Cenk Alican JTW Columnist Letters from Germany printable version send your friend message to author add comment ()

Thursday, 14 May 2009

Germany’s opposition Left Party (Die Linke/ Linkspartei) has introduced its agenda for the forthcoming European and national elections to party fellows and media this week. The election program is marked by the party’s left-wing force and the theatrical sunshine unity of its leaders.

When Oskar Lafontaine and Gregor Gysi – both parliamentary group leaders – presented the pillars of the election program in Berlin, the audience was faced with a glimmer of old-fashioned socialist unity: party seniors and top-lawmakers were standing behind the speaker’s desk approving the leaders` speech with long-lasting applause. Secretary General Dietmar Bartsch had asked them take this position on the stage in order to demonstrate the party’s unanimity.[1] Lafontaine – former chairman of the Social Democrat Party (SPD) to which he turned his back in 2000 – had worked on the draft for a night long and had fought for words, formulations and numbers against fellows from the hardliner socialist block. And by the end he gave in. The radicals won, the realists lost. Only three members of the 44-head executive committee voted with abstention, the rest confirmed the new left course.[2]

The new agenda promises two million new jobs, half of them in the public sector. Party seniors of the Social-Christian coalition government (Social Democrats and Christian Unionists) laughed sneeringly at the employment measures blaming the Left Party for foreseeing the crisis, but not presenting reasonable and affordable solutions for the miserable state of German labor markets. The financial crisis has shaken the economy more than expected, forcing market giants like Opel, Thyssen Krupp and BMW to dismiss workers or to offer them temporary work contracts.  

Although party leaders were hesitant to make any forecasts and promises during the press conference, the election program sets a number of pre-conditions for a coalition government the Left would accept to join: the withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan, the settlement of a state-regulated minimum salary of ten Euros per hour, the decrease of pension age from 67 to 65, the equalization of pensions in East and West Germany and a reform of the education system. “Any party that accepts our demands, is welcome to form a coalition with us”, Gysi said after the conference.[3] Even the spokeswoman of the party-internal rebelling Communist Platform, Sahra Wagenknecht, expressed her satisfaction with the election program. But other party fellow criticized the paper as too leftist and even resigned from party offices, like Carl Wechselberg, member of the state parliament of Berlin.[4] 

The range of possible coalition partners is not very wide for the Left Party. The party was constituted in 2007 when the East-German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the West-German Alliance for Labor and Social Justice (WASG) merged to a reactionary movement that condemns the “Agenda 2010” of former SPD-Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, a wide-reaching package of social reforms for which the Social-Green coalition government (1998-2005) is still blamed. Indeed, the Left has become a nightmare for the Social Democrats. Many rooted voters expressed their disappointment at national and local elections and gave massive turnout for the new party at the ballot.

Some senior German officials see the Left Party as a radical and extremist movement. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) in its 2006-report has ranked the former PDS as a potential “danger” that could harm the constitutional and democratic order of Germany.[5]

None of the parties represented in the Federal Parliament – with the exemption of the Social Democrats – has rejected a possible coalition with the Left Party so far, although the Liberal Democrats (Freie Demokratische Partei) would prefer the Christian Democratic Union as the great partner and the Greens are aiming a traffic-light-coalition (Social Democrats, Liberal Democrats and Greens).[6] In the bottom of their hearts no party is willing for a coalition with the Left Party, but the “neo-communists” – that is how some critics like to call the far-left – make the sound on Germany’s political stage.