New Leftist Coalition Shuffles Political Deck in Germany
By Richard Bernstein
The New York Times August 1, 2005
nytimes.com
BERLIN, July 27 - You could almost say that a specter is haunting Germany, and while it is not the specter of communism, as Marx and Engels had it in their famous Manifesto, it is the specter of former Communists - along with a scattering of idealistic socialist reformers and a larger number of defectors from the governing Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
All of those groups have come together to form a new party in Germany, the Linkspartei, or Left Party. While it is new and still small, it could have a major impact on the national elections set for Sept. 18.
The new formation, announced a couple of weeks ago, is a coalition between two groups: the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the Communist Party of the former East Germany, and a collection of former members of Mr. Schröder's party, disillusioned over his attempts to reform the German economy by cutting down on social welfare.
The new party's most prominent figure is Oskar Lafontaine, a former finance minister and Social Democratic chairman. He is a bitter rival of Mr. Schröder, who bested him seven years ago in a contest to be their party's candidate for chancellor.
The Linkspartei is, to say the least, not popular among mainstream politicians and commentators. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer called Mr. Lafontaine a "German Haider" in a recent interview with the magazine Der Spiegel, referring to Jörg Haider, leader of the far-right, anti-immigrant Freedom Party in Austria.
Similarly, a group of eight well-known German writers, in a letter to the newspaper Die Welt earlier this month, called the leaders of the new party "populist demagogues." They drew attention in particular to a reference made by Mr. Lafontaine to what he called Fremdarbeiter, which means foreign worker and, to the writers, was an intentional revival of a term out of the Nazi lexicon.
"The message is 'We are pure and you are aliens, and you are taking away our jobs,' " the novelist Peter Schneider said of Mr. Lafontaine's choice of words.
Leaders of the new formation deny that they pose a danger to Germany or to its democratic values.
"We need a new culture," Gregor Gysi, the longtime leader of the Party of Democratic Socialism, said in an interview. "We need wage increases. We have to see social costs as something positive, and taxes have to be fair," meaning, he said, the rich should pay more of them.
Is he a populist? The term, Mr. Gysi said, is applied by the news media and opposition politicians to deflect attention from the failure of either the Social Democrats or the Christian Democrats to come up with an effective formula that would spur economic growth and retain an acceptable level of social justice.
What is striking is that almost overnight, polls showed the Left Party becoming Germany's third-strongest, leaping ahead of small but influential parties like the Greens, with projected totals of 12 percent or more of the vote. The Greens have normally received about 7 percent.
If it does make such a strong showing, the Left Party would very likely siphon enough votes from the mainstream parties to prevent any of them from attracting the majority needed to form a government.
"We've had a four-party system since the 1980's," Richard Hilmer, managing director of Infratest dimap, a leading polling organization, said in an interview. He meant that for a quarter-century, power has generally alternated between a stable two-party moderate-right coalition and a two-party moderate left one, the current one in power being what is called the Red-Green coalition, between Mr. Schröder's Social Democrats and the Greens.
"But a five-party system makes things much more complicated than they were before," Mr. Hilmer said.
Indeed, without the Left Party, it has seemed almost a certainty that a right-of-center coalition between the Christian Democratic Union, or C.D.U., led by Angela Merkel, and the small Free Democratic Party would win the September elections and form a government with Mrs. Merkel as chancellor, which is still a strong possibility.
Still, pollsters like Mr. Hilmer say there is a 50-50 chance that the center-right alliance will not get a majority. If that should happen, Mrs. Merkel could be forced to enter into what is being called a "grand coalition" with the very Social Democrats she has been battling for two years.
Such a grand coalition could lead to political paralysis in Germany, where the economy is already in crisis and a mood of pessimism deepens daily. Or, in the view of some, it could actually prove to be a good thing, leading to the passing of a strong economic reform program without the party rivalry that has stymied Mr. Schröder's economic agenda for the past few years.
In either case, the abrupt rise of the new leftist coalition suggests a kind of political fatigue and disillusionment that many analysts and commentators find unsettling.
"People don't trust the Social Democrats any more, because Schröder failed in his promise to lower unemployment by half," Mr. Hilmer said. "And they don't trust the C.D.U. either, because they don't see any programmatic change since the days of Helmut Kohl." It was under Mr. Kohl's leadership in the mid-1990's that Germany's high unemployment rates appeared.
What disturbs many mainstream Germans is not so much the new party's program, because nobody thinks the Left Party will ever have the occasion to carry out a program, but what they see as its reliance on false economic premises, its soak-the-rich oratory and the whiffs of antiforeign populism emanating in particular from Mr. Lafontaine.
"It's an unsettling sign that Germany is doing badly enough to have generated a political reaction reminiscent of Weimar," Mr. Schneider said. Though unlike the Weimar of the 1920's and 30's there is no extremist party in the German Parliament, last fall the ultranationalist National Democratic Party became the first far-right party in almost 40 years to win a bloc of seats in a state legislature, which it did in Saxony.
Now, the Linkspartei seems likely to parlay German insecurity and fear into a bloc of seats in Parliament. A signal characteristic of the Weimar Republic, whose failure led to the rise of Hitler, was a splintered political landscape with the extreme right and left vying for power.
"Culturally it changes things a lot," Mr. Schneider said of the Left Party's emergence. "It's not a good sign." |
