Things have changed rapidly in Germany. In September 1998, the Social Democratic Party SPD scored a big victory in the Bundestag elections, ousting the bourgeois coalition under Kohl which had held power for 16 years. The start of the new "red-green" coalition government under chancellor Schröder was accompanied by aspirations of millions of workers, unemployed, old age pensioners and youth. Now the SPD as well as the Greens are stumbling from defeat to catastrophe to disaster. When in the last major partial election of a four month election marathon starting with the June 1999 Euro election, the SPD losses in the Berlin local elections of October 10 were smaller than many activists and commentators had expected - Schröderites in the party apparatus celebrated this as a positive sign of stabilisation. Yet 22.4% in the city of Willy Brandt where the party had safe overall majorities in the 1950s and 1960s was the worst result since WW2.
Superficial observers could come to the conclusion that the masses are turning back to Kohl´s Christian Democrats. In fact, the Christian democrats scored big gains in percentage in virtually all of these elections and managed to take over social democratic strongholds such as the state governments of Hessen and the Saarland and the town halls of important cities such as Cologne, Düsseldorf and Essen. Should this trend continue, and should the SPD lose their strongholds in Schlesweig Holstein and Northrhine-Westphalia next spring, the Schröder administration will be in most serious trouble.
The CDs do appear to be the strongest and most stable bourgeois party of Europe, having recovered rapidly from the historic defeat in 1998. However, the election results of 1999 are not an expression of enthusiasm with the CDs but rather an expression of frustration and disappointment with the Social Democratic dominated Schröder government.
A general feature has been the low turn-out in all the recent elections; in some urban areas of British and American dimensions well below 50%, and there was not a major swing of millions to the CDs. In the states of Brandenburg and the Saarland the number of non-voters has doubled since the 1998 general election. Whereas the CDs managed to mobilise their electoral potential much better, the SPD failed completely.
In comparison with the number of SPD voters in September 1998, the SPD lost:
26% in Hessen in February
38% in Bremen in June
59% in the Euro elections nationally
31% in the Saaraland in September
61% in Thuringia in September
71% in Saxony in September
53% in Berlin in October.
In addition to the generally high abstention, in the Eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony, Brandenburg, and East Berlin, the PDS (the former East German CP which in the last two national elections scored over 5% and has stabilised itself) gained at the expense of the SPD. In Thuringia, the PDS for the first time eclipsed the SPD, and in Saxony the SPD scored less than half of the votes cast for the PDS. This shows that when there is a strong and established party to the left of the SPD (and not just a small sectarian grouplet) taking up burning questions of workers and unemployed and one parent families and raising "social equality" slogans, gains are possible. However, the PDS is still mainly a party of the East and has only just managed to reach 3000 members in the West (over 85,000 in the East). Nevertheless, in the elections in West Berlin as well as in the municipal elections in the industrial heartlands of the West, in Northrhine Westphalia, the PDS made some advances and gained dozens of local councillors (over 4% in the City of Duisburg). But elsewhere (such as in the Saarland state elections) the PDS in the West is still at the level of a one percenter.
Of course, Marxists must not be surprised by the fact that a government lead by the German Blairite Schröder and firmly based on capitalism and liberalism should come into serious trouble and frustrate their working class and left wing supporters before long. What is surprising, however, is the fact how quickly this crisis has developed.
Under the pressure from below and from the unions, the SPD election manifesto had contained some clear statements in favour of the reversal of some drastic cuts and attacks carried out under Kohl. This was enthusiasticly applauded in the election rallies and - against the background of a general time-for-a-change feeling - secured victory. However, the manifesto also stated that any further reform objective was strictly subject to the financial premises in the state budget, thus hinting that after an initial honeymoon period harsh cuts would be on the order of the day.
