 Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Trinity Long Room Hub. President Lammert, ambassadors, provost, vice provosts, guests, colleagues, and students, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great pleasure and a real privilege for us to welcome you today to Trinity College and to welcome the president of the German Federal Parliament, the Bundestag, Professor Norbert Lammert, for his reflections and the discussion with him on democracy and populism. My name is Jürgen Barthoff and as professor of German and also as a board member and former director of this research institute for the arts and humanities, the Trinity Long Room Hub, I am truly delighted to have the opportunity to welcome you, President Lammert, on behalf of the university today, and thank you for this opportunity to hear your thoughts and exchange views with you. It is a great opportunity indeed for us to profit from your experience, your insight, and your reflections on one of the most pressing issues facing Europe and the world today. We are very grateful that you could make time in your dense schedule on your two-day visit to Ireland for this public event and we are very much looking forward to your talk. In 2015, the university had the great pleasure to welcome Bundespräsident Gauck as part of his state visit to Ireland and the year before Chancellor Merkel had a very memorable discussion with students here so today with your visit you complete the shamrock of the three highest political representatives of Germany coming to college and of course the president of the Bundestag is number two of those three after the federal president. We are particularly pleased that we can welcome you here today to the Neil Theatre of the Trinity Long Room Hub as you are known as a passionate advocate of culture and the arts as a central and indispensable element of a civilized society. One particular goal of this institute is to link academic work with public debate and address the crucial issues of our time from a perspective that highlights the importance of their historic and cultural dimensions and employs the long-term perspectives of the humanities in addressing them. We know that this is also your approach so we are doubly privileged to have you here today. Before I hand over to Catherine Mien who chairs the German group at the IIEA and who will introduce our speaker and chair today's session I just would like to take the opportunity to thank most warmly the German Embassy, His Excellency Ambassador Höfner and the First Secretary Ha-Adams and the Institute of International and European Affairs for the co-operation that made this event possible today. Thank you very much. Catherine, over to you and her Bundestag's President Liva Helamot herzlich to be calling. I particularly would like to acknowledge the help and the support of the German Embassy and the Ambassador who has always been a great supporter of our work and a bullet of what we've done. It's a great pleasure to have President of the Bundestag, Professor Norbert Lamot with us today. He has a long and distinguished parliamentary career. He was elected to the Bundestag in 1980 and has been elected and re-elected three times to be Speaker of the Bundestag. I think that's a remarkable tribute to the esteem in which he's held by his colleagues. He's also Deputy Chair of the Konrad-Adna Foundation with which the Institute itself also has had a long-term relationship. So rather than listen to me I'll ask Professor Lamot to talk about the most pressing topic which is democracy and populism today. Mr. Wachow, Ambassadors, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your invitation and your kind introduction. Since some time commentators are calling the hour of the populist and indeed some are already saying that we have entered the stage of populism. I'm not quite sure whether this might be one of the again popular exaggerations but at least it is true that in a majority of member states of the European Union at least 19 out of 28 still. We have right-wing populist parties being represented in the National Parliament and this is also true for Norway and Switzerland which still don't belong to the European Union but face similar developments. In truth, the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential elections in the United States are striking examples of a more general trend the surge in support in numerous countries for politicians, parties and movements offering simplistic solutions playing on people's emotions and not infrequently telling bare-faced lies. So it seems quite necessary and simple to talk about democracy and populism but I'm not sure whether we know precisely what democracy is all about and populism as well. I will start with two attempts to define what we are talking about. In the definition of Oscar Wilde which I hopefully find democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people and to offer you a similar simple definition of populism which I found in the Cambridge dictionary populism now here being defined as political ideas that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want. This seems reasonable but not very exciting and again puts the question what these two orientations might connect to each other in what differs from each other. Populism is an elusive phenomenon as hard to pin down as a propagandist in a rational way so rather than a universally valid definition a more nuanced approach is obviously required by the way in the meantime nearly everyone has accused each other for populism which again illustrates that it has become a type of battling each other and claiming a higher amount of political rationality against others being accused for populism. And in a political system in which voters decide who they want to govern them every politician must as a matter of principle take an interest in what the public thinks but responsible politics should not be measured solely against the benchmark of popularity. Politics is about making decisions which may not be but necessary. I am of course much more familiar with the German experiences but with experiences in other European countries but to be honest if I consider which of the main decisions of German politics after the Second World War would have overcome a referendum and I don't find just one. Neither the decision in favor of a social market system would have got a majority at that time nor the rearmament in Germany the obligatory service in armed forces in Germany the membership in NATO and certainly not the goodbye to the German mark in order to introduce the common European currency. None none of these decisions would have overcome a referendum or in other words if we wouldn't have got parliamentary decisions which at that very moment have been very unpopular we would talk on a completely other country as we do talking about Germany it is the responsibility of politicians and parties to provide answers to complex questions and the question of fundamental importance is this should they primarily adopt positions which