How a Well-Thought-Out Platform Can Save Us Trouble, Confusion and Endless Repetition

In our previous contribution, “Why Do We Want All of Us to Be Part-Time Politicians — and No One a Career Politician?”, we argued that politics must become everyone’s business again.

That sounds good. - But it immediately raises a hard question.

If ordinary citizens are to share political responsibility, how are they supposed to judge the endless stream of political issues confronting them?

Every day brings new debates. Climate targets. Energy prices. Migration numbers. War and peace. Artificial intelligence. Agriculture. Housing. Education. Debt. Taxation. Infrastructure. Free speech. Security. Europe. Global power shifts. Local conflicts. Scientific warnings. Moral panics. Real emergencies. Manufactured outrage.

No citizen can start from zero every morning.

No party member can study every issue from first principles after work.

No democratic organisation can rely on the spontaneous wisdom of the loudest voice in the room.

So, if we do not want politics to be dominated by charismatic personalities, professional tacticians, media performers or permanent outrage, something else must take their place.

That something is the programme.

What: Programme must come before person

Our strategic statement is this:

Europeans for the Planet values programme over person because a serious political party must be guided by shared principles, not by the instincts, ambitions or moods of prominent individuals.

A person may inspire.
A person may explain.
A person may represent.
A person may even lead for a time.

But no person should become the compass of a party.

A party built around a personality remains fragile. If that person changes course, the party changes course. If that person falls, the party falls. If that person seeks applause, the party begins to perform. If that person becomes vain, the party becomes vain with them.

A programme does not remove human weakness.

But it reduces dependence on it.

A programme says: this is what we stand for.

This is how we reason.
This is what we prioritise.
This is what we reject.
This is how we judge new questions.
This is the common ground on which members, candidates, spokespersons and elected representatives must stand.

That is why programme must come before person.

How: A programme is not a campaign brochure

Here we must distinguish carefully.

A good party platform is not a collection of slogans.

✘It is not an election brochure.
✘It is not a list of promises designed to please every target group.
✘It is not a rhetorical warehouse from which convenient phrases can be taken as needed.

A real programme is a decision compass.

It contains values, principles, priorities, diagnoses and directions of action. It helps members understand not only what the party wants, but why it wants it and how it thinks.

This matters especially for a members’ party.

If members are expected to become politically responsible, the programme must help them form judgement. It must make the party’s worldview understandable. It must prevent every discussion from beginning with personal preference. It must make disagreement more productive by giving all participants a shared reference point.

✘A good programme does not abolish debate.
✔It disciplines debate.
✘It does not answer every question in advance.
✔But it prevents every question from being treated as if nothing had ever been decided, learned or understood before.

What makes a programme good?

We therefore need criteria.

A good party programme should meet at least ten tests.

First, it needs foundational clarity. It must say what the party believes about human beings, society, freedom, responsibility, nature, justice and power.
Second, it needs constitutional-democratic compatibility. It must respect human dignity, equal citizenship, pluralism, the rule of law and liberal democracy. A programme can be coherent and still be dangerous.
Third, it needs long-term orientation. A party that claims to care about the future must think beyond the next election.
Fourth, it needs internal coherence. Values, diagnosis and proposals must fit together. Contradictions may be unavoidable at the edges, but they should not define the centre.
Fifth, it needs policy breadth. A party that seeks public responsibility cannot speak only about its favourite topics.
Sixth, it needs prioritisation. Politics consists of trade-offs. A programme that never says what matters most avoids responsibility.
Seventh, it needs operational usefulness. Members must be able to use it when judging everyday political questions.
Eighth, it needs evidence orientation. It should distinguish facts, assumptions, values and desired outcomes.
Ninth, it needs participatory legitimacy. A programme gains authority when members have genuinely debated, shaped and adopted it.
Tenth, it needs learnability. A programme that ordinary members cannot understand, explain and apply may impress specialists, but it will not empower citizens.

These criteria also allow us to look at existing parties more soberly.

