By Hans-Gerd Öfinger
March 14, 2000
In Germany, the new millenium has been ushered in by a partyfinancing and corruption scandal which was more exciting than manythrillers and caused a political earthquake of unprecedenteddimensions. The Christian Democratic Party (CDU) which until the endof 1999 appeared to be the most solid and united bourgeois party inEurope and given the difficulties for Schröder´s"red-green" coalition had appeared to be close to a return to power,suddenly saw its popular support shrink from day to day. The crisishas culminated in an open split between Helmut Kohl (who had beenFederal Chancellor for 16 years and party leader for 25 years) andthe majority in the party leadership and membership including some ofhis hitherto closest cronies. Kohl renounced his position as honorarychairman of the party and did not turn up in parliament for fourmonths but has not surrendered.
Over 50 years, Germany´s Christian Democrats had been capableof maintaining a dominant position in home politics. Being founded in1946 as a merger of various bourgeois parties and tendencies that hadexisted in the pre-Hitler Weimar Republic, the CDU has managed morethan any other of their sister parties to maintain popular supportand win all but two out of 14 general elections since 1949. Being abourgeois party, it has always been decisively influenced by leadingbig business circles who organised the fund raising and thecollecting of donations from millionaires and industrialists. At thesame time, they had largely managed to maintain popular supportamongst small businessmen, middle classes, farmers and self-employedpeople and their associations as well as civil servants and aminority of the working class especially in catholic and/or ruralareas. Many of those fellow travellers and party activists who hadalways had illusions in the "christian", "law and order" and moralistslogans cynically used by the leaders have been shocked anddisillusioned enormously by the recent revelations about moneylaundering, illegal party funding and the high degree of criminalenergy displayed by leaders such as Kohl and Kanther (the former HomeSecretary/Minister of the Interior) whom not so long ago theyregarded as law-abiding and honest men.
Money laundering
Revelations began when the Augsburg Department of PublicProsecution initiated investigations and the interrogation of theformer CDU treasurer Walter Leisler Kiep. The almost daily exposureshighlighted facts that do not surprise Marxists but come as a shockto all those who wrongly believe that politicians who make andexecute laws were really law-abiding. According to German laws onparty financing, the names of all major donors have to be published.The system of black funds involving banks in Liechtenstein andSwitzerland has consistently been created under Kohl´sleadership in order to avoid this obligation. Like old women who donot trust the banks and keep their savings in stockings or undertheir pillows, the Christian democrats used messengers who carriedmillions of Deutsche Marks in banknotes from one place to the other.Whereas the issue of compensation for the few surviving slavelabourers under Hitler´s Nazi regime is still not settled, theregional leaders of the Hessen CDU around Kanther had the cheek tocynically claim that they had received considerable anonymousdonations from deceased Jewish industrialists until in the end underthe pressure of continous revelations they had to admit that it wasjust a lie and fairy tale.
The revelations so far are obviously only the tip of the iceberg.But it has been made absolutely clear that money buys and rules theworld and in concrete cases money makes the decisive difference toget certain political decisions passed. In 1991, Kohl intervenedpersonally to get German tanks delivered to the regime in SaudiArabia - and shortly after the CDU was donated one million Marks bythe industrialists concerned. There is the case of AgnesHürland-Büning, a third rate politician and former deputyminister who got an 8.5 million DM fee for "consulting" the Thyssencompany. There is the case of former deputy minister Holger Pfahls(who used to be the right hand of the former Bavarian ChristianDemocratic leader Strauss) who is being searched by the lawenforcement authorities on a warrant of arrest.
In East Germany, where Western capitalists and many dubiousspeculators and "investors" have made a fortune out of theprivatisation and sell out of industries, premises and assets, manyare beginning to realise that with Kohl´s promise in 1990 tocreate democracy and prosperity for all have been betrayed onceagain. In this context, it has become known that the French oilcompany Elf Aquitaine has donated 85 million DM from black fundswhich have leaked into Germany through different channels (includingonce again foundations in Liechtenstein and Swiss banks) and inreturn got the privatised East German petrol stations at a very goodprice and at the same time got billions of Deutschmark as subsidiesfor the takeover and modernisation of the Leuna oil refinery. Yet thefiles and records on these and other deals and transactions seem tohave been removed from the Federal Chancellor´s Office undermisterious circumstances before the Christian Democrats had to handover the keys to Schröder´s team in 1998.
