Portside

(Three takes)

(1)

German Left Becomes Third Largest Party: Poll

    An opinion poll shows the German Left party has become the third largest party, thanks to growing support emanating from its categorical rejections of military intervention in Syria.

Press TV
September 20, 2013

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) received 38 percent support while her coalition partner, the Free Democrat (FDP) stands on the 6 percent, just one point above the threshold for entering parliament.

The survey also showed that the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) received 28 percent of the votes while the Greens Party stood at eight percent.

In addition, the poll showed that the newly formed Alternative for Germany (AfD) has crossed the five-percent threshold.

Meanwhile, analysts say the increasing support for the Left party is partly due to its rallying against military action in Syria and its demands to halt arms exports. The party also wants to bring German peacekeeping troops home from Afghanistan and to exit NATO.

All four mainstream parties have said they are not willing to join the Left in a coalition.

"The Left appeals to a certain way of living in eastern Germany, whereas in the west they attract more the protest vote and appeal to those who feel the SPD is not left-wing enough," said Klaus-Peter Schoeppner of the pollster Emnid.

The party is also against euro bailouts, as it says they only benefit the banks while imposing harsh austerity on deprived citizens.

Other recent polls have shown that the Left is the second largest party in several eastern states, where it has ruled in several regional coalitions.

One Left supporter Georg Brozek, said the party understands the concerns of eastern Germans, of whom some still complain of discrimination and neglect 23 years after reunification.

Germany is set to hold federal elections on September 22 to determine some 598 members of the 18th Bundestag, the country’s main federal legislative house.

(2)

Don't Write Off Germany's Left party

    Die Linke does not go along with the general austerity consensus, and since 2005 its election results have been rising

By Peter Thompson
The Guardian (UK)
September 5, 2013

Supporters of the German party Die Linke: 'The Left party will continue to stick around as one of the few true oppositional parties in German politics.' Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

When I covered the election to the German Democratic Republic's People's Chamber for an academic journal back in March 1990, everyone was expecting the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), as the party that had just emerged out of the old ruling Communist party, to be swept into the dustbin of history. In the event, it obtained 16% of the vote, only 6% behind the Social Democratic party (SPD), whom everyone had expected to win. And it has been like that at every election since. A combination of wishful thinking and dodgy psephology has meant that the mainstream parties and their media outlets have done what they can to marginalise what has now become Die Linke or Left party.

This Left party is the product not only of parties of the old GDR, but also a merger with forces on and to the left of social democracy in West Germany, predominantly around Oskar Lafontaine. This means that it has built a basis not only as a sort of Christian Social Union (CSU) of the east but also as the only party represented in the Bundestag that does not go along with the general austerity consensus on social and economic policy. In a society and polity so geared towards consensus this puts it beyond the pale for a predominantly western-dominated political culture.

If we look at the national election results since 1990 we can see that the PDS/Left has managed to hold on with representatives in parliament on the basis of constituency votes during the 90s and into the 2000s, but since 2005 its representation has gone from vulnerable to stable, gaining 8.7% in 2005 and 11.9% in 2009. It is no coincidence that this last election took place in the teeth of the great recession, not because Germany was particularly badly hit in terms of headline figures, but because its ability to weather the crash has been based on keeping wages as low as possible (there is no minimum wage in Germany, something the Left wants to introduce) and productivity high without sharing the resulting benefits.

If we look at its results in the eastern states then we can see that it has also established itself as the representative of east German interests, regularly taking 25-30% of the votes there. Its support in East Berlin (48% in 2001) led to it forming a coalition government with the SPD. This combination of east German interests married with a strongly working-class flavour in the west – enabling it to pick up disaffected social democratic votes in the Saarland and North Rhine Westphalia – means that it is an important political player in federal politics, far more so than the flash-in-the-pans of the Alternative für Deutschland and Pirates. In the run-up to this election it is consistently at 8-10% in the opinion polls.

