GERMANY: Left Party leads polls in the east

by Norman Brewer - Green Left Weekly, Sydney Sun Jul 17, 2005 12:42 Nobbytob at yahoo dot de +61 2 9690 1220

[
Well, this is an excellent summary of the state of mainstream politics -
but biased in favour of the greens (no longer a left party, but a
party for the intelligentia and definetly upper middle class), and
underestimating the power of the new united left - the Linskpartei,
an alliance of PDS & WASG that currently polls 12% nation-wide, and
which might win over even more votes from the current opposition of
CDU-CSU and FDP who have an even worse neoliberal agenda for germany.
Norman B. (but Brewer ;-)
]

http://direland.typepad.com/

July 15, 2005

Exclusive:
Norman Birnbaum on WHAT'S HAPPENING IN GERMANY?
A Crisis for the Country, and its Left

The following report, the latest in an occasional series, was written
especially for DIRELAND by Norman Birnbaum — who has just returned from
Berlin, Brussels, and Paris.

Norman is University Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law School,
and author — most recently — of After Progress: American Social Reform and
European Socialism In The Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press),
among other books. Norman was a founding editor of New Left Review, was on
the editorial board of Partisan Review, and is on the editorial board of
The Nation. Norman, who got his doctorate in sociology from Harvard, has
also taught at the London School of Economics, Oxford University, the
University of Strasbourg and Amherst College, has had academic
appointments in Italy and Germany, and has been a consultant to the
National Security Council.

After Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder convinced many in his own party to
abstain in a parliamentary vote of confidence, he deliberately lost the
vote, and asked the President to dissolve the parliament and order new
elections. Those who, in his own coalition (Greens and Social Democrats),
actually lack confidence in the Chancellor also oppose elections this
fall, and prefer to wait until the scheduled date next summer — they
Schroeder's request and voted confidence in the government. It is somewhat
uncertain that the President will agree to the request, as he might decide
that Schroeder can indeed govern, however beleaguered, until next year. If
he does agree, some parliamentarians will ask the Constitutional Court to
intervene and order the elections to be held on the original schedule,
Whatever happens, however, it is clear that Germany is experiencing a
major political and social crisis.

The major elements of the crisis are: high unemployment (at 11 %); the
resistance of a majority of citizens to changes in the welfare state which
reduce social protection without increasing investment; and the continuing
economic and social crisis in the new federal states once comprising
Communist East Germany. The ruling coalition won the election in 2002
narrowly when Schroeder succeeded in making his refusal to send troops to
Iraq (and his general criticism of US foreign policy) the central issue.
That issue is now subsumed by another one: will the European Union succeed
in developing a foreign and security policy which would unite its members
in autonomy of the United States?

The conflicts within the European Union — brought to the surface by the
referenda in France and the Netherlands in which their citizenries
rejected the new European Constitution — will have to be solved before
that autonomy is achieved. Those conflicts include the effort by the
managers of European capitalism to destroy the European social model, its
welfare state — efforts supported by many of the European Union’s senior
officials in Brussels. The European Parliament is relatively powerless to
reverse the process, and that intensifies another aspect of the present
agony of Europe: the remoteness of the European Union’s decision making
institutions and processes from democratic control. The European
citizenries accept limitations on national sovereignty for the sake of
achieving a more independent, prosperous and stable Europe. They did not
sign on to surrendering their political rights.

To this is added yet another problem: the eastward extension of the
European Union and the possible inclusion of Turkey strike many western
Europeans as going too far, too fast. The potential inclusion of Turkey,
in particular, reinforces the unease felt in France, Germany, Great
Britain and the Netherlands about increasing the resident Muslim immigrant
populations. The French referendum debate included considerable
attention, as well, to the fictive figure of the "Polish plumber," working
at low wages outside the social protection system and taking jobs from
French workers.

The incidence of these problems on Germany is considerable. The German
public resents black market work by immigrants from eastern Europe — and
the unions point out that large firms prefer to invest in new factories in
countries like Hungary and Poland, where labor is cheaper..Indeed, the
public in the old Federal Republic (what was West Germany) now thinks that
the billions poured into public investment, subsidies and unemployment
compensation in the Federal states that once comprised east Germany is
good money thrown after bad. With some exceptions, those states are losing
the more energetic and educated of their younger populations, who migrate
to the west for employment — leaving behind angry plebeians who are
xenophobic and vote for the neo-Nazi groupings. The middle aged and
elderly, meanwhile, begin to think that unification was not such a
splendid idea. To a large extent, then, when the elections take place —
there will be two, one in the west and one in the east.