The Hessen election in February marked the end of the honeymoon period for the Schröder administration when the Christian Democrats on the basis of a racist campaign managed to score a narrow, unexpected victory and take over the state government there. Their ambitious and reactionary leader Koch had campaigned with law and order slogans, mainly on his opposition against double nationality for immigrants. It was a relatively progressive step and overdue piece of legislation proposed by the Schröder government to enable millions of immigrants to acquire German nationality without necessarily abandoning their original nationality (a matter of course in many Western countries). However, when reactionaly folk were mobilised to sign petitions "against the foreigners" on CD stalls up and down the country and the victory of Koch intimidated tame social democrats, Schröder rushed to make a watered down compromise on the issue with the liberal Free Democrats (who had been in Kohl´s government for 16 years but would not support the racist campaign).
Only a few weeks later, the conflict between big business and the Schröderites on the one hand and the then finance minister and SPD chairman, Oskar Lafontaine, reached new heights. 22 top managers from the commanding heights of the economy warned Schröder not to introduce changes in the tax system proposed by Lafontaine. The major insurance company, Allianz, threatened to move their headquarters abroad. The Handelsblatt newspaper, a sort of German Financial Times, on March 1 quoted a top manager saying that the "revolution of big business has begun". As against Schröder and the minister of the economy, Müller (a non-party member and former industrial manager), Lafontaine made public statements in those days saying that the big companies and banks had enough cash to make a bigger financial contribution to the state revenue. With ideas motivated by Keynesianism and the aim to exert an effective political control of the finance sector, Lafontaine provoked conflicts with big business and their direct representatives in the cabinet and at the same time encouraged the unions to fight for bigger wage rises in the wage round in February and March.
In mid-March, Lafontaine resigned from all his political positions (cabinet minister, party chairman and MP). Although he had never been a consistent left-winger, nevertheless he had embodied hopes and had been a point of reference for many left-wingers and trade unionists, and had been seen as a counter-weight to Blairism in the SPD. This was a major shock for many grassroot activists. Lafontaine renounced everything, leaving the path open to Schröder who was elected party chairman in a special conference convened a month later. It is clear that on the basis of an open political fight against the right turn of the government, Lafontaine could have got an enormous echo and support. But he went home and kept his mouth shut. It was not until May Day that he reappeared in public and made statements critical of the policy pursued by the Schröder administration.
Party and union activists had only just digested the shock after Lafontaine‘s resignation when for the first time after 54 years the German army was involved in warfare. The new coalition, above all the new green foreign minister Fischer, had emphasised "continuity" in German foreign policy and thus for them it was matter of course that Germany should actively participate in the NATO war against Yugoslavia. Whereas in other European imperialist countries such as Britain and France imperialist wars had always been on the order of the day even in the so called "post-war period", in Germany pacifism and the idea of abstention from international military intervention had had a strong basis in the labour movement. The fact that it was a "red-green" coalition that launched the third aggressive war of Germany against Serbia within the century produced shock and disgust with many labour movement activists. Although under the impact of media and government propaganda a silent majority in the country (especially in the West) and loyal members in the labour organisations tolerated the war (there was no enthusiasm for the war), a number of party activists with a long tradition broke with the party apparatus and resigned from membership.
Another blow followed suit. Just a few days before the Euro elections the Blair-Schröder document arguing for the "third way" was launched, allegedly to mobilise voters from the "new centre". Yet Schröder´s SPD and Blair´s Labour turned out to be the main losers of the Euro elections. Of the 20 million votes cast nationally for the SPD in 1998, the party lost nearly 12 million this time!
Although ordinary working people do not normally bother much about manifestos and long written documents, the message was clearly felt by many party and union activists - many of whom keep the local ward branches, the district organisations, the union branches and shop steward comitees going: this allegedly "modern" Blair-Schröder document represents an attempted break with 150 years of labour movement traditions and a recipe for privatisation, for the further dismantling of the welfare state and attacks on the poor and the unemployed.
