Germany has an undeserved reputation for dour rationality and lacking an appreciation of the absurd. In reality, however, Germany is a – for want of nicer terms – very counterintuitive country.

If you are running a regime in Kiev (at least according to the official story) and blow up Germany’s vital energy infrastructure, Germans will say thank you and throw money and arms at you, while also helping you blame someone else (the Russians, of course: Germany has never been an imaginative country).

If you are in Washington and certainly had a hand in blowing up that infrastructure, and then go on to fleece the Germans by selling LNG at a high cost and promoting their deindustrialization by filching their companies, good Germans get very, very angry – at China.

If you happen to be the single most popular and perfectly legal political party in Germany, get ready to never be allowed to actually participate in governing. Because Germany is also a country in which that single most popular party – the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, commonly known simply as AfD) – is locked out of building governing coalitions. By definition.

That system is called a “firewall” – against that nasty most popular party that makes life so difficult for all those other, no longer popular parties. It has absolutely no basis in the constitution or in law.

Come to think of it, as the “firewall” systematically and deliberately treats the votes of AfD voters as somehow less effective than those of others, it may well be the “firewall” itself that is unconstitutional, at least in spirit if not even by the letter of the law. So much for Germany, the country that allegedly loves order and rules.

In reality, the “firewall” amounts to a dirty political cartel and a form of disenfranchisement: The traditional parties, feeling threatened by the insurgent AfD have simply decided that they do not care what the voters say and won’t have anything to do with it. Since German governments are virtually always based on........

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