The Social Democrats and Greens took office in 1998, after Helmut Kohl and
his Christian Democratic Union and the German party of the market, the
Free Democrats, had outworn their welcome — they'd been in power since
1982. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party in
Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU) are social Christian parties —
as much in favor of the welfare state as the Social Democrats and the
Greens.The reforms to the welfare state in the period 1982-98 consisted
predominantly of extensions of it — like the introduction of compulsory
insurance for home care of the elderly. They negotiated with the unions
and developed a large modus vivendi with them, the more so as the
architect of Kohl’s social policies was himself a unionist (Norbert Blum.)

The two Christian parties are certainly more conservative in cultural
terms (on issues like the rights of women and children, the rights of
homosexuals, abortion) but they are quite aware that much of their
electorate is quite secularized .The social Christian parliamentarians and
thinkers who visit the United States regard the moral frenzies of our
Protestant Fundamentalists and Catholic traditionalists as a strange
reminder of a distant German past. They are decidedly more nationalistic
in an ethnic sense, more likely to sympathize with parents and
grandparents who were Nazis. Paradoxically, however, the social Christian
parties have been from the beginning very active partisans of
Franco-German collaboration in particular and the European Union in
general. Throughout the Cold War, this was combined rather unsteadily with
near total obedience to the commands of the United States.

The Free Democrats (FDP), on this point, were pronouncedly more
independent.Genscher Their leader and Foreign Minister for 18 years,
Hans-Dietrich Genscher, agreed to have US first strike weapons, the
Euromissiles, stationed on the territory of the Federal Republic. He then
called for an end to armed confrontation in Europe with the words, "Let us
modernize our ideas, not our weapons." His successors, should they take
over the Foreign Ministry , are decidedly deficient in experience,
independence and talent. They, however, opposed their possible future
partners, the social Christians, by agreeing to the present coalition’s
major alteration in nationality laws, which allowed many immigrants to
become citizens

The coalition of Greens and Social Democrats, led by Green Foreign
Minister Joschka Fischer and Schroeder (who was governor of the industrial
state of lower Saxony) took office with four major projects. They were
"Sixty-Eighters," veterans of the 1968 revolt of the students and the
intelligentsia who wished to replace German nationalism with a European
cosmopolitanism. That led to emphasis on reconciliation with Poland and
Russia, increased developmental assistance to the Third World, an interest
in international campaigns for human rights. It also led to the first
armed interventions by Germany outside of its borders since 1945 — in the
Balkans first (Fischer argued that the nation responsible for Auschwitz
had a responsibility to intervene militarily against genocide), and later
in Afghanistan. It occasioned the present government’s espousal of
eventual Turkish membership in the European Union (strenuously opposed by
the Christian Democratic and Christian Social parties). It led, too, to
German participation in the European Union’s overly discreet but definite
support for the Palestinians. Finally, the new German consciousness of
international responsibility led to the rejection of the insistent US
invitation to send troops to Iraq — and a refusal to allow NATO to become,
as it once was, an ancillary of US policy.

The philosophers Juergen Habermas and Jacques Derrida termed the
Franco-German rejection of the Iraq invasion a "European declaration of
independence." Perhaps — but when you next land at Frankfurt airport,
look across the field from the passenger terminals. There is the US base
with a daily contingent of some thirty or so large transport planes flying
to and from Iraq: a really independent Europe would have denied the US
overflight rights. It has apparently occurred to the Bush administration
that open campaigning for the opposition in the German election can only
strengthen Fischer and Schroeder.: The systematic denigration of the
German government as a band of irresponsible and ungrateful cowards has
been left to entire regiments of eager ideological volunteers in our media
and universities.

The second part of the Red-Green project was (and remains) cultural and
social. Goebbels The rejection of a conception of nationality based on
German descent (often quite contortedly described) by access to
citizenship for immigrants was a belated triumph for the ideas of 1789. (I
use the date since the late Josef Goebbels declared in 1933 — on January
30, when Hitler became Chancellor — that Germany had finally finished with
the legacy of 1789.)