The practical counterpart of this document followed suit. Just before the summer holidays, the cabinet passed a programme of cuts to the amount of 30 billion DM per year which will hit especially the unemployed and old age pensioners, whereas corporations and the rich in general are to be found on the winning side. Whereas in the 1998 election Schröder had promised that combatting unemployment was going to be the number one task of his new administration, now it is sound budgets, sound budgets, sound budgets, with the unemployed being subjected to more pressure to accept any job however badly paid it might be.
Schröder would like to present himself as an iron chancellor, and after the defeat in the Euro elections he promised that his home policy would be "going to be as good as his foreign policy" (what a threat!!!). As though they lived in cloud cuckoo land, government protagonists argue that their course may be unpopular for the time being but will produce results in the medium term and lay the basis for a sustained boom and a return to office in the 2002 elections. However, not only in the case of a world economic crisis could they quickly find themselves in the abyss.
It should not come as a surprise that party and union activists at recent conferences have voiced strong criticism of the government line. This is the most serious crisis of the SPD for decades, and landslide defeats in elections have acquired proportions not reached since the 1920s and 30s. The question is: how is this opposition voiced and organised. And here you see the problem of left wing activists who hope that someone on the top will voice their criticism and express some sort of left alternative: Lafontaine, in his typical individualism, gave up all his positions and consulted nobody. Although his new book expresses important points of criticism, he has remained virtually silent over more than six decisive months. A close friend of Lafontaine´s and his successor as prime minister in the Saarland, Reinhard Klimmt, was seen as a new champion and mouthpiece by many workers in the region when he openly voiced criticism of the government cuts and demanded more social justice. With his semi opposition against Schröder, Klimmt managed to motivate party activists to show fighting spirit in the election campaign. In fact, the SPD there lost to a smaller degree than elsewhere (see figures above) and was only defeated by the regional CDs with a very narrow margin. Yet only three days after his defeat in the Saarland, this "working class champion" who had promised that he would keep course before and after the elections was bought off as he agreed to move to Berlin to become the new minister of transport in the Schröder administration.
Many of those who are seen as the party "left", MPs and regional leading figures loosely grouped around the "Frankfurter Kreis", have stated they they were not too happy about the lack of social justice in the recent programme of cuts but that they were going to vote in favour anyway.
A new opposition current of some 40 MPs (not the leading figures of the Frankfurter Kreis but a number of "back benchers" with more grassroot connections and some left wing identity) has come out with an open document which puts forward fundamental criticism of both the Blair-Schröder document and the programme of cuts. Yet the decisive driving force of this loose opposition, former Juso deputy chair Uwe Hiksch, surprised his co-supporters in late September as he suddenly decided to resign from the SPD and join the PDS two days later. The problem is that again this was a purely individualist step. Hiksch had won a Bavarian constitutency from the CD s in 1998 but obviously so far has not found a handful of local party activists who would be prepared to follow him. If he had remained an SPD MP and voted against the cuts, he could have become a point of refernce for many acitivists. His resignation before any real fight against the Schröderites has taken place has caused further confusion rather than strengthening the opposition.
Nevertheless, in local party organisations there is a ferment taking place. Schröder got a hammering from delegates at a regional party conference in Bochum (Ruhr) the end of September. In Frankfurt local party acitivists pressed for a special city party conference which eventually condemned the programme of cuts. Some have formed opposition circles with the aim of retying the knots with the good old days of Willy Brandt. Although there is a lot of politicial confusion and all those who have left the party recently are missing when it comes to taking a vote or electing delegates for higher organs, the ferment and crisis will continue. Schröder is not in exactly the same position as Blair. Party and union activists as well as millions of working people are about to learn painful lessons. There is no progressive solution to unemployment or the huge budget deficit without the nationalisation of the banks and giant industrial monopolies. The ideas of Marxism have a strong traditions in the German labour movement and are going to find a fertile soil again in the coming period. What we need is not a saviour from the top but to organise the alternative from below.
Hans-Gerd Öfinger
October, 1999
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