Baal’s Chair: AfD Hands BSW the Education Seat

Berlin’s Rat Pack Finds the Cheapest Chair in Politics

AfR (Alternativ für Ratten) members in Berlin spent Friday morning selling “principled restraint” with the same sincerity a nightclub promoter sells a velvet rope, after the party signaled it would let BSW take a prized committee chair that the usual allocation rules did not give it. In Magdeburg, that meant the education portfolio. In Berlin, it meant a public handoff dressed up as procedure: one side loosens its grip, the other slides in, and everyone pretends the chair chose itself.

Alice Rattenweidel’s people called the move fair procedure. That phrase has become the far right’s favorite cologne: a thick spritz over something that still smells like a favor done with both hands under the table. The AfR’s local operatives, who normally perform outrage as if they were auditioning for a graveyard shift on cable television, suddenly discovered the spiritual value of compromise the second there was a chair to be won and a room to dominate. Their moral code, it turns out, is very selective about what qualifies as principle once someone starts offering the seat instead of the sermon.

A BSW organizer in Berlin-Mitte, who requested anonymity because she did not want her own members texting her a lecture about democratic virtue while they reached for the upholstery, said the deal was “not romantic, just parliamentary.” That is the kind of sentence politicians use when they have already leaned all the way in and are still insisting the posture is innocent. In practice, the message was simple enough for the committee corridor: the far right opens the door, the left-populist crew walks through it, and the chair gets claimed in public as if nobody had been auditioning for the role all week.

The arrangement matters because the education committee is not some decorative side table. It is one of the rooms where schools, staffing, standards, and the whole dreary machinery of civic future get sorted by people who spend half their time pretending they are above games and the other half trying to win them with cleaner shoes. So when the AfR in Berlin starts talking about “fair procedure,” what it is really doing is leaning over the room, smiling for the cameras, and offering the chair to whichever partner makes the whole setup look least like a confession.

That is the part Berlin knows by heart. AfR spends half its life shrieking about elite stitch-ups, migrant chaos, and Brussels ruining civilization with paperwork, then behaves like a discount maître d’ for any outfit willing to flatter its importance and maybe let it hold the coat while the real negotiation happens. BSW, for its part, keeps posing as the tender voice of the forgotten while happily moving closer to the seat that was supposed to stay out of reach. In their shared performance, no one wants to admit they are being positioned; they prefer to call it balance, because balance sounds cleaner than being handled.

A district official said the usual committee logic was still supposed to govern appointments, but admitted the public would likely see only “horse-trading.” That is far too polite. Horse-trading at least suggests animals with momentum. Here the animals are mostly office rats in expensive shoes, circling the same polished chair, sniffing it, claiming they never wanted it, then settling into it with the relieved expression of people who have just found the one object in politics that can be sat on without having to tell the truth.

The next step is a formal confirmation from the relevant body, with opponents already preparing to complain that the rules were bent in daylight and then buffed until they reflected everyone’s face. By the time that meeting happens, the question will not be whether anyone kept their principles. It will be which party gets to sit first, who gets made to stand outside the frame, and how many people will call that decency while they adjust the chair for the next handoff.