Gregor Gysi, the Left leader, is an important factor in the popularity of the party. He is a feisty political campaigner and knows how to play an audience. During this election campaign he has come up time and again as the best media performer and as a politician who is seen as authentic. In the 1980s, he was a lawyer in the GDR who represented many of the main dissidents in their struggle against the bureaucracy. This meant that he had contact with the Stasi – as a result, allegations that he was a Stasi informer himself have followed him around since 1990. This is one of the major reasons why a coalition of leftist parties (the SPD, the Greens and the Left) has never been possible, despite the electoral arithmetic which often gives them a combined theoretical majority. The fact that the east German Greens in particular emerged from the dissident movement means that they are not prepared to go into coalition with what they still see as the successor to the old ruling Communist party.

However, given that some of the latest polls indicate that the Liberals (currently in coalition with Angela Merkel's CDU) may not get the 5% needed for representation, some in the Greens are still considering a coalition with the CDU, and that the most likely outcome at the moment is a grand coalition of the CDU/CSU and the SPD, one thing is for sure: no matter how much the others may hope for its demise, the Left party will continue to stick around as one of the few true oppositional parties in German politics.

(3)

German Left Party Advocates Three-Party Election Coalition Against Merkel

    Germany's socialist Left Party has urged the center-left Social Democrats and Greens to consider a three-way alliance to beat Chancellor Angela Merkel in this month's elections. The numbers work, but could the alliance?

Deutsche Welle (Germany)
September 9, 2013

The German Left Party on Monday issued its ten-point plan for voters ahead of the national election on September 22.

Key policy proposals like implementing a minimum wage, bolstering pensions and a shorter working week were perhaps predictable; the Left's appeal to other center-left parties to consider a three-way ruling coalition at the federal level was more of a surprise.

"We're ready to kick Angela Merkel out of the driving seat," senior party figure Bernd Riexinger said, before questioning whether the other opposition parties could say the same. Riexinger said that the Social Democrats and Greens were so keen to exclude the Left from any potential alliances that this unwillingness had turned them into "Mrs. Merkel's best piece of life insurance."

According to current opinion polls, the Social Democrats and Greens do not look likely to win the outright victory they set as their combined election goal. Adding the estimated 8 percent of the vote that the Left might hope to secure, however, a three-way alliance could theoretically pass the winning post.

Foreign policy hurdles

As Germany's most left-leaning mainstream party, the Left's domestic policies diverge from the Social Democrats on several levels - but perhaps the most fundamental difference can be found in foreign policy.

Seasoned campaign manager Frank Stauss says he's been left yawning at the election offensives of the two main rivals in Germany's federal polls this year, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. (08.09.2013)

The Left is the only completely pacifist German party, saying German troops should never be stationed abroad and arguing for the abolition of NATO. One of the Left's ten proposals released on Monday was a blanket ban on deploying the German Bundeswehr on any foreign mission during the four-year legislative period.

"A Left Party that is not reliable on foreign policy … we cannot envisage any cooperation with them," Green party candidate Katrin Göring-Eckardt said.

The Social Democrats, meanwhile, said that neither a coalition, nor even so-called "toleration" from the Left would be acceptable. Toleration is a comparatively rare situation in German politics where a party agrees to prop up a minority government without formally joining it.

The Left and the Social Democrats are allies in some of Germany's state governments, but the former has never been involved in a national government in Germany.

With less than two weeks to go until the election, the current coalition received some bad news in Monday's press. Merkel's junior coalition partners, the pro-business Free Democrats, slipped to 4 percent in a poll conducted by the Insa Institute for the German daily newspaper Bild. German parties must secure at least 5 percent of the overall vote to guarantee themselves representation in parliament.

Current polls, which put Merkel's Christian Democrats comfortably ahead overall, suggest that the Free Democrats' ability to clear this hurdle will decide whether there is a change in the German government.