they assume will be popular in other words those which meet the expectations of a substantial number of voters or should they after carefully weighing up their arguments provide what appear to be politically viable solutions to energy issues if the former is seen as the only option the authentic democratic option there is cause for concern one of the fundamental aims or orientations of democracy and by the way part of Martin Luther's legacy is that politics should listen to what the people have to say but should not tell them what they want to hear the truth is that in politics popularity is less important and less effective than credibility politicians and parties should not be fickle if politics and politicians lose credibility for any reason because they are inconsistent or because they have broken their word or arrogant or indifferent they cannot compensate for what they have lost by seeking popularity anyone wishing to build a steadfast relationship with voters has an obligation to embrace a rational well-informed style of politics playing on people's emotions is apparently effective as a way of winning votes and elections the Brexit referendum and the recent US elections have made that abundantly clear but even those who gain office by populist means will ultimately be judged on their results not that this is a particularly comforting thought for those who spread simplistic messages and promise the undeliverable simply reinforce and replicate the discontent and distrust in politics that give rise to their success in the first place this negative spiral in which rivals constantly don't do each other is nowhere more apparent than in the social media in the meantime which energize the populist messages and combine them with an appalling coarsening of tone and discourse politicians and parties will be well advised to take this negative development in our country's political culture very seriously and also to take a long hard look at themselves for it is a form of protest against the established parties and their approach one of the main reasons for this trend undoubtedly in Germany again is that in the Bundestag policies which have proved highly controversial with the general public such as the support for payments for Greece for example and the response to the refugee crisis another example have the backing of surprisingly large cross-party majorities even among the ranks of the opposition parliamentary support is certainly much stronger than the public approval ratings for these policies at least according to the port and while this cross-party support could be regarded and in my understanding should be regarded as a sign of a major parliamentary culture it has the consequence as well that a remarkable minority of the voters don't feel represented in their parliament with the unavoidable effect of looking for alternatives and so forth it seems quite normal that in the meantime even in Germany which seemed being non-affected by the populist movements throughout the Bureau in the meantime we have got a new political movement naming itself alternative for Germany there are some similarities and of course some differences between the respective political movements in Germany being called or identified as populist movements one similar feature or orientation is anti-elitism another one is claiming to present the only authentic position of the people without any reflection of the statistical difference between this claim and the number of supporters being available on the streets even on the occasion of demonstration or other events and and a third and certainly not minor common feature is a trend of refusing the traditional media system as a responsible and acceptable part of the communication system of a modern society at least the last tendency is new we could observe similar tendencies in terms of anti-elitism of anti-parliamentalism and claiming to represent the only authentic position of the so called people but if I understand the development correctly we never ever had a trend of refusing in principle the traditional communication system being the basis for informing each other what our challenges are what our aims could be what proposals might be suitable for meeting our challenges etc more and more this results in a double confrontation between the claim of representing the people against the political system being represented by the government and the parliament and the media simultaneously and the social media offer for the first time another platform for communicating with each other which offers the opportunity to get always the same answers on the same questions and we not just by accident more and more get the reaction if anybody is confronted with other informations to regard these other informations as the proof for lies they don't fit all the other informations they normally exchange and so they seem at least personally convinced that the new information can't be true and so we have this widespread discrimination of traditional media as Lügenpresse lying communication system decision making is a tough process this is not only true for political decisions and sometimes we should perhaps remind ourselves that even private decisions can be right or wrong and mostly we know definitely later whether we have decided correctly or should better have done it in another way as far as political decisions are concerned for logical reasons we have precisely the same situation but the expectation is another one and again we are confronted with the question what time of political process might produce right decisions avoid wrong decisions this is something which voters and their representatives must come to terms with in most cases the resulting solutions are compromises and as such will not please everyone the willingness to comprise is the first democratic virtue but nearly completely strange for populist movements it is indispensable basis the indispensable basis for politicians to make decisions which is what citizens want them to do ultimately we all have a shared responsibility for maintaining the political culture and stability of parliamentary democracy in our respective countries all of us voters and elected representatives alike having equal obligation to play our part in ensuring that we do not through negligence allow these preaches assets to fall victim to simplistic populism and immobility and this is my last remark so far it is an astonishing experience that nearly everybody seems convinced that we live in times where the complexity of challenges has significantly increased but nevertheless or perhaps due to this awareness nearly everybody expects simple solutions this is interesting and I tend to assume that it is awareness of complexity which produces the expectation of simplicity and this makes it even more complicated for politicians to react properly because they can neither neglect this expectation nor should they accept this expectation at least they should not offer simple solutions which are certainly not effective for complex questions thank you