Key Takeaways
- Overwhelming membership rejection: 91.7% of participating Green Party members in Baden-Württemberg voted to immediately halt Palantir’s Gotham software in a direct ballot concluded July 24, 2026.
- Contractual lock-in: A five-year, €25 million contract signed by the CDU-led Interior Ministry in March 2025 contains no exit clauses, making the membership vote legally moot.
- Coalition divisions: The Green Party’s elected representatives voted alongside the CDU to defeat an SPD motion to halt Gotham, placing the parliamentary wing and rank-and-file on opposite sides.
- Constitutional concerns: Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled in 2023 that a similar deployment in Hessen was unconstitutional, and civil liberties groups have filed new challenges.
- European pivot: Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV), the Bundeswehr, and France’s DGSI have all moved toward European alternatives, leaving Baden-Württemberg as a holdout bound by contract rather than policy conviction.
Introduction
In an internal party mandate, the Green Party membership in Baden-Württemberg has voted overwhelmingly to reject Palantir’s Gotham police surveillance software—only to have the state’s coalition government reaffirm its commitment to keeping the contract. The episode highlights a structural tension in coalition governance: when one partner signs a significant technology procurement deal without the other’s knowledge and without exit clauses, democratic pressure has no mechanism for implementation.
The Membership Vote and Its Limits
In a direct membership ballot—a mechanism known as Urabstimmung—concluded on July 24, 2026, approximately 91.7% of the roughly 10,400 Green Party members who participated called for the immediate halt of Palantir’s Gotham data-analytics software in the state’s police force. All 26,000 registered Green Party members in Baden-Württemberg were eligible to vote, and turnout was approximately 40%.[^1]
Despite this emphatic result, the state’s Green-led government, headed by Minister-President Cem Özdemir, responded within hours by reaffirming its commitment to keeping the contract. The reason is fundamentally contractual: the five-year deal, worth approximately €25 million ($28.7 million USD), was signed by the CDU-led Interior Ministry on March 20, 2025, without informing or consulting the Green Party, its own coalition partner. The contract contains no exit clauses, meaning that even if the government wanted to terminate the agreement, every euro of the €25 million in licensing fees would still be owed.[^1]
“We would rather not have a contract with Palantir,” Green lawmaker Oliver Hildenbrand said in November 2025. “But we don’t want to withhold the tool from police for years.”[^2]
The financial reality is stark: the five-year deal costs approximately €4.25 million annually plus €5 million in licensing fees, running to 2030. The government has reframed the ballot result not as a mandate to act immediately, but as a confirmation of the general direction—transitioning to a European alternative “as soon as possible, but no later than 2030.”[^1]
Coalition Politics and Legislative Contradictions
The situation grew more pointed when the Green Party’s legislative caucus compounded the bind just days before the membership result was published. When the SPD introduced a Landtag motion specifically calling for Gotham to be halted, the Green caucus voted alongside the CDU to defeat it. The party’s elected representatives and its rank-and-file membership thus found themselves formally on opposite sides of the same question in the same week.[^1]
This legislative alignment was not new. In November 2025, the Landtag voted to amend the state police law to establish the formal legal basis for Gotham’s deployment, with 113 members voting in favor, 22 against, and one abstention. Green legislators voted with the CDU despite internal unease, on the logic that blocking the legal amendment would mean paying €25 million for software the state could not legally use—a scenario described by observers as “lose-in-a-different-way.”[^2]
The compromise reached between the coalition partners in July 2025 included several conditions: the CDU and Greens would introduce a bill to extend the Black Forest National Park (a Green priority), and the use of Gotham would be subject to intensive parliamentary scrutiny by the oversight committee. Restrictions on the technology were also planned, including avoiding the use of artificial intelligence in certain applications.[^3]
What Gotham Does—and Why It Matters
Palantir’s Gotham platform is designed to ingest data from disparate sources—criminal records, traffic records, case management files, telecommunications surveillance results, and social media content—and run cross-database analysis to surface connections among individuals, including people with no direct connection to any crime. The software has been deployed under various names across German states: HessenDATA in Hessen (since 2017), VeRA in Bavaria (since 2024), and DAR in North Rhine-Westphalia.[^4][^5]
Bavarian police had already used VeRA in approximately 100 cases by May 2025, including in the investigation of the attack on the Israeli consulate in Munich in September 2024. The deputy chairman of the Police Union, Alexander Poitz, explained that automated data analysis made it possible to identify perpetrators’ movements and provide officers with accurate conclusions about planned actions.[^4]
