The left in Germany is still haunted by the fall of the Berlin Wall. The latest angst has been over a regional election in Thuringia. It looks like the Left party – which won – will go into coalition with the Social Democrats and the Greens. That would make the minister president of the region a left politician.
Nothing abnormal in that you would think. Except this is eastern Germany and the Left party is formed out of a Social Democrat splinter group and the PDS, the successor party to the East German communists.
The prospect of such a coalition was too much for the current German president Joachim Gauck. He is a former East German Lutheran pastor who was an anti-communist human rights activist: he helped overthrow the East German regime, and then in the 1990s became