Some programmes are recent and carefully structured.
Some are value-rich but outdated.
Some are broad but evasive.
Some are clear but exclusionary.
Some are regionally coherent but not nationally complete.
Some give orientation but little operational method.

That matters.

Because a programme is not only a text. It is a political instrument.

A deliberate counterweight to the spirit of the age

Modern politics does not naturally move in this direction.

We know that.

If anything, the prevailing tendency points the other way. Politics is increasingly personalised. Media prefer faces, conflicts, heroes, villains, winners and losers. Social media intensifies this even further. A person can be photographed, attacked, quoted, praised, mocked and turned into a symbol far more easily than a careful programme can be understood.

Political science has described this development under terms such as personalisation, mediatisation and presidentialisation. Even parliamentary systems are not immune. Leaders become more visible, executives more prominent, campaigns more leader-centred, and parties more tempted to organise public attention around individual figures.

Germany is not the United States, and German democracy still contains important party-political and parliamentary counterweights. The evidence for a complete “chancellorisation” of voting behaviour is mixed. But the pressure is real: media logic pushes politics towards persons, not programmes.

We therefore do not advocate “programme over person” because we are blind to reality.

We advocate it because we see reality clearly enough.

A serious democratic party must not merely follow the attention economy. It must put a counterweight into the balance. The stronger the pull of personality politics becomes, the more important it is to bind political action to principles, procedures and a shared programme.

We will still need visible people.
We will still need spokespersons.
We will still need candidates.
We will still need members who can explain our position publicly.

But visible people must not become the compass of the party.

The programme must.

That is not a rejection of political communication. It is a democratic discipline imposed upon it.

Why this saves trouble

At first glance, programme discipline may sound restrictive.

It is the opposite.

A good programme gives freedom from arbitrary politics.

It frees members from having to guess what the party stands for.
It frees spokespersons from improvising every answer.
It frees candidates from building politics around personal biography.
It frees working groups from reinventing principles.
It frees the party from being captured by every passing outrage.
It frees supporters from personality worship.

A good programme does not prevent disagreement. But it changes the character of disagreement.

Instead of asking, “Whom do we like?” we ask, “What follows from our principles?”
Instead of asking, “What will play well today?” we ask, “What remains defensible tomorrow?”
Instead of asking, “What does the leader think?” we ask, “What does our programme require?”
Instead of asking, “How do we win attention?” we ask, “How do we remain responsible?””

This is less spectacular than personality politics.

But it is also more serious.

How a programme helps with everyday politics

Consider any issue that suddenly appears in public debate.

A proposed new climate measure.
A conflict over migration policy.
A European defence decision.
A digital surveillance proposal.
A new AI regulation.
A subsidy for industry.
A tax reform.
A farmers’ protest.
A court judgment.
A scientific warning.

Without a programme, the party reacts.

With a programme, the party reasons.

The members can ask:

What is the factual situation?
Which of our values are affected?
Who benefits, who bears costs, and who is ignored?
What are the effects on future generations?
Which principles conflict?
What does our programme prioritise?
What evidence would change our view?
What would be a proportionate response?

Can we explain our position honestly to those who disagree?

This is how a programme becomes useful.

✘Not as a dogma.
✘Not as a script.
✘Not as a substitute for judgement.
✔But as a disciplined way of forming judgement.

What follows: A party must first bind itself

There is a deep democratic reason for putting programme over person.

A party that wants influence should first bind itself.

It should bind itself to principles before asking citizens for trust.
It should bind its representatives before asking members for loyalty.
It should bind its rhetoric before entering public theatre.
It should bind its ambitions before seeking office.
This is not weakness.

It is seriousness.

The programme is the party’s promise that it will not become whatever its most visible personalities happen to want at a given moment.

That is why Europeans for the Planet must develop, maintain and continuously improve a substantive programme.

✘Not a decorative document.
✘Not a marketing text.
✘Not a symbolic manifesto left unread after adoption.

But a living compass: stable enough to guide, open enough to learn, clear enough to apply, and serious enough to hold people accountable.