However, the civil liberties concerns are substantial. Baden-Württemberg’s Data Protection Commissioner Tobias Keber described Gotham as a “highly invasive instrument” and warned that people with no involvement in any suspicious activity could still be subject to data analysis—including witnesses, whistleblowers, or individuals whose data is linked to evidence such as contact details in a confiscated smartphone.[^3]
Constitutional Exposure and Legal Challenges
The constitutional concern is not merely political. On February 16, 2023, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled that Hessen’s legal basis for HessenDATA was unconstitutional, finding that the law violated the constitutional right to informational self-determination under Article 2(1) in conjunction with Article 1(1) of the Basic Law. The court established that every person has the fundamental right to determine for themselves the disclosure and use of their personal data—a right rooted in the 1983 Population Census Judgment. The Hessen police had used HessenDATA’s powers thousands of times each year, processing data on people with no connection to any crime.[^1]
In June 2024, the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF), supported by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), filed a new constitutional complaint against Hessen’s reformed police law, arguing that even the amended version falls short. Similar litigation is pending in North Rhine-Westphalia. In July 2025, the GFF filed a constitutional challenge against Bavaria’s police law, which provides the legal basis for VeRA.[^2][^4]
“Palantir’s dragnet-style manhunt sweeps up an enormous amount of people,” said CCC spokesperson Constanze Kurz. “It brings together data that were previously kept separate and intended for very different purposes. For that reason alone, automated mass-scale analysis must not be a part of everyday police work.”[^2]
Franziska Görlitz, a jurist and case coordinator at the GFF, added: “Anyone who reports something to the police, is the victim of a crime, or is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time can come under police scrutiny.”[^2] The GFF has indicated it is monitoring deliberations in Baden-Württemberg and weighing options for a potential legal challenge.[^2]
The CLOUD Act and Data Sovereignty Concerns
A second structural concern is irreversible by contract. The US Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act of 2018—the CLOUD Act—requires any US-incorporated company to produce data it controls when compelled by US law enforcement, regardless of where the data is physically stored. A Palantir server located in Germany does not neutralize a valid US warrant. No data-residency commitment, no GDPR clause, and no German police regulation overrides this structural legal reality.[^1]
This is precisely why Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), chose a European alternative in May 2026 rather than renewing with Palantir. The BfV selected ArgonOS, a data-analytics platform developed by French firm ChapsVision. ArgonOS operates in an air-gapped “sovereign cloud” environment with no external network connectivity, processes structured and unstructured data using AI, and is already deployed by France’s domestic intelligence service (DGSI).[^1]
The Urabstimmung campaign’s materials flagged this explicitly: the values of digital sovereignty and informational self-determination are structurally incompatible with a US-headquartered vendor operating under the CLOUD Act—not as a matter of politics, but as a matter of permanent legal architecture.[^1]
Palantir’s Political Profile
Palantir has drawn criticism for years, in part because of its co-founder, Peter Thiel. Thiel, an American-German billionaire, has repeatedly voiced anti-democratic opinions and is a prominent supporter and donor of US President Donald Trump and his Vice President, J.D. Vance. At least 10 members of the current Trump administration are known to own shares in the company.[^2][^5]
The company is also controversial for its connections to US intelligence agencies and partnerships with US immigration authorities. In 2020, Amnesty International raised concerns that there was a “high risk” that Palantir was “contributing to human rights violations of asylum-seekers and migrants.” The company entered into new contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2025, including a $30 million contract to develop an operating system to identify undocumented migrants.[^2][^5]
Germany’s Security Establishment Is Moving Elsewhere
Baden-Württemberg’s predicament stands in contrast to the direction the rest of Germany’s security infrastructure is traveling. The Bundeswehr—Germany’s armed forces—has explicitly excluded Palantir from its planned military cloud infrastructure. Vice Admiral Thomas Daum, head of the Bundeswehr’s Cyber and Information Domain Service, told Handelsblatt in April 2026 that it is “simply inconceivable at the moment to grant industry staff access to the national database.” The Bundeswehr has shortlisted three European alternatives: Almato (Stuttgart), Orcrist (Berlin), and ChapsVision (Paris).[^1]
Another company positioning itself as Palantir alternative is OneData, based in Passau, Germany.
