On: ‘Russian sleeper cell’: Can Germany’s far-right AfD be barred from sensitive...

Verfassungsschutz - the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Mark what the name accomplishes: it makes exclusion sound like guardianship. In Magdeburg they debate whether a party chosen by Saxony-Anhalt’s voters may be sealed away from the state’s papers, on suspicion that its heart answers to Moscow.

I do not rise to defend that party. I rise to name the mechanism, because I have stood inside it. First the charge of divided loyalty. Then the closed room where the dossier is weighed. Then the verdict: this faction may not know what the state knows. And mark the confession hidden in the sealing - a harmless party is merely watched; a dangerous one is walled off from the republic’s own memory. The wall itself is the admission that the party might actually govern.

Here is the bargain - there is always a bargain: the door reopens if the required words are spoken. Condemn the Kremlin, renounce the sympathies, perform the loyalty. Recantation in exchange for a key. Whether the words are believed is beside the point; the institution does not want belief, it wants the mouth to move correctly.

They tell me Germany abolished all this, that no idea burns there anymore. But a state that keeps a secret ledger of which parties may touch its documents has not dismantled the tribunal. It has given the tribunal a filing system. In that room there is not one legitimate Germany. There are many - and the insistence on a single certified, cleared, stamped one is the political act dressed as security procedure. The papers stay sealed. The voters do not. That gap between the sealed page and the open ballot is where the next century’s fires are being stacked, quietly, by men who call themselves protectors.