✔Only then can a members’ party work.
✔Only then can part-time political adults judge everyday issues without becoming dependent on professional interpreters.
✔Only then can we reduce the burden of personality politics.

Less personality, more programme.

Not because persons do not matter.

They do.

But because the programme must matter more.

Next Friday, we will address the sixth question:

→ Why do we opt for a “boring” but consistent approach without all the usual fuss?

Appendix

How a good platform helps with everyday political issues

A good platform is not a catalogue of ready-made answers. It is a structured way of reasoning.

For any new political issue, members should be able to ask:

What is the factual situation?
Which programme values are affected?
Which groups or future generations are affected?
Which conflicts of values arise?
What does the programme prioritise when such conflicts occur?
What evidence would change our view?
What policy response follows from our principles?
What are the risks, costs and unintended consequences?
Does the proposal strengthen or weaken democratic responsibility?
Can we explain our position honestly to citizens who disagree?

This is the real function of “programme over person”: not mechanical obedience, but disciplined judgement.

Checklist: criteria for a good party platform

I suggest using ten criteria. They can also serve as the article’s intellectual backbone.

Criterion	Guiding question	Why it matters
Foundational clarity	Does the programme state the party’s basic values and worldview clearly?	Without this, policy positions become arbitrary.
Constitutional-democratic compatibility	Is the programme compatible with human dignity, equal citizenship, rule of law, pluralism and liberal democracy?	A programme may be clear and coherent yet democratically dangerous.
Long-term orientation	Does it address generational, ecological, institutional and geopolitical time horizons?	A serious programme must resist short-term electoral reflexes.
Internal coherence	Do values, diagnosis and proposals fit together?	Contradictions create confusion and opportunism.
Policy coverage	Does it cover the major fields of government sufficiently?	A party that wants responsibility needs breadth, not only protest themes.
Prioritisation	Does it say what matters most when goals conflict?	Politics is about trade-offs; a programme without priorities avoids responsibility.
Operational usefulness	Can members use it to judge everyday political questions?	This is the central criterion for a members’ party.
Evidence orientation	Does it distinguish facts, assumptions, values and desired outcomes?	Otherwise the programme becomes ideology detached from reality.
Participatory legitimacy	Was it developed, debated and adopted through meaningful member participation?	Programme authority depends partly on how it was created.
Learnability and accessibility	Can ordinary members understand, learn and apply it?	A members’ party needs a programme that educates, not only declares.

For the purpose of getting a quick overview we scored each criterion from 0 to 5:

0 = absent or contrary
1 = very weak
2 = partial
3 = adequate
4 = strong
5 = excellent

Preliminary ranking of Bundestag party platforms

This is a first-pass ranking of programme quality as a decision-support instrument, not a voting recommendation and not an endorsement of content.

We evaluated the long-term foundational documents first:

CDU Grundsatzprogramm 2024,
CSU Grundsatzprogramm 2016,
SPD Hamburger Programm 2007,
Grünen Grundsatzprogramm 2020,
AfD Grundsatzprogramm 2016,
Die Linke Erfurter Programm 2011/stand 2024, and the
SSW Rahmenprogramm 2016.

The official pages show, for example, that the CDU provides its 2024 Grundsatzprogramm and chapter downloads, the SPD’s Hamburg Programme dates from 2007 and is now being renewed, the Greens adopted their fourth basic programme in 2020, Die Linke adopted its Erfurt programme in 2011 and confirmed it by member vote, and the SSW frames its 2016 Rahmenprogramm as its political foundation.

