GERMANY: Success of Left Party - which way forward?

October 12, 2005
Issue 

Winfried Wolf, Berlin

The Left Party.PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism] performed best in the German federal election on September 18. Receiving 8.7% of the national vote, it has more than doubled its result from 2002, when it failed to jump the 5% hurdle that allows its national list candidates to enter parliament.

Even though the opinion polls from August predicted the party would receive 10-12%. However, it needs to be emphasised that for the first time since 1952 (when the German Communist Party, KPD, failed to enter parliament in the second general election after World War II), we can see across the nation a parliamentary party that is to the left of the German Social Democrats (SPD).

Encouraging is also the composition of the Left Party voters — 23% of the jobless voted for the LP, which is above the average 8.7%, and so are the blue-collar workers with 12%. And it is exactly those two important sections where the PDS failed to a large extend in the 2002 elections.

Also, the LP's result on September 18 was an east-west nationwide victory. In the east, the LP achieved 25.4%, in the west it was 4.9%. That means an increase of 8.5 points in the east (or 150%) and in the west the party more than quadrupled its vote from the 1.1% it scored three years ago.

In the far west Ruhr basin, the LP beat the Greens in important industrial cities with a high unemployment rate. In Saarland, home state of Oskar Lafontaine (former SPD chairperson and Saarland premier, now a leader of the LP/WASG), the LP received 18% of the total vote.

But there remain three main weaknesses of the LP, which were confirmed during the election campaign and afterwards.

First, the "social question": Despite an overwhelming number of LP voters indicating that social justice is a crucial issue for their decision, the LP remains weak on this. The election manifesto and program hardly mentioned unions and workers, and there was no key message on how to fight against Germany's record unemployment. The idea of work-time reduction was only mentioned in general terms, and it was stated that only employees with low incomes should be granted full compensation for reduced work hours. Lafontaine even propagated the following thesis which otherwise sounds like very right-wing rhetoric: "The state is obliged to prevent family fathers and women from losing their jobs, because foreign workers take them away on cheapest wages."

The important issue of war and peace was the second weak spot: Right in the middle of the election campaign, party leader Lothar Bisky saluted the proposal to nominate Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder for the Nobel Peace Prize. And shortly after the election, when the old Bundestag (German parliament) once again decided to extend the deployment of German troops in Afghanistan (against the votes of the two LP.PDS MPs), LP member of European Parliament, Andre Brie — often referred to as mastermind of the PDS, now LP — when asked "What impression do you get of the work of German soldiers in Afghanistan?", replied: "The troops do a very good and responsible job."

The third and decisive weak spot is the fact the Left Party is not what its candidates mainly got rewarded for in the elections: It is not the beginning of something new; it's essentially a renamed PDS. The cooperating second party, the WASG, contributed greatly to the good LP election result, but only 12 of the 54 elected LP MPs are from the WASG, and on the executive level of this new fraction, it has only 2 out of 12 members.

But above all, the LP-renamed-PDS is a government party in the states of Berlin and Mecklenburg-Pomerania, a junior partner in coalitions with the SPD. While the LP election platform demanded the extension of the public sector, SPD-PDS-governed Berlin is attacking the public sector, e.g., the SPD-PDS government privatised electricity and water supply.

The SPD-PDS government in Mecklenburg-Pomerania conducts a "land reform", where it reduces the amount of districts (that are also electorates) from 18 down to 5, thus putting more distance between the government and the citizens, and also slashing almost a quarter of public sector jobs.

Nevertheless, a number of Left Party parliamentarians will become pro-active on socialist policy-making and they will closely cooperate with extra-parliamentary movements. More than 4 million Germans voted against neoliberalism and militarism on September 18. In conjunction with new struggles in society, this promises the chance for some dynamic developments.

The main conclusions to draw from the 2005 elections are: Gerhard Schroeder and his SPD got punished for their neoliberal politics, and Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats Angela Merkel failed to win majority support. For the first time, the SPD and the Christian Democrats together received less than 70% of he national vote. The regained relative strength on the left and the obvious weakness of the right must be used to advance progressive politics.

[Winfried Wolf is a former leading member of the Trotskyist Fourth International. From 1994 to 2002 he was a member of German parliament for the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). Today he is co-editor of Zeitung Gegen den Krieg ("Newspaper Against the War").]

From Green Left Weekly, October 12, 2005.
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