The Kohl government, strenuously opposed by the Vatican, had already
liberalized laws on abortion and these were liberalized further.The rights
of children and women were reinforced in measures both direct and
indirect. Communist Germany had all day kindergartens (as does France),
but the new government has been slow to introduce these or reintroduce
these in all of Germany — which would greatly improve women’s ability to
enter the labor market. Progress toward legitimizing homosexual unions has
been slow, but the social atmosphere has been improved. (The mayor of
Berlin, Klaus Wowereit — a Social Democrat — is openly gay...but so is the
General Secretary of the Free Democratic Party, to the impotent distress
of the energetic conservatives amongst the social Christians.)

With the Greens in government, there has been considerable attention to
environmental policy — notably, a gradual cessation of the use of nuclear
power plants to generate electricity. Investment in alternative sources of
energy have been increased (Germany is now covered with windmills).
Consumer protection has centered recently on protection against
genetically altered foodstuffs — environmental consciousness in general is
high in Germany (it was Kohl who initiated an environmental ministry.)
Much of the debate is not in our terribly regressive terms (some
regulation against no regulation) but entails arguments on the degree and
rate of change to environmental protection. The present coalition claims,
correctly, that its environmental policies have created jobs in new
technologies.

All of these achievements pale, however, when contrasted with the huge
failure of the government to have reduced unemployment. Indeed, it has
increased steadily since 1998. There has been a considerable amount of
experimentation — with subsidized low wage jobs, with subsidies for
starting one-person firms, with alterations in the Byzantine tax code.
These have had no long term effect because of a strike by German capital:
it refuses, by and large, to invest a nd that is a matter of political
calculation, designed to oust the government or force it to capitulate to
capital’s program. What that program is was stated just the other day by a
German economist working for the American Morgan Stanley bank. "Neither
the SPD nor the CDU propose a profound deregulation of the labor market,
an abolition of the industry-wide wage bargaining system, an end of
co-determination, an increase in the pension age, or an overhaul of the
federal system."

In other words, German capital seeks the Americanization of the German
economy.

The most disastrous aspect of Schroeder’s policy has been its lack of
clarity. His government, by fits and starts, has attempted to reduce labor
costs, to rationalize a system of social benefits (for health, retirement
and unemployment) which is directly tied to the job. He and his Ministers
have been unclear, however, whether they are dealing with the consequences
of demographic change (an aging population with fewer new entrants into
the labor force), whether they are seeking to lift burdens on capital, and
as to how far they will go in shifting social costs back to the ordinary
citizen — whether in the form of cuts in government subsidies or increases
in the burden on individual households in paying for essential social
provisions. They have adopted — a grave strategic mistake — the term
"reform" to designate reductions in social benefits, but have been unable
to convince the citizenry that they have a larger design which will in the
end maintain the German welfare state.

The Chancellor, despite his own working class roots, must bear some of the
responsibility for his government’s failure to reassure its own
electorate. His own familiarity with and ease with the managerial elite
has not been reciprocated. That elite has been relentless in its
sponsorship of its large demolition project — with a veritable army of
economists and publicists working for it. The conventional wisdom in
Germany once insisted on the superiority of its social model:
capital-labor cooperation, investment in the education of a very skilled
labor force, the state as legitimate agency of redistribution and economic
steering, lifetime employment with an assured share for labor of the
nation’s increasing social product. Now, everything has been reversed: one
only has to read Der Spiegel, once the relentless defender of Germany’s
post-war social achievements and now bitterly denouncing them.

The jagged course of the coalition, its political emergencies and defeats
too numerous to enumerate, may flow from an initial conflict. The party’s
chair on the eve of the 1998 election was the Governor of the Saarland,
Oskar Lafontaine. Lafontaine, raised as a Catholic and much influenced by
the Church’s doctrines of social solidarity, was originally a physicist.
He attracted the hostility of the US by his leadership in the protest
movement of the early eighties against the stationing of the Euromissiles,
was always a proponent of an independent Europe (I remember a West Berlin
politician telling me: "What does Oskar know of the rest of the country —
he goes to France for dinner every night."). It was he, however, who
proposed that Schroeder run as candidate for the Chancellorship — since he
doubted his own national electability. Schroeder, in turn, left the
formulation of the common program with the Greens to Lafontaine and took
the view that in politics, as in industry, managerial talent was
everything. That talent failed him: it became obvious that he had no long
term project of his own. In the first months of his government, he
agitated the party by issuing a letter with Tony Blair praising the Third
Way and its encouragement of individual responsibility and
competitiveness, but not mentioning social justice and redistribution.
Lafontaine retained the Chairmanship of the Party and was Minister of
Finance. Convinced that he was being undermined by the Chancellor, he
abruptly resigned in March of 1999 and for the time being left political
life altogether. Lafontaine and his advisers were skeptical of the utility
and necessity of adhering to the European union’s "stability" pact, which
limited the members to budgetary deficits of three percent of Gross
National Product, were critical of the anti-inflationary and monetarist
concerns (which they rightly thought of as obsessions) of the European
Central Bank, and advocated policies which we could term "left
Keynesianism." The present situation, in which fear of unemployment and
uncertainty as to social provision has led Germany’s citizens to save
rather than spend — a situation replicated in France and the Netherlands
as well — is one bit of evidence that suggests how right Lafontaine was.
To a strike of capital there has been joined a strike of consumers — no
wonder the European economy’s growth rates are low.

