When the journalist Nicholas Moor is on vacation with his daughter in a mountain hotel, he accidentally films a secret meeting of the right-wing populist “People’s Party” with a drone. The recordings are explosive: They show that the party, which is ahead in the polls, is planning a coup d’état after its victory in the federal elections and wants to undermine the Basic Law. The security guards of the “People’s Party” noticed him, however, and they are willing to go over dead bodies to prevent Nicholas from making the plans public.
The political thriller “The Last Choice”, which SZ society editor Fabrice Braun wrote under the pseudonym Eric Sander, is speculative fiction. It’s about a “what-if” scenario in the election year: What if a right-wing populist party came to power in Germany – and could then fall back on the instruments of mass surveillance to eliminate its opponents and democracy? And it’s about the moral question: How far can you go to prevent an overthrow?