As Germany Votes, AfD Mulls 'DEXIT' Referendum

The EU is the real-world 'Hotel California' (sorry, Eagles), and while legacy media now discusses 'how to leave the EU' orderly, gaping holes in what is said (and what isn't) are visible

All of this begs the questions: do political journos actually know a thing or two about the EU?

For years, I’ve been contributing to my university’s ‘European Studies’ programme—I’ve been teaching in the ‘Intro to European Politics and History’ course at the Social Sciences faculty—and my experience of my colleagues is…underwhelming. They all hold rosy-eyed views of the EU (yes, they’re mostly Norwegians), consider the EU Parliament a true legislature (‘because the course literature [not mine] says so’), and calls for Norway to accede to the EU to deal with a whole host of issues unrelated to it (‘small country needs friends’, the euro is said to ‘help against inflation’) are on the rise, too.

It’s all the more absurd as Germany’s AfD has now begun floating the idea of holding a referendum, ‘Brexit’ Style, over Berlin’s continued membership in the EU. And to this issue we now turn before I’ll add some more about leaving the EU in the bottom lines. (Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.)

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How Germany Would Leave the EU

AfD chairwoman Alice Weidel has brought up the idea of a ‘Dexit’. How it would work—and what major hurdles Weidel is overlooking.

By Christian Kerl, Berliner Morgenpost, 25 Jan. 2025 [source]

AfD leader Alice Weidel’s game plan for Germany’s exit from the European Union has caused a stir not only in Germany—and raised many questions. Could an AfD in government really simply cancel Germany’s EU membership after 70 years? How would that work, what would the consequences be?

Weidel says only briefly that a government led by the AfD would try to reform the European Union and give the member states more sovereignty again [all is made well once Berlin begins to re-order European states’ sovereignty]. If this does not bring the desired result [by/for whom? will Europe’s teachers in Berlin have favourites and teachers’ pets? Would an AfD gov’t like, for instance, Ms. Meloni’s Italy more than they would Mr. Macron’s France?], ‘we should let the citizens decide, as in the UK’, the far-right leader told the British Financial Times [I can imagine the Babylon Bee’s headline: ‘Eurocrats Cancel DEXIT Vote to Save EU Democracy’; I wonder what Mr. Vance would say, though…]. Brexit should be followed by a ‘Dexit’: ‘We could hold a referendum—on Germany's exit from the EU’, said Weidel [I’m going out on a limb here for a moment by suggesting that doing so—having the citizens weigh in on such matters—is the final nail in the coffin for democracy in Europe /irony].

However, it sounds simple, but it’s not. Theoretically, Germany can also leave the EU (but cannot be excluded); the procedure has been regulated in the EU Treaty since 2009 [this is true, cue Art. 50 of the Treaty on European Union]. The Federal Government would submit a declaration of withdrawal to the EU Council of Member States [this is the co-tyrant of the EU institutions, which also doubles as ‘second chamber’ of the EU’s Parliament (in said Council, or Soviet, all heads of gov’ts of the bloc decide on policy], which must comply with constitutional requirements [that’s Art. 50 lingo]; no justification is required. There would then be a standard two-year period for negotiations on an agreement on future relations before the separation would be finalised [cf. ‘Brexit’]. The British led the way with the Brexit referendum in 2016. However, the hurdles in Germany are higher than in the UK [why, one is tempted to ask, but before that thought enters the journo™’s mind…] and so high that the AfD could hardly end its EU membership even in the unforeseeable event of government participation [it’s double hypothetical]. This is because a Dexit would not only require a law, but the Basic Law would first have to be amended with a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag and Bundesrat [given German parliamentary procedure, the journo™ is telling you that politicos™ opposed to leaving the EU might use every dirty parliamentary and/or procedural trick to pervert such a course of action, which is, notably, also possible in the absence of popular support; and let’s set aside the un-constitutionality of the entire Covid Mania where such legal niceties didn’t carry that much water].

Exiting the EU is only possible with an amendment to the Basic Law

Its supporters and opponents may have a lot of faith in the AfD, but it is practically impossible for the far right to ever achieve such a majority. No party has ever managed this at federal level. Why change the constitution? For one thing, it would be necessary if the citizens were to vote on Dexit in a referendum, which is what Weidel is proposing. So far, referendums like the one that led to the narrow Brexit decision in the UK are not even possible at federal level [what cannot be, cannot be legal in the first place]; they would first have to be enshrined in the Basic Law. Had Weidel overlooked this? Of course it would be possible without a referendum [ah, a brief glimmer of hope here: o.k., no vote—where’s the problem?] But if a federal government wanted to use its own authority to initiate the withdrawal from the EU instead—there was no way around another constitutional amendment [ah, bummer, so, to sum up: Germans may not hold a vote about continued EU membership because the constitution says so; the Berlin gov’t cannot initiate (declare) to leave either because…the constitution says so: do you see the ‘Hotel California’ allusion now?].

