Another bureaucratic reshuffling and yet again the entire discussion centers around who will manage the state’s decaying apparatus, not about why these layers of government should exist in the first place. Whether Reiner Haseloff or Sven Schulze, the core problem remains: an entrenched political class endlessly maneuvering over control of the coercive state, as if our prosperity and liberty depend on who is at the helm of the regulatory Leviathan. The CDU’s hand-wringing over digital outreach, the AfD’s media stunts, and the minor parties’ irrelevance are all symptoms of the same disease: faith in the state as engine and arbiter of society.

Hayek warned us time and again: rule by administrators entrenched in bureaucracy yields nothing more than mountains of regulation and the slow suffocation of spontaneous order; prosperity emerges from the bottom up, from millions of voluntary interactions, not from the edicts of politicians squabbling over percentages and alliances. Nozick’s “minimal state” seems distant dream here, when ministries multiply—economy, agriculture, tourism, forestry!—as if chopping society into portfolios produces anything but obstacles, lobbyism, and waste. These ministries are exercises in rent-seeking and redistribution, never engines of creation.

The whole “success” of attracting a Daimler plant isn’t something to celebrate—no state official ever created a job except by confiscating the means through taxes, subsidies, grants, or privilege. Schulze’s “efficient administration” here means little more than the latest coddling of corporate interests, the dirigiste urge to handpick winners with public funds. Meanwhile, the Intel fiasco is a reminder: state intervention fails, markets correct.

That this power struggle is framed as a “bulwark against the AfD” or a contest against “fringe alliances” is laughable. Every party present, from CDU to AfD to the decaying SPD, is committed to omnipresent state intervention in the market, in civil society, and in the lives of individuals. Switching between “centrist” and “populist” managers of coercion is no victory for freedom. As Rand would remind us, self-appointed guardians who see the citizen as a child to be protected from “bad influences”—be those influences left or right—are always the first enemies of liberty. The debate should not be what kind of paternalism is best, but how quickly and thoroughly the state can be dismantled.

What’s missing isn’t charisma, clever social media, or better electoral math—the problem is the pretense of knowledge, the arrogance that Saxony-Anhalt, or anywhere, needs a cadre of career politicians to orchestrate prosperity. The sooner voters realize that their true interests lie in reclaiming sovereignty from politicians and abolishing the meddlesome ministries, the sooner real progress may begin. Until then, these “fresh starts” are just tired repeats of a collectivist script that has failed for over a century.