The Social Democratic Party's platform to raise the minimum wage and for single-tier health insurance resonated with voters and contrasted with the left's failure. Sibylle Kaczorek reports.
Die Linke
In the aftermath of the recent racist attacks in Hanau, Green Left spoke with Sibylle Kaczorek, an anti-racist activist based in Berlin, about its impacts on recent election results in Hamburg and the campaign against the far right.
The fear of collaboration by the so-called mainstream democratic parties with the far-right in Germany has been realised in the first such incident in post-war times, writes Sibylle Kaczorek.
One of two unnamed individuals who have been arrested in Germany for possession of weapons and a “kill list” of prominent left-wingers was a police officer, the Morning Star reported on August 29.
The pair had been discussing “refugee and migration policy”, which they claimed would lead to the “collapse of public order,” via online chat groups, the article said.
Just after midnight on July 27, a bomb exploded in the car of left-wing politician and refugee activist Michael Richter in the town of Freital on the outskirts of Dresden in eastern Germany.
Richter, a 39-year old town councillor for the socialist party Die Linke (The Left) was not in the car. No one was harmed by the blast, which also damaged a nearby car.
Police are yet to assign blame, but Richter is certain the attack came from right-wing groups in the area, who have threatened him repeatedly in recent months over his campaigning work for refugees.
Supporters of Die Linke (The Left) demonstrate in front of the Federal Chancellery, Berlin.
Protests took place in 14 cities in Germany on July 16 against the German government’s aggressive treatment of the Greek crisis and in solidarity with their European Mediterranean neighbours.
The largest anti-nuclear protests in German history were held on March 26. About 250,000 people marched in Germany’s four largest cities.
Under the slogan “Fukushima Warns: Pull the Plug on all Nuclear Power Plants”, more than 120,000 took to the streets of Berlin, 50,000 in Hamburg, 40,000 in Koeln and upward of 40,000 marched in Muenchen.
In state elections held the next day, the German Greens won a historic victory in Baden-Wuerttemberg. They will form Germany’s first-ever Green-led government.
They also tripled their vote in elections in Rheinland-Pfalz.
The German parliament met on June 30 to elect the country’s largely symbolic president. What should have been a fairly straightforward affair, however, turned into a political embarrassment for Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The new election was made necessary by the resignation of Horst Koehler on May 31, after a public outcry over his comments suggesting German military involvement in Afghanistan was commercially motivated.
Koehler’s resignation came as Merkel’s governing right-wing coalition was struggling in opinion polls.
On May 15, German left-wing party Die Linke held its national congress in the eastern city of Rostock, electing a new national leadership and debating its new draft program.
At the conference, charismatic left-wing firebrand Oskar Lafontaine stepped down as the party’s co-leader for health reasons. Lafontaine, the former head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and finance minister, quit the SPD in 1999 because of the party’s neoliberal policies.
Germany’s ruling centre-right coalition suffered a double defeat on May 9, when it lost its ruling majority in an important state election in North-Rhine Westphalia.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) scored its lowest ever vote in the state, dropping 14 points to only 34.6%, on a par with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which slipped to 34.5%.
Support for the arch-neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — the CDU’s coalition partner on a state and federal level — stagnated at 6.8%. The Greens emerged as the big winners, doubling its vote to 12.1%.
