Politics & Power Quote by Franz von Papen

Spoken like a man trying to launder a political earthquake through the language of procedure. Von Papen frames mass democracy as a mere hypothetical - "conceivable" - as if the core mechanism of parliamentary government were an odd edge case. The sentence is doing quiet work: it takes a perfectly normal democratic outcome (a party wins a majority) and recasts it as something vaguely improper, even opportunistic. "Claims the government for itself" doesn’t describe governing; it suggests seizure, entitlement, a grab. The subtext is patrician alarm: the wrong people might win fair and square.

Context turns that chill into a warning flare. Von Papen was a Weimar-era conservative who helped crack the system open for Hitler, imagining he could contain and instrumentalize a radical movement to stabilize elite power. In that light, the line reads less like a civic observation than a justification scaffold: if democratic majorities are inherently suspect, then extra-democratic maneuvers start to sound like responsible adult supervision. He’s pre-arguing for backroom arithmetic, presidential decrees, coalition contrivances - anything that keeps parliamentary legitimacy from becoming actual power.

What makes the quote effective is its blandness. It doesn’t rant about mobs or revolution; it insinuates danger with the calm tone of a committee memo. That’s precisely how democracies get softened up for subversion: not by announcing contempt for elections, but by treating electoral victory as a kind of loophole.