Rank	Party	Indicative score / 50	Preliminary judgement
1	Bündnis 90/Die Grünen	40–43	Strong on foundational clarity, long-term ecological orientation, values, and internal programme process. Weakness: can become abstract and normatively dense; trade-offs are not always operationally resolved.
2	CDU	38–41	Recent, structured, broad and usable. Strong as a governing-party compass. Weakness: balancing rhetoric can soften hard trade-offs; ecological transformation and social-ecological limits are less structurally central than for the Greens.
3	SPD	34–38	Strong tradition, values and social-democratic coherence. Weakness: the current foundational programme is old; the party itself is developing a new one, which suggests recognised renewal need.
4	CSU	33–37	Clear identity, values, regional grounding and social-market orientation. Weakness: strong Bavarian self-location limits direct national-European transferability; sometimes more identity-driven than analytically structured.
5	SSW	31–35	Clear minority-party identity, regional grounding, democratic-social orientation and practical coherence. Weakness: intentionally regional/minority-specific, therefore less complete as a general national governing platform.
6	Die Linke	29–34	Strong participatory legitimacy and clear social-justice orientation; programme was adopted at Erfurt and confirmed by member vote. Weakness: older foundational architecture, partial tension between radical transformation language and operational governing utility.
7	AfD	18–25	Clear identity and distinctive positions, but weak on liberal-pluralist compatibility and integrative democratic breadth. Its programme includes exclusionary cultural claims such as “Der Islam gehört nicht zu Deutschland” and demands such as state approval for imams, which make it difficult to rate highly under constitutional-democratic and pluralist criteria.

This ranking is intentionally harsh on one point: constitutional-democratic compatibility is not just one criterion among many. A programme that is clear but exclusionary cannot be a good democratic programme in the sense needed for a citizens’ party.

Annotated APA 7 references

American Political Science Association, Committee on Political Parties. (1950). Toward a more responsible two-party system: A report of the Committee on Political Parties. American Political Science Association.

This is the classical source for the responsible-party model. Its core idea is that democratic accountability requires parties to present clear and meaningful policy alternatives, compete on those alternatives, and then be judged by voters for what they do with political responsibility. The model is not fully transferable to Germany’s multi-party parliamentary system, but it remains useful for the article’s central claim: if politics is not to be personality-driven, parties must be programme-driven.

Biale, E., & Ottonelli, V. (2019). Intra-party deliberation and reflexive control within a deliberative system. Political Theory, 47(4), 500–526.

Biale and Ottonelli argue that parties can serve important epistemic, motivational and justificatory functions in deliberative democracy. They are especially useful for a members’ party because they show that programmes should not merely be imposed from above; they should be shaped through structured intra-party deliberation. This supports the article’s claim that a programme must be both binding and learnable.

Bundeswahlleiterin. (2025). Bundestagswahl 2025: Endgültiges Ergebnis.

This source identifies the parties represented in the 21st German Bundestag and gives their final second-vote shares: CDU, AfD, SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, Die Linke, CSU and SSW. It is the factual basis for deciding which parties to include in the preliminary programme comparison.

BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN. (2020). „… zu achten und zu schützen …“, Veränderung schafft Halt: Grundsatzprogramm.

The Greens’ 2020 programme is one of the more recent foundational programmes among Bundestag parties. The party’s official page states that it is the fourth basic programme in Green party history and was adopted at the first fully digital party congress. It is especially relevant for evaluating long-term ecological orientation, internal deliberation and values-based programme structure.

CDU Deutschlands. (2024). In Freiheit leben: Deutschland sicher in die Zukunft führen. Grundsatzprogramm der CDU Deutschlands.

The CDU’s 2024 foundational programme is recent, structured and broad. The party provides the full programme and separate chapter materials, which makes it comparatively accessible as a decision-support document. It is useful for assessing how a governing party attempts to combine foundational values, state capacity, security, economy, sustainability and social cohesion.

Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern. (2016). Grundsatzprogramm der Christlich-Sozialen Union.

The CSU’s programme is valuable because it is highly explicit about identity, values, Bavarian rootedness, the social market economy, security, subsidiarity and Europe. Its strength is clarity and rootedness; its limitation, for purposes of comparison, is that it is deliberately and strongly regional in self-understanding.

Däubler, T. (2012). The preparation and use of election manifestos: Learning from the Irish case. Irish Political Studies, 27(1), 51–70.

Däubler is useful for understanding manifestos not simply as public promises, but as documents used internally by candidates and parties. This supports the article’s broader point that programmes and manifestos matter not only for voters, but also for members, candidates, internal discipline and political learning.

