinian speech and assembly.

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Why you'd press play

You want a clear, serious read on Germany's democratic self-image under pressure.

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