European law expert Thomas Groß from the University of Osnabrück makes it clear that a withdrawal from the EU using the procedure provided for in the EU treaty ‘is not covered by the applicable provisions of the Basic Law’. In other words: ‘A declaration of withdrawal would be unconstitutional.’ This is also ‘the prevailing view among German constitutional lawyers’, says the law professor to our editorial team [well, I suppose any such declaration will quickly end in the Karlsruhe Constitutional Court, which may or may not agree with ‘the prevailing view among German constitutional lawyers’]. The hurdle: the Basic Law contains provisions for the realisation of a united Europe. According to the preamble, the Federal Republic should serve the peace of the world ‘as an equal member in a united Europe’ [no mention of the EU]. And: ‘In order to realise a united Europe, the Federal Republic shall participate in the development of the European Union’, Article 23 states [this art. was originally introduced/amended in the late 1980s and in force 1990-92, i.e., prior to the creation of the EU (via the Maastricht Treaty, 1993); it’s been amended since].

The Federal Constitutional Court calls this a ‘constitutional mandate for the realisation of a united Europe’. For the German constitutional bodies, this means ‘that it is not at their political discretion to participate in European integration or not.’ [huhum, what happens if the constitution is rewritten?] European law expert Groß emphasises that if there is a political will to leave, both the preamble and Article 23 of the Basic Law would first have to be amended or repealed. The constitutional and European law expert Mike Wienbracke from the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences made a similarly clear statement during Brexit:

The current German constitution does not allow the Federal Republic to leave the EU, nor does it allow the secession of an individual federal state.

[Huhum, I’ve read and re-read these parts of the Grundgesetz several times now and the way to do a ‘Dexit’ seems to be an amendment of the various articles referring to the EU (although I acknowledge that this might be do-able at a later point in time as it’s unclear how a referendum would end…]

AfD Plan for Dexit: Large Majority Against

Apart from the high hurdle that the constitutional judges in Karlsruhe are watching over—there is absolutely no political majority in Germany in favour of leaving the EU—probably not even within the AfD. According to its election manifesto for the European elections, the far-right party sees the EU as a failed project and is calling for it to be re-founded as a ‘confederation of European nations’ [hi, Charles De Gaulle], but after a lengthy debate, the party has decided not to include Dexit in its programme. The AfD’s lead candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah, made it clear:

If Dexit means that Germany leaves and everyone else stays in, then we don’t want that [talk about German leadership].

The vast majority of German citizens are against leaving the EU anyway. In a survey conducted for the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 87% of respondents were in favour of Germany remaining in the EU; among AfD voters, the figure was one in two. 10% of citizens are explicitly against EU membership. However, in a survey commissioned by the EU Commission, 21% of respondents said that Germany would be better equipped for the future without EU membership, either in full or in part. Leading German economists consider this expectation to be dangerously wrong. The President of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW [a business lobby]), Marcel Fratzscher, sees a Dexit as the end of the German economic model and fears for millions of good jobs [the former was compromised by ‘reunification’ and the latter were destroyed by the SPD-leg Schröder gov’t]:

Brexit was a catastrophic decision for the UK, which has caused great economic and social damage and significantly reduced autonomy, freedom, and independence.

A Dexit would be ‘even more damaging’ for Germany due to its high dependence on exports, warns Fratzscher. The head of the German Economic Institute, Michael Hüther, believes: ‘Without the EU, the German export model is on the verge of collapse.’

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Bottom Lines

What a curious piece, eh? Says some things, omits the most relevant ones—the actual EU Treaty clauses governing these procedures.

None of these Treaties contain any provisions for the EU to self-dissolve (hence ‘Hotel California’).

Art. 50 (1) TEU is clear: ‘Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.’

This means, in effect, a replay of the arduous tit-for-tat we know from Brexit as per (2)—but there’s also (3), which reads:

The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.

So, here’s a trick question: what happens if Art. 50 (1) is invoked, nothing is done to negotiate™ with Brussels (‘Hard Brexit’), and, as per (3) if the member-state in question refuses to do anything? (My first reaction would be: that’s a way to create domestic unrest.)

Technically, I suppose if all member-states filed Art. 50 (1) declarations of their intent to withdraw, the EU bureaucracy would have a hard time finding anyone to negotiate their future salaries.

Moreover, EU Treaties (‘primary law’) may be amended, which is outlined in Art. 48 TEU.

And then there’s the ‘backdoor’ option via the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, specifically its Art. 54 that provides that any int’l treaty (which the EU Treaties are, i.e., they’re not ‘special’ as claimed by Eurocrats), any such treaty can be abrogated, or terminated, provided all parties agree.

So, if all EU member-states agreed to dissolve the EU, they could, by a joint declaration, end all EU treaties through mutual consent. This would likely involve a set of subsidiary arrangements beyond or outside the existing EU framework to wind down operations, distribute assets (e.g., the EU budget, real estate in Strasbourg, Brussels, and elsewhere), and address liabilities (e.g., salaries, pensions, etc. for soon-unemployed Eurocrats, etc.).

Whatever the outcome of the German elections, then, nothing will fundamentally change in the near future.

More and more authority will be devolved onto Brussels, and I doubt it that ‘far right™’ parties, even if they accede to political power here and there, are fundamentally changing anything about that.

‘Hotel California’ it is, then, where one may ‘check out any time, but you can never leave’.