The Schroeder government has been practicing involuntary economic
asceticism ever since. Its measures have included a complex and as yet
untested fusion of unemployment benefits and welfare, an unsuccessful
attempt at partial privatization of pensions, the imposition of increased
payments for the provision of health services. The budget deficit has
continued to rise, despite the selling off (under pressure from the
European Union bureaucracy, which seeks to eliminate the public economic
sector) of state owned assets.

The SPD's own political deficit has risen, too. Despite the narrow victory
in the 2002 elections (made possible by votes in the east), there have
been a succession of defeats in state elections. The states of Hesse,
Lower Saxony, Saarland, Hamburg were lost in the first term (1998-2002.)
This year, there were serious defeats in Schleswig-Holstein and North
Rhineland-Westphalia. Schleswig-Holstein is small but had Germany’s only
woman Governor, who actually won the election but was sabotaged in the
secret vote for the Governorship in the legislature by someone from her
own party. North Rhineland-Westphalia is Germany’s largest state and had
been governed by Social Democrats for forty years — ever since the
Catholic workers of the Ruhr began to vote Social Democratic. With large
scale unemployment and uncertainty, their offspring switched electoral
allegiances.

That precipitated what Schroeder thought of as a blow for freedom. No
sooner the defeat in North Rhineland-Westphalia confirmed than he
announced that he would ask the President to dissolve the Parliament so
that new elections can be held. His argument is that he has no governing
majority, since the opposition controls the upper house (Federal Council)
and can use its two-thirds majority there to block legislation passed by
the Social Democratic-Green coalition in the Parliament. More surprising
is Schroeder’s frank declaration that his own party and coalition
partner’s party are likely to vote against his program in the Parliament.
He reached the decision to ask for new elections virtually alone, possibly
against the advice of his very intelligent chief of staff — with the man
who succeeded him as Chair of the Social Democrats last year, Franz
Muentefering.

Muentefering has had to deal with vertiginously declining membership in a
party which served its members in the recent past as a secular church,
with the extreme discontent of both those who think Schroeder has moved
far too far to the right and those who think he has not gone far enough,
and with the large possibility that after the election, he will be the
sole leader of the party. Defeated, Schroeder is very unlikely to continue
in politics.

Muentefering, from the industrial Ruhr, is a traditional Social Democrat —
and that accounts, no doubt, for his sudden rediscovery of the existence
of social classes the other week, when he shocked those who think that
class conflict these days is decent only when conducted from the top
against the bottom. The managers of international capital, he said, with
their German allies, behaved like "locusts" — moving in on Germany and
then moving on after devastating it. Indeed, the Social Democrats’ hastily
devised electoral program promises to revive the institutions of
solidarity and save the welfare state. The public, polled, does not
believe this — but it is equally skeptical of the declarations of the
other parties. That is regrettable in one respect, since the Greens have
produced a document both honest and thoughtful.

The major development of the campaign thus far, however, involves not the
Wasgspd established parties but a half new one. A year or so ago,
dissidents within and from the Social Democrats began to meet to consider
their alternatives. The group consisted of trade unionists, party
activists, some academics — but lacked leaders with profile. The group,
WASG (Electoral Alternative For Employment And Social Justice), ran
candidates in the North Rhineland-Westphalia election and scored a dull
two and one-half percent. Five percent is necessary in state and national
elections for a party to enter the state and local parliaments. A leader
with plenty of profile has now re-emerged, Oskar Lafontaine. He has talked
with the leaders of the post-Communist party, the Party of Democratic
Socialism — led by Gregor Gysi — and they are succeeding in forming a
common electoral coalition, east and west. The latest poll showed this new
WASG coalition as the leading party in the east, with over 30 % of the
vote — and with a score of at least eight percent nationally. The Social
Democrats are managing a dismal 27%, the Christian Democratic Union and
the Bavarian Christian Social Union together get 44%, the Greens a very
solid nine percent, and the Free Democrats obtain seven percent. This last
would be enough to qualify them as coalition partners of the Christian
parties in the next government.

