A Tale of Two Federations

One federation was afraid to touch its flag. The other cannot stop planting them.

By Sewasew Teklemariam · 11 November 2026

It was the best of flags, it was the worst of flags. It was the age of the Bundestrainer’s baseball cap, and the age of the kebele flagpole. In one federation, the centre spent a decade afraid to pick up its own flag. In the other, regional officials cannot stop planting theirs in other people’s soil.

Germany has 16 Länder. Ethiopia has 12 regional states and two chartered cities. Each of them, in both countries, has a flag of its own. That is where the resemblance ends. In Berlin a flag is a question of feelings. In Moyale it is a land deed, a tax office and a police jurisdiction, sewn onto one piece of cloth.

This autumn both federations were tested by a flag. One responded with a press conference. The other responded with gunfire. Your correspondent has compared the two, with a ledger, a calculator and a strong coffee.

Germany: the flag nobody dared to touch

For a generation, black-red-gold was something respectable Germans kept in a drawer beside the World Cup bunting, aired every two years and folded away with a faint sense of guilt. The colours of the 1848 democratic revolution were treated as a mild health hazard. The Greens’ youth wing in Rhineland-Palatinate summed up the official mood: “Patriotismus = Nationalismus. Fußballfans, Fahnen runter!” Patriotism equals nationalism. Football fans, flags down.

The flags came down. Somebody else picked them up. On 6 September the AfD won 43.8 per cent in Saxony-Anhalt, more than double its 2021 share, on a record turnout of 77.8 per cent. Chancellor Merz’s CDU, which had run the state for 24 years, fell from 37.1 to 17.2 per cent. Two weeks later, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the AfD took 38.2 per cent and the CDU failed to clear the 5 per cent threshold at all. “It is a catastrophe,” said the chancellor, in what may be the most accurate statement issued by a German government this year.

Then came the cavalry, and it arrived in a baseball cap. Eleven days after Saxony-Anhalt, the new national football coach, Jürgen Klopp, walked into a press conference wearing black-red-gold and the slogan Einer von 83 Millionen (“One of 83 million”). He said: “Ich würde mir oder uns gerne die Fahne zurückholen.” He would like to take the flag back.

A football manager had found in one sentence what the political class had misplaced for a decade. The conversions followed at speed:

• The Greens: Party leader Franziska Brantner told the Bundestag to raise black-red-gold together with the European flag, so as not to leave it to the AfD.
• The CDU: Brandenburg’s interior minister, Jan Redmann, ordered the flag flown permanently on state offices from October.
• The SPD: Vice-Chancellor Lars Klingbeil agreed with Klopp that anyone can be proud of the country.

The AfD’s reply was the cruellest one available. It agreed. When Brantner spoke, AfD MP Stefan Schröder called out “Lasst sie uns hissen!” (“Let’s hoist it!”), on every town hall, sports ground and market square. In Germany, it turns out, you cannot outflank a nationalist party by flying the national flag. You can only arrive second.

You cannot outflank a nationalist party by flying the national flag. You can only arrive second.

The German federation, meanwhile, has remained impeccably orderly, almost to a fault. Before the vote, Saxony-Anhalt’s mainstream parties amended the state constitution so that the AfD could not block the appointment of constitutional judges. A court in Cologne stopped the domestic intelligence service from labelling the whole party extremist, pending a full ruling. And when the AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund stands for minister-president in December, the CDU’s plan is to stand up and leave the chamber. In the third round, a simple majority will do. German democracy’s last line of defence, it seems, is the exit door.

Ethiopia: the flag everyone wants to plant

Ethiopia has never suffered from Germany’s shyness about flags. Its federation has the opposite problem: too many flags and too much enthusiasm for raising them in other people’s neighbourhoods.

Moyale is one town cut in two by the Kenyan border. Its Ethiopian half is then cut again, between Oromia and the Somali Region, by a line that runs through homes, markets and families. The 2004 referendum meant to settle the boundary instead split the town along the highway. More than two decades later, the joint Oromia–Somali border commission is still, in the finest traditions of Ethiopian administration, pending.

In the meantime, the Somali Regional Council found time in 2025 to redraw its own map, growing from 95 districts to 109. It has not published the list of the 14 new ones. Borana critics in Oromia call it annexation by stationery. The Somali Region says no new land has been added. Along that border, OCHA counted more than 288,000 people displaced from July 2025, long before anyone in Germany had heard of Moyale.

Then, on 18 October, an office opened in Moyale’s Kebele 02 and the Somali regional flag went up over it, on ground Oromia says is its own. Within hours there was gunfire. A 13-year-old girl, Diqqoo Jaataan Aagaa, was shot dead. There is nothing satirical about that sentence, and this column will not try to make it so.

What followed is the part that deserves ridicule:

• The local diplomacy: Elders and local officials reportedly agreed to take the flag down. The agreement lasted roughly as long as a Moyale ceasefire, which is to say, not long.
• The spread: The fighting moved into three more Oromia districts: Gumi Eldallo, Wachile and Arero.
• The exodus: A government assessment counted 35,950 people displaced as of 24 October. The Kenya Red Cross now puts it above 50,000. Many of them fled to Kenya, where one Kenyan has since been killed by a stray bullet.
• The relief: The Ethiopian Red Cross distributed about 30 million birr in shelter and household items to 1,000 families. That is 30,000 birr per family, or about 183 US dollars per family whose home is now on the wrong side of a flag.

To be fair, the officials have been impeccably polite about one another’s flags. Moyale’s Oromia-side mayor, Gelma Korcha, said of the Somali flag: “We respect that flag… But we told them the flag was raised in an unsuitable place.” Ethiopia’s regional flags are all respected, it seems, provided they stay at home.

And the referee? Ethiopia’s constitution has an answer for exactly this. Under Article 48, boundary disputes go first to the two regions, and failing that to the House of Federation. The federal government in Addis Ababa, led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, had yet to react when AFP reported the clashes on 24 October. The government engaging Addis Ababa on Moyale’s behalf turned out to be Kenya’s. When a neighbouring country’s police chief is doing more shuttle diplomacy over your internal boundary than your own capital, the federation has not so much a referee as a vacancy.

The federation has not so much a referee as a vacancy.

The ledger

For readers who prefer their satire in columns, here is the autumn of 2026 in two federations.

The figures for Germany are what a strong federation looks like when it is nervous. The figures for Ethiopia are what a federation looks like when nobody is minding it.

The moral of the tale

Germany’s problem is a centre so frightened of its flag that it handed it to the people it feared most, and is now trying to get it back through a football coach. Ethiopia’s problem is a centre so absent that its regional flags have become boundary markers, planted and contested by armed men.

One federation has too many referees and not enough nerve. The other has plenty of nerve and no referee. Germany will settle its flag question in a December vote, a constitutional court and, apparently, the Nations League. Ethiopia has the instruments too: Article 48, the House of Federation and a border commission that has been “pending” for longer than some of Moyale’s displaced children have been alive. What it lacks is anyone in Addis Ababa willing to pick them up.

So here is a modest proposal from your correspondent. Let Ethiopia borrow Germany’s caution for one season: call a ceasefire, take down every disputed flag in Moyale on the same day, and let the House of Federation rule. In return, Germany may borrow Ethiopia’s conviction that a flag is worth caring about. Then perhaps the citizens of both federations could see their flags as something that belongs to all of them.

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