Germany's Federal Constitutional Court turns 75 with a paradox: it remains the most trusted branch of government by a wide margin, yet that trust is eroding fast. A YouGov survey finds 66% of Germans trust the court, compared to 47% for the Bundesrat, 38% for the Bundestag, and 29% for the federal government. But the Allensbach Institute measured trust at 81% as recently as 2021 — a 15-percentage-point drop in four years. The decline likely traces to the COVID-19 era, when the court upheld government restrictions on civil liberties, provoking protests and feeding a broader collapse in institutional confidence. The court's perceived alignment with executive power during an extraordinary period may have shattered the illusion of judicial independence for a significant minority. Trust in all branches fell in that period, but the court's fall is steeper because it had further to fall. Two scholars — Christine Landfried of Hamburg University and former Constitutional Court judge Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff — offer competing diagnoses. Landfried argues the court is inherently political by design, adjudicating constitutional questions through legal method rather than political debate. Lübbe-Wolff's critique is structural: the court's composition no longer reflects Germany's fragmented party landscape. The old CDU-SPD duopoly that quietly divided judicial nominations between themselves no longer commands the votes to sustain that arrangement. The Brosius-Gersdorf affair illustrates the dysfunction. An SPD-nominated candidate for the court was torpedoed by a social media campaign attacking her positions on abortion decriminalization, causing CDU parliamentarians to withdraw support and the candidate herself to step down. The episode demonstrated how populist pressure can now reach into what was previously an elite, consensus-driven selection process. Lübbe-Wolff's reform proposals are concrete: replace party-nominated candidacies with open applications, as Austria and Switzerland already do. This would maintain democratic legitimacy — parliamentary committees still decide — while reducing party gatekeeping. Her more controversial suggestion is allowing AfD-nominated candidates to be considered, arguing that excluding a party representing millions of voters creates a "structural problem" that itself undermines legitimacy. She believes sufficient safeguards exist to filter out anyone genuinely hostile to the constitution. Landfried pushes back sharply on the AfD question, citing the party's partial classification as extremist by domestic intelligence agencies and Germany's Nazi history as reasons for caution. The disagreement is not abstract: it maps directly onto the central tension in any democracy between representational legitimacy and protective exclusion. Include everyone and risk the fox in the henhouse; exclude significant factions and confirm their narrative that the system is rigged. The structural question underneath both proposals is whether Germany's postwar institutional design — built for a stable two-party-plus system — can survive a fragmented, six-party parliament where one major party is considered partially unconstitutional. The court's trust deficit is a symptom, not a cause. The disease is a selection mechanism designed for consensus politics operating in an era of polarization.