It is, however — quite apart from the question of whether the election
will take place in the fall at all — far too early to be making
predictions. Angela Merkel, the pastor’s daughter from the east who leads
the Christian Democratic Union, has never fought a national election (or,
for that matter, one in a state.) She has been effective in
out-maneuvering the older national and younger regional leaders of her
party — but they, in turn, are hardly enthusiastic about her becoming
Chancellor. Her electoral program is vague, but in agreeing to raise the
Value Added Tax, she has opened the party to charges that it will depress
consumption even more while placing unfair burdens on ordinary citizens.
She and the rest of the party are counting on the fact that many Social
Democratic voters no longer trust Schroeder to represent their interests —
and are beginning to emphasize that they as social Christians are the
authentic defenders of the welfare state. To that has to be added an
intimation that immigration ought to be severely slowed, skepticism about
the European project in its present form, and a very discreet promise to
improve relations with the US — as well as extreme opposition to having
the Turks join the European Union. As far as the foreign policy
possibilities of a Stoiber government led by Merkel are concerned, I cite
the depressed prophecy of a very senior Christian Democrat who will not be
part of it: "She and Stoiber (Edmund Stoiber — the Bavarian Governor who
lost the election last time to Schroeder) will manage to antagonize Poland
and Russia, the Czechs and the Turks, alienate the French, and cannot in
any event drag the nation back into submission to the US, which they might
prefer. . We re headed for a disaster."

That much said, one should not under estimate the electoral skills of
Fischer and Schroeder. Lafontaine has just declared that, were it not for
him and his new alliance, the other parties would be talking about
strengthening the market. Now, he says, they are outbidding each other to
demonstrate their fidelity to Germany’s welfare state traditions. I have,
he adds, pushed my old party to the left again — and everyone else, too.

* It is simply too early to make any single prediction. The most
likely result remains a coalition of the Christian parties with the Free
Democrats — notably weak in talent and likely to exhibit as many internal
divisions as the Social Democrats. Of course, the Social Democrats could
increase their present score to let us say, 32 %, while the new left
alliance WASG — led by Gysi and Lafontaine — could obtain eight, and the
Greens another eight. That would allow a left coalition. Schroeder has
declared he would not participate in any such arrangement, but other
Social Democrats have been loudly silent on that score.

A more probable alternative result is that, with some five percent of the
electorate throwing away its votes on right wing parties which do not get
into the next parliament, the Christian parties and the Free Democrats
would lack the seats to form a majority. In that case, the Social
Democrats would be able to function as junior partners in a coalition with
their adversaries. Schroeder would leave, of course — but Muentefering
would presumably be the next Foreign Minister. In the opposition,
meanwhile, Greens and the new left alliance would lay the groundwork for a
new opening to the left.

Those are optimistic scenarios, in their way. Should unemployment
continue, the state become ever more impoverished, the European project
disintegrate, the older demons of German history could return. The German
crisis is part of a larger European one — just as in the fourth decade of
the last century. On Germany, however, falls the burden of assuming a
vanguard role in leading Europe out of it. The gravest criticism one can
make of the present government is that it did not take its European
responsibilities consistently and seriously enough — leaving the French
and Italian left coalitions on their own and allowing the oleaginous Blair
to pose as the defender of Europe’s political distinctiveness. Still,
Germany is always good for historical surprises: let us hope for a
modestly positive one.

NORMAN BIRNBAUM

Die LINKSPARTEI = PDS + WASG + smaller Left parties UNITED!

by WASG member - WASG Sun Jul 17, 2005 22:48

The "Linkspartei" is not a new party, it is simply the PDS with a different name. Under German electoral law, parties cannot form electoral alliances, so the agreement reached between the leaderships of the PDS and the WASG was that the PDS would change its name to "Linkspartei" and allow members of the WASG and some other left candidates, trade union activists, people from social movements etc. to stand on the Linkspartei ticket.
Never seen that logo before either btw...