Left Party breathing down SPD's neck posted by Richard Seymour

They have the politicians, the media, and the ruling class scared, with good reason. In a recent poll, the Left Party in Germany had 14% of the vote, compared to the SDP's 25%. In another, it had 15% of the vote compared to the SPD's 20%. That trend persists. In Oskar Lafontaine's home state, the Linke is ahead of the SPD. In response to the rise of the Left Party, the SPD has tried to meet the challenge half-way before recoiling to the right again. Kurt Beck, the right-wing technocrat put in charge to keep the party ticking over, moved faintly the left last year. However, he has now been ousted by those ubiquitously referred to as "Schroeder's men", such as Franz Müntefering, the employment minister, who hated the shift from its inception. They have put the right-wing foreign minister in the "grand coalition" government, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in charge.

In a preposterous inversion of the facts, most Anglophone news sources are pretending that it was his very mild shift to the left that made Beck unpopular, despite the fact that he wasn't exactly riding high in the polls beforehand. They are giving the impression that the policies of Agenda 2010 and its successors are actually spiffingly popular, which is precisely the opposite of the truth. What actually happened was that the business of government within the "grand coalition" became more difficult, as the larger CDU component had to reckon with an SPD trying to coopt popular Linke demands. The rightists in the SPD were evidently infuriated by this, bided their time, and struck hard this September in an internal coup. As Victor Grossman records, the right-wing leadership of the SPD is now hammering the party's left-wing and flatly ruling out any deals with the Left Party. This will certainly reassure the SPD's business allies, who can only be astonished by the rapid emergence of an aggressively leftist party. As the establishment has sought to contain the Linke, the anticommunist language of the Cold War has been taken out of cryogenic storage. The CDU, which is on 37% and which may still require the SPD's support for a future government, is embarking on a nasty campaign to defame the Left Party as a Stalinist relic. This has been a theme of both the CDU and the SPD right for some time, and it has yet to be effective. It will be less convincing as the party makes further incursions into the Western states, as it has been doing.

At the moment, there is nothing else in Europe to match the Linke, although the new Anticapitalist Party in France might actually deliver the goods. A poll last month showed that the party's figurehead Olivier Besancenot, not the Socialist Party's leadership, is seen as Sarkozy's main opponent. Thought it is a pity that the LCR itself will cease to exist as a part, something has to give. The PS is in meltdown, and it is extremely important that the radical Left is moving in to fill the vacated space. Wherever this doesn't happen, the far right in its various guises has a demonstrated ability to win over a sizeable layer of the working class vote. And, I ought to mention, the recent experience of the Italian left, not to mention the crisis in the Portugese Left Bloc, stands as a direct warning to the Linke - get too close to the SPD at any level, and their right-wing policies may drag you down. And there lies the rub: as strong as the Left Party's performance is, there will surely be a divide between those who want to move to the right to make some sort of compromise with the SPD leadership, and those who do not. There will be those who want to concede something to the red-baiting hysteria and purge the party, and those who want to resist it. Success will bring its own dilemmas. But which dilemmas would you rather have? Those of marginality, or those of success?

Labels: cdu, germany, left party, linke, spd

Redistribute the Wealth. posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: labour left, left party, new labour, redistribution, socialism

Left Party in Hamburg posted by Richard Seymour

"Without us it would be deadly boring in [Hamburg's parliament]," said top Left party politician Gregor Gysi at an election rally in the port city on Wednesday.

Labels: anticapitalism, european left, germany, left party, socialism

Left Party rattles the German mainstream parties posted by Richard Seymour

As the Left Party looks to make a historical breakthrough in the Western German state of Hesse, the mainstream parties - particularly the SPD, are looking to exclude them at all costs. This, one of four states being contested this year, is significant because it would be the first time the Left Party has broken through in the West of Germany. The party polls in double digits nationally, with up to 30% in the East and between 6-10% in the West, and may well be able to carry this through into the Bundestag elections next year. In the last elections in 2005, it won 8.7% of the vote and 54 seats, polling particularly strongly in Berlin, Saxony, Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt, all in the East. Making it in the West would make it plain that they're here to stay. The SPD, currently in a national coalition with the CDU, says it would rather ally with the right-wing Free Democrats than form any coalition with the Left Party, which is the main national opponent of the 'Agenda 2010' reforms introduced by Schroeder and backed by Merkel. That's what happens when you challenge neoliberalism - the mainstream parties know that they share far more than they let on, and will do anything to avoid a serious challenge to that consensus.