Breathing space for Social Democrats
The scandal around Kohl and the CDU has meant a breathing spacefor the Social Democrats who shortly after their takeover of officein autumn 1998 had lost in virtually every regional election in 1999.But in February 2000 - against previous expectations and fears - theywere able to defend power in the Northern state of Schleswig-Holsteinwhere the Christian Democrats were clearly defeated. In the state ofHessen, where the SPD lost power in early 1999 after the localChristian Democrats had waged a racist campaign and scored anunexpected victory, the SPD is campaigning for a dissolution of theregional parliament since the Christian democrats there have beenheavily involved in all this financial business; two thirds of thepopulation are convinced that the Hessen prime minister and CDUleader Koch is not as innocent and ignorant as he claims to be.
But by and large, many SPD leaders - while scoring points for thedecisive regional election in Northrine Westfalia in May - seem to bekeen to save the CDU from collapsing and disappearing from thepolitical scenery and keep saying that a strong and renovated CDU wasindispensable for a well functioning democracy and that without theCDU figures like Haider would have a chance in Germany and thereforeit was better to have the CDU and so on and so forth.
So they give the new generation of CDU leaders such as theprospective new party chair Angela Merkel (who comes from the Eastand was promoted by Kohl since 1990 but as General Secretary since1998 distanced herself from Kohl just in time in late 1999 to beregarded as "Anti-Kohl", "fresh" and "non-corrupted") and the newparliamentary leader Friedrich Merz (a reactionary demagogue) the"democratic" credentials they do not deserve. "The reds and greenscould do anything they liked, and we are paralysed", a CDU politicianrightly deplored in January 2000. But the "reds" and "greens" do byand large what big business likes and seem to be keen to collaboratewith the CDU on decisive issues. So big business leaders haveaccomodated themselves with the perspective that the coalition underSchröder might last longer than they had initially envisaged.Although big business is still mainly oriented towards the CDU, theycan live very well with the Schröder government from which -after the May elections - they will expect, demand and probably getmore "reforms" in terms of liberalisation and deregulation as well asdrastic cuts in the welfare state.
In addition, there have also been revelations about "personalabuse" of power by regional SPD leaders which lead to the resignationof Schröder´s successor as prime minister of Lower Saxony,Glogowski, and the Finance Minister of Northrhine Westfalia,Schleusser. It is true that the charges concerned amount to "peanuts"in comparison with the systematic money-laundering and breach of thelaw by the Kohl apparatus, and it is also true that Social Democraticleaders are "cheaper" than Christian Democrats, but ordinary workersand labour movement activists expect "their" leaders to be differentfrom the bourgeois politicians.
No real democracy under capitalism
This crisis is more than just a crisis of the CDU and anaccumulation of some unfortunate mistakes of vertain individuals. Itis a crisis of a social system in which money and profit ruleeverything and morals and decency are subordinated. It reveals thegap between the fine words of "democrats" and "civilised christians"and their actual rottenness. In the 20th century, Germany saw sharpchanges of different political regimes. But one thing has notchanged: the rule of big business who accomodated themselves with allsorts of political leaders and superstructures and bought thepolitical decisions they wantes. Above all in an epoch of almostdaily spectacular new mergers we must be aware of the fact thateconomic power is also political power.
After the collapse of the Nazi regime and the end of the SecondWorld war in 1945, many activists in the labour movement had thislesson in their minds and tried to build a new democracy based onsocialist foundations. "Monopoly capital has helped Hitler to takepower and prepare the war against Europe. While huge fortunes canstill be accumulated in the hands of irresponsible individuals inGermany, democracy is not safe. The enormous economic power of thecompanies must be taken over into common ownership", SPD leader KurtSchumacher rightly pointed out in 1945. Since then, the SPD and unionleaders as well as many activists have forgotten this essentiallesson of history.
From the German Marxist magazineDerFunke