At the national intelligence level, the pattern is the same. France’s DGSI announced in June 2026 that it will replace Palantir with ChapsVision, completing a transition that French officials framed explicitly as a sovereignty decision. On July 17, 2026, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz signed a joint declaration pledging to examine the development of a “European sovereign digital backbone” covering data-centric security, AI, and cloud solutions.[^1]
In North Rhine-Westphalia, the Green Party’s state delegates have also decided to withdraw support for Palantir, urging the state government to cancel existing contracts and stop entering into new ones. The resolution reflects the position of the Green Party base, which opposes the surveillance state and advocates digital sovereignty.[^6]
A Broader Pattern of German Dissent
Reservations about Palantir extend beyond individual states. When the German Federal Council voted in favor of a joint data analysis platform for federal and state police forces, several states—including Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Bremen, Lower Saxony, Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein, and Thuringia—expressly spoke out in favor of a European alternative that “excludes the use of products from the market-dominating US provider Palantir.”[^7]
At the federal level, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) is considering whether German police should use Gotham in all federal states, breaking with the more reserved attitude of his predecessor, Nancy Faeser (SPD), who in 2023 stopped a project that would have enabled federal agencies to use Palantir software.[^5][^7] An online petition on the Campact platform calling for politicians to stop the use of Palantir software in Germany gathered more than 264,000 signatures within a week.[^4]
The Coalition Trap
What Baden-Württemberg’s episode exposes is a structural problem in coalition government technology procurement: when one coalition partner signs a significant tech contract without the other’s knowledge, and without exit clauses, the result is a situation where democratic pressure—including a legally conducted binding party ballot—has no mechanism for implementation.[^1]
The Greens are in a governing coalition that requires the CDU’s partnership to function. The CDU has no incentive to honor a Green membership mandate they were not party to creating. The contract runs until 2030, and the 2030 transition deadline is already in the existing coalition agreement. The membership’s 92% verdict is the most emphatic possible democratic signal—delivered into a contractual structure specifically designed, however unintentionally, to absorb it without consequence.[^1]
The contrast with Switzerland is instructive. Swiss federal authorities rejected Palantir bids at least nine times over seven years, managing to say no repeatedly without the constraint of a signed, irrevocable contract. Baden-Württemberg signed first, checked with its coalition partner second, and included no exit mechanism at all.[^1]
Looking Ahead
The state’s current path is clear, at least contractually: Gotham will deploy operationally in Baden-Württemberg by the end of 2026, will run under the November 2025 police law amendment, and the 2030 transition deadline will govern the coalition’s planning horizon. Absent a legal challenge or a CDU change of position that is not currently signaled, the membership vote will not stop Palantir before 2030.[^1]
Whether the state’s police law amendment survives constitutional scrutiny remains an open question for Germany’s courts—not for the 91.7% of Green Party members who have already registered their view. In the meantime, the wider European context is moving fast, with the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Germany’s BfV, and the Bundeswehr all transitioning away from Palantir. Baden-Württemberg’s state police remain a holdout—bound not by policy conviction but by a contract its governing coalition signed without agreement and without an exit.[^1]
References
[^1]: (2026-07-30). “Germany’s Greens Voted 92% to Dump Palantir Gotham: Coalition Contract Blocks Them“. TechTimes. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
[^2]: (2025-11-17). “Germany: Baden-Württemberg approves use of Palantir“. Posteo. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
[^3]: Marie-Claire Koch (2025-07-30). “Baden-Württemberg police may be allowed to use Palantir software temporarily“. heise online. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
[^4]: (2025-08-02). “German police expands use of Palantir surveillance software“. DW. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
[^5]: (2025-08-18). “Palantir: What is the US-based AI surveillance system used by German police?“. IamExpat. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
[^6]: (2026-06-23). “Tensions brew over use of Palantir software in Germany“. Cybernews. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
[^7]: (2025-04-14). “German dissent on Palantir: Several federal states oppose the US software for the police“. digit.site36.net. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
