How does democracy work?

In recent decades, Germany - like many modern democracies and also the EU - has developed a paradoxical condition: the state is strong, yet no longer comprehensible. Its powers are extensive, but its structure has become opaque. Citizens face an environment that is formally rational but substantively impenetrable. The problem is not weakness - it is overcomplexity.

This excess of complexity is not accidental. It is the unintended consequence of a moral virtue: the pursuit of ever-greater justice in detail. Every problem demands precision, every rule yields an exception, every exception invites a new procedure. The result is what the sociologist Niklas Luhmann would have called a “hypertrophy of rationality” - a system that becomes unreasonable precisely through its own reasonableness.

Yet in a democracy, comprehensibility itself is a constitutional value. Article 20 of Germany’s Constitution binds all state authority to the people - not just as a formal source of legitimacy, but as an audience that must be able to follow, question, and judge public action. When normative complexity effectively excludes participation, democracy slides toward a form of expertocracy - a rule by those who understand, rather than by those who consent.

Thus, not every new rule is an advance. A constitutionally uncomfortable truth may be this: more regulation does not mean more legitimacy. A dense web of rules does not prevent distrust; it can in fact deepen it by making citizens feel like objects of administrative rationality rather than subjects of democratic self-determination.

Banning extremist parties may sometimes be constitutionally justified - but it targets symptoms, not causes. To strengthen faith in democracy, we must cut through the barrier of complexity. Clarity is not an aesthetic bonus; it is a condition of democratic legitimacy.

Hence, the state must regain the courage to simplify: in law, in administration, in communication. Not to sacrifice precision, but to make authority once again intelligible. Where law is clear, commitment grows. Where governance is transparent, trust follows.

The path to a “defensive democracy” does not lie only in banning its enemies. It lies above all in restoring comprehensibility for its friends.

Encouragingly, this awareness is beginning to return. Both at national and European level, one senses a shift - the recognition that a democracy drowning in its own rules risks losing the trust on which it stands. The European Commission’s current initiative to “simplify and streamline” EU regulation - by reducing administrative burdens, cutting duplications, and reviewing outdated directives - is more than bureaucratic housekeeping. It is an effort, however modest, to restore the legibility of governance.

If pursued seriously, such reforms could mark the beginning of a broader renewal: a move toward a democracy that protects not only through law, but through understandable law; that governs not by density, but by clarity. For persuasion - and democracy itself - begins where citizens once again understand the system acting in their name.