Die Linke. (2011/2024). Programm der Partei Die Linke.

Die Linke’s Erfurt programme was adopted in 2011 and confirmed by a member vote with high approval, according to the party’s official documents page. This gives it strong participatory legitimacy. Its usefulness for everyday political judgement lies in its clear social-justice orientation; its weakness is that older radical transformation language may not always translate easily into operational governing choices.

Manifesto Project. (2026). Manifesto Project Database: Information and documents. Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.

The Manifesto Project is a key reference because it treats party programmes and election manifestos as measurable evidence of parties’ policy preferences. Its database enables research on programmatic supply, the relation between parties and voters, and the translation of party programmes into policy output. This supports the article’s claim that programmes are serious democratic instruments, not merely campaign decoration.

Merz, N., Regel, S., & Lewandowski, J. (2016). The manifesto corpus: A new resource for research on political parties and quantitative text analysis. Research & Politics, 3(2).

This source is useful as a methodological complement to the Manifesto Project. It shows how party manifestos can be studied systematically as textual evidence of party positions. For the article, the importance lies less in quantitative methods and more in the underlying premise: programmes are sufficiently important to be analysed as structured political data.

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. (2007). Hamburger Programm: Grundsatzprogramm der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands.

The SPD’s Hamburg Programme links social-democratic values with long-term answers to twenty-first-century challenges. The party itself notes that it is now developing a new foundational programme to be adopted in 2027, which supports the assessment that the existing programme remains important but needs renewal.

Südschleswigscher Wählerverband. (2016). SSW Rahmenprogramm.

The SSW’s framework programme is explicitly described by the party as its substantive and political foundation, covering democracy, social justice, education, economy, environment, Europe and minority policy. It is strong as a regional and minority-party compass, but it should not be judged by the same expectations as a national governing-party programme.

Alternative für Deutschland. (2016). Grundsatzprogramm für Deutschland.

The AfD’s programme is clear and distinctive, but it raises serious concerns under a pluralist-democratic quality checklist. The official programme contains exclusionary cultural claims, including the statement “Der Islam gehört nicht zu Deutschland,” and proposes state approval for imams, among other measures. These positions are central to why it scores poorly on constitutional-democratic and pluralist compatibility, despite programmatic clarity.

Poguntke, T., & Webb, P. (Eds.). (2005). The presidentialization of politics: A comparative study of modern democracies.Oxford University Press.

This is the key reference for the broader tendency towards leader-centred politics. Poguntke and Webb describe presidentialisation as a process in which leaders gain greater power and autonomy within executives and parties, while electoral processes become more leadership-centred. It is especially useful because it applies not only to presidential systems, but also to parliamentary democracies.

Landerer, N. (2013). Rethinking the logics: A conceptual framework for the mediatization of politics.Communication Theory, 23(3), 239–258.

Landerer is useful for explaining why politics adapts to media logic. The article argues that mediatization occurs when both media and political actors adapt their behaviour to audience-oriented market logic. This supports the claim that politics is pulled towards visibility, simplification and personalisation.

Van Aelst, P., Sheafer, T., & Stanyer, J. (2012). The personalization of mediated political communication: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings.Journalism, 13(2), 203–220.

This review is useful as a careful academic anchor for the concept of mediated personalisation. It does not treat personalisation as a slogan, but reviews how the concept has been defined, measured and studied across political communication research. It supports the article’s statement that personalisation is a recognised feature of contemporary political communication.

Becker, P. (2024). The de- and re-chancellorisation of voting behaviour in German Bundestag elections: The development of the electoral impact of chancellor preference between 1991 and 2021.Zeitschrift für Parteienwissenschaften>

This is useful as a balancing reference. It shows that the German case should not be overstated: empirical evidence for steadily increasing chancellor-centred voting behaviour is mixed, and most studies do not find a simple linear increase in chancellor-candidate effects. This allows the article to say: the media pressure towards personalisation is real, but Germany has not become a purely leader-centred democracy.

Europeans for the Planet

2026-08-28

Programme before Personality