How Democracy Abolishes Itself - Again - and Slides Into Authoritarian Rule

Everyone is talking about Chat Control and how it brings us closer to a surveillance state, but that is not the only front on which Big Brother is busy stripping us of our autonomy. At the same time, and with far less media attention, the government is working to ensure that the citizen - already made increasingly transparent by European regulation - gets to know even less about what those in power are doing in their name.

Let me start differently: "Reformstau"! As many of my anglophone readers already know, Germans love their compound words. Reformstau literally means reform bottleneck or reform traffic jam. For many legislative periods, those newly voted into power have pledged to clear this "Reformstau." Of course, that requires prioritising what is most urgent. Now this black-red coalition apparently thinks the Freedom of Information Act needs to be revised - meaning watered down so far that it amounts to a de facto abolition.

What Is the IFG

The Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (Freedom of Information Act) is a German federal law on freedom of information that has been in force for twenty years. The core idea is that every citizen has a fundamental and unconditional right of access to official information held by federal authorities - without any particular reason, and without having to state or prove a legal interest. The federal law applies at the federal level, but corresponding provisions exist at the state level too, except in the Free State of Bavaria.

The Current Attack on the IFG

On 2 July 2026, the coalition committee of the CDU/CSU and SPD resolved to turn this right on its head. Instead of the promised reform "with added value for citizens and administration" from their own coalition agreement, what is now on the table is a resolution that 122 civil-society organisations, trade unions, and media outlets have described as "the most serious attack on state transparency in the history of the Federal Republic."

Specifically, the following is planned.

The circle of those entitled to file requests is to be radically narrowed. Only natural persons who can demonstrate a "legitimate interest" and cannot obtain the information elsewhere would qualify. Organisations, NGOs, environmental associations - and, particularly controversially, press requests from legal entities - would effectively be excluded.
A nationality check would restrict access to German citizens and EU citizens living in Germany.
The names of public servants, including management, would be redacted as a matter of course.
The fee cap of 500 euros is to be abolished. Individual requests could then cost several thousand euros - turning a right into a question of your wallet.

Reactions have been sharp. The Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider, has warned of a de facto "abolition of the freedom of information that has existed for twenty years." The relevant state commissioners are up in arms, warning Germany risks sliding back into closed bureaucratic knowledge. Transparency International, netzpolitik.org, Digitalcourage, the CCC, and FragDenStaat are among the more than one hundred organisations that have signed an open letter against the plans. According to the Federal Commissioner's own data barometer, 83 percent of citizens want more transparency - not less.

Also telling is how the IFG came into being. Unlike most laws, it did not originate as a government bill from a ministry but was introduced in 2004 directly by the parliamentary groups of the SPD and the Greens - because earlier government attempts had been blocked by ministerial bureaucracy unwilling to allow more scrutiny of its own work. Parliament had to push the law through against the ministries, not with them. When a coalition committee - the head of government, ministers, and parliamentary leaders - now decides the future of precisely this law, it is in essence the same executive that had the greatest interest in preventing the law when it was created that is deciding on its own oversight. This is not a group that can judge impartially about transparency towards itself - it is a structural conflict of interest.

Chat Control: The Second Front

While this attack on citizens' ability to monitor the state is under way, a parallel and already better-known attack on citizens' privacy is playing out at EU level.

As a brief reminder: Chat Control 1.0 allows providers such as Meta, Google, or Microsoft to voluntarily scan private messages for abuse material and cybergrooming. Chat Control 2.0, under negotiation since 2022, would make this mandatory for all providers - including end-to-end encrypted services - by means of so-called client-side scanning directly on the user's device. Both initiatives have failed multiple times in the EU Parliament or due to a missing common Council position, but they reliably return. Most recently, Chat Control was pushed through on 9 July 2026 via an emergency procedure in the last sitting week before the summer recess - at precisely the moment when opposition was least well organised. According to the EU Commission's own figures, effectiveness has not been demonstrated to this day, false-positive rates are enormous, and actual perpetrators have long since organised themselves outside the monitored platforms anyway.

Two Fronts, One Movement

And here the circle closes. Chat Control wants to know what citizens are writing. The IFG reform wants to prevent citizens from knowing what the state is doing. These are not two independent projects from different departments - they are two manifestations of the same movement: the shift in the balance of power between the state and its citizens, the sovereign.

In a functioning democracy, the exact opposite of what is being prepared here is supposed to apply. Citizens' privacy should be protected, and transparency - the ability to hold the state accountable - should be promoted. The citizen owes the state no account of their private life as long as they break no law. The state, by contrast, owes its sovereign - the people - an account of every decision made in their name. It is precisely this relationship that reactionary forces are inverting. The citizen is scrutinised while the powerful retreat to the back room.

This is neither coincidence nor a minor detail. Exclusive knowledge is dangerous knowledge. Only when the sovereign can see what their elected representatives are actually doing can they make a meaningful decision at the next election to demand change or correction. Anyone who withholds that view - who makes requests more expensive, excludes those entitled to file them, and anonymises those responsible - is taking from voters exactly the information they would need to hold those in power to account. That is the real lurch to the right running through Europe: keeping the rulers in power by controlling and infantilising the people.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Those who look only at Chat Control see only half the picture. While at EU level the fight is over the right to private communication, the federal government is simultaneously working to cut citizens' access to government activity. Together, these create a pattern that can no longer be talked away. The agenda of those currently shaping policy is to hollow out democracy and - knowingly or unknowingly - to further entrench an autocracy of the powerful.

Cheers Alexander

Sources

IFG reform - resolution of 2 July 2026 and reactions

IFG - background and history (2004/2005, parliamentary bill rather than government bill)

Wikipedia: Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (German)
Bundestag: Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (PDF) (German)
Greens parliamentary group: Strengthen freedom of information, not erode it (German)

Coalition committee - composition