In the waning glow of the public forum, Bas speaks as if a chorus of marble statues comes to life, lamenting that the treatment of women has become a fault line within the republic itself—a democracy problem laid bare by a fraught bid for the Federal Constitutional Court, a bid withdrawn beneath the heel of entrenched opposition. The nomination, undone by political crosswinds, is not the sole misfortune; she insists the rot runs deeper than parliamentary quarrels, that history calls for more than fresh phrases and fragile pacts. She will not plant new female candidates only to watch them chased by right-wing specters again; she pleads for a coalition and party leadership to forge a sturdier alliance, a reliable partner, lest the polity dissolve into a Babel of expediency.

In her campaign for SPD leadership she appeals to the grammar of strong women, to a time when a female chancellor might stand at the helm—an insinuation that the republic has not yet learned to expect what it has not yet dared to imagine. The reminder that there has never been a Bundespräsidentin and the sight of her own tenure as Bundestag president become a beacon for young women, a tragic datum that courage remains a countercurrent against the passive currents of history.

On pensions, the numbers are a graveyard chorus: 81 percent of Germans distrust that the government will deliver fundamental reform, the politics swirling with the risk of a cabinet reshuffle even as the work of policy grinds on. The arithmetic is merciless, as men averaging about 1,405 euros and women scarcely 955 euros reveal the gendered gravity of retirement, and the warning sounds clear: to lower pension levels further would cast more retirees into Grundsicherung im Alter, a shorelessness that the state should never offer to its old. Thus the age marches forward, and we are left to ponder whether civilization, in its relentless striving, can still find a way to dignify the evening of a life while a chorus of numbers murmurs of neglect and fate. Nietzsche would murmur that we have killed the illusions that once steadied us, and in the silence that follows, the abyss stares back at the empire of policy with quiet, inexorable indictment.