Labels: germany, left party, neoliberalism, socialism

Germany moving left posted by Richard Seymour

A recent news article in Die Zeit revealed that Germans are moving to the left:



These are the results from a study carried out by TNS, and they tell a strange mixture of tales. As you can gather from the image above, there is a sizeable swing to the Left. Only 11% of voters identify themselves as being right-wing, while 34% of voters place themselves on the left. The votes from the centre splits in several different directions, obviously, but it's significant that the Left Party picks up a substantial portion of voters who consider themselves centrists. Further, not only do more voters identify themselves as being left-wing, but if you go to the report (or do a Babelfish translation of the story), you find that voters for right-wing parties favour the left's programme. For example, 68% of voters for the right-wing FDP support a mininum wage, while 57% support reducing the pension age, 82% support free childcare (slightly more than Linke supporters), and most oppose privatisation as well. All of these positions are popular with most voters, but their acceptance by supporters of an aggressively free-market party signals how broadly as well as deeply these ideas are held. A plurality of voters think the unions are too weak, and on this point the distribution of support is more traditional, but still a quarter of FDP supporters, and a third of CDU supporters agree with the prevailing view. Another issue with a more predictable distribution of views is on nuclear power: 38% want to abolish it entirely, but this rises to 65% among the SPD supporters, 86% among the Greens and roughly an even split among Left Party supporters.

The article concludes that "the key demands of the Left Party fall on fertile ground, even outside its milieu". Die Zeit discusses all of these findings with a certain amount of horror, describing them as the result of the impact of neoliberalism on German society (in the usual condescending language in which people are depicted as frightened by a changing world). That is unquestionably the driving force behind this. However, the results also extend into foreign policy matters, where most German voters oppose their government's participation in the occupation of Afghanistan. The strongest opponents of the occupation are naturally Linke supporters, but - not completely surprisingly - the strong supporters of the occupation are Green voters, 47% of whom do so, more than the 42% of CDU voters who favour it.

It is no wonder that the Left Party has come from nowhere to regularly receiving over ten percent of the vote in national opinion polls, putting it ahead of the much more established Green Party. The latest poll puts them on 13%. Incidentally, the presentation of that poll is quite misleading: it says "most Germans continue to support the conservative parties in the governing coalition". In fact, "most Germans" do not: 36% of voters support the conservatives, 11% support the FDP and the remainder - most in fact - support the SPD, Left Party and the Greens. But this is how consent is manufactured, is it not? As Chomsky puts it: "Not only are citizens excluded from political power, they are also kept in a state of ignorance as to the true state of public opinion."

Labels: germany, left party, neoliberalism, socialism

Anti-G8 protests, and a massive boost for the German left. posted by Richard Seymour

Tens of thousands of people are taking part in an anti-G8 protest in Rostock, with many more arriving by bus and coach. This is the main event, but there are set to be a series of protests throughout the week, and attempts will be made to blockade the event as it takes place. However, police have already laid into the protesters, presumably as an early warning that any attempt at disruption later in the week will be dealt with equally severely. As usual, the police are blaming a faction of the protesters, and as usual, I don't believe them. Reports from protesters would be most welcome.

There is an added significance to this as far as Germany is concerned, because it turns out I was right to sense an important moment in the recent boost for the German Left Party in local elections, where they got 8.9% of the vote. the 'grand coalition' government has experienced a serious drop in support nationally, and the Left are gaining:

Germany’s ruling coalition has lost public support, according to a poll by Forsa released by Stern and RTL. 36 per cent of respondents would vote for the Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavarian Christian-Social Party (CSU) in the next election to the Federal Diet, down two points since mid-May.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) is second with 26 per cent, followed by the Left Party (Linke) with 12 per cent, the Green Party (Grune) with 11 per cent, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) with 10 per cent.

For the Left Party to have become the third biggest party nationally is a real achivement, and a massive encouragement. No doubt it is to a large extent the result of incompetent right-wing leadership and unappealling policies by the SPD, but then that doesn't always translate into an advantage for the Left. Something is percolating there.

Update: Hossam el-Hamalawy has many video clips from the protests.

Labels: anti-capitalism, capitalism, G8, germany, left party, socialism