Primary Election Experiences

* Cologne, 26 January. With a heavy heart, yet always ready to open the little treasure chest of his mind to his fellow citizens, Ehren-Brüggemann answers our article of the day before yesterday with “Primary Election Experiences”.

Herr Brüggemann insists: the present electoral law makes reasonable and binding elections impossible, as long as not, etc., etc. ... A fine compliment for the octroyed electoral law! All the finer since its author is none other than the most grateful worshipper of the “saving deed of the Crown” which has been consummated in the new electoral law!

So the “saving deed of the Crown” amounts to having made “reasonable and binding elections impossible”, and has convinced Ehren-Brüggemann that we cannot yet “flatter ourselves that we have definitively concluded the revolution”!

Poor Brüggemann! Unfortunate Crown!

Herr Brüggemann now endeavours to find means which, in combination with the present electoral law, will make possible “reasonable and binding”, i.e., non-democratic, non-oppositional elections, elections in the spirit of the saving deed of 5 December.

Very simple! A high property qualification together with special representation of the great landed property would certainly satisfy all the demands of the profound thinker Brüggemann.

But no! The Crown has retained a semblance of universal suffrage, and Brüggemann has orders never to be more reactionary than the Crown. Such odd fellows are necessary too, says Manteuffel, when Brüggemann is mentioned to him.

That is why “We consider the achievement of universal suffrage very valuable”, for “We are in earnest about true democracy” – as long indeed as “new octroyings do not become necessary”!!

But what is the reason that the “achievement of universal suffrage” has led to democratic elections and has so deeply offended its admirer Brüggemann?

This time the elections were decidedly party elections. This is proved by the fact that almost everywhere the first election was also the narrow, decisive election. The primary voters voted with full knowledge of the issue; for them it was a question of overthrowing or maintaining the ministry and its counter-revolutionary acts. The enormous majority of the country – this is now already certain – declares for the overthrow of the ministry, for the annulment of its acts. Herr Brüggemann wants the opposite, and yet he claims to represent “true democracy”, the “true” majority. How does that hang together?

The matter, according to Ehren-Brüggemann, has two snags. Firstly:

“There was everywhere a lack of sufficiently general participation.”

The “frightening lack of participation on the part of the middle class” has already shrivelled up into a mere lack “of a sufficiently general participation”. First “primary election experience” and, to speak with Herr Brüggemann: “we shall at once take note of this experience”.

We have already answered this point. We maintain that this lack of participation, where it existed, arose from the certainty of the result, and had no influence on the result itself. We further maintain that in many places it arose from the feeling of shame on the part of many conservatives, who in November, whether from honesty or from fear of a new revolution, sent addresses of thanks to the National Assembly and now did not want to vote for the opposite policy. Not every howler is a lazzarone who today cries: eviva la constituzione, and tomorrow for a plate of macaroni bellows out into the world: eviva il Re e la santa fede. Not every bourgeois understands how to trim his sails to the wind as promptly as certain unshakeable Catos of the legal ground.

Or just tell us, Herr Brüggemann, why the democrats were sometimes able “to fetch succour over lunch”, while you confess with a sigh: “In the last few weeks we have repeatedly called for general participation, and have repeatedly begged every reader to work for the widest possible participation… in his circle… These admonitions have… for the most part been in vain!”

Now the second snag: “The mutual unfamiliarity of the election comrades.”

To be sure, if all the “election comrades” of the holy city of Cologne had known the sublime qualities of Ehren-Brüggemann, he would have been elected elector in all 64 districts, whereas the “mutual unfamiliarity of the election comrades” has now let him fall through in his own district!

If our present elections have turned out fairly decisively, this is precisely because this unfamiliarity existed, or because, where it did not exist, people acted as if they were unfamiliar with one another. People did not elect the “honourable character”, the “respectable man”, the “influential capitalist”; they elected the democrat or the counter-revolutionary, the opposition man or the conservative. People kept the main thing in view and did not let themselves be determined by personal considerations. And therefore our elections will bring us – one way or the other – a decision.

But this is precisely what so deeply offends our Brüggemann. And for that reason he makes projects on how to remedy this unfamiliarity, how to make the primary voters of the district personally acquainted with one another, how to bring personal, patriarchal relations into the election; for that reason he proposes to turn the electors into permanent district representatives, so that in their election the simple consideration should not apply: whether they are good enough to appoint a deputy in the spirit of the district, but so that hundreds of other considerations come into play which have nothing at all to do with the election, e.g., whether they are good businessmen and suitable for municipal councillors, etc., whether they possess all kinds of capacities and knowledge irrelevant to the election, etc.

Indirect election is already a most confused and useless operation. But for Ehren-Brüggemann, the knight of true, octroyed democracy, it is still far too simple. He would like to make it so unclear that no human being could make head or tail of it any more. Only then, when the entanglement, the tohuwabohu, has reached the highest degree, only then does our octroyed slyboots hope for “reasonable and binding elections”!

But all that is still not enough. All this is supposed to be valid only “for the transition and for the interim period”. The goal of all this lies elsewhere. Listen:

“A gulf lies between the different professional and life spheres of our present-day civil society, which is truly not yet filled up by the fact that the electoral law ignores them! If for the time being we could not yet overcome the – in our opinion very false and superstitious – political shyness of legally recognising and taking into account these differences, we should at least – adopt the above transitional measures.”

Herr Brüggemann declares in addition: “One should not seek the saving way out in the old, worn-out rut of the naked property qualification.”

That means, put bluntly, the same thing that the gallows newspaper preaches every day: It is impossible to govern with a modern popular representation. Do away with universal suffrage and vote by estates, send the constitutional chambers to the devil and summon the old estate-based United Diet, which alone is still capable of marching with God for King and Fatherland!

Herr Brüggemann preaches these things in the Kölnische Zeitung eleven months after the February revolution, ten months after the March “events”; and this unveiled feudal muck he calls “true democracy” and “consolidation of the democratic principle” by “further complementary democratic organisations in the industrial and social sphere”!!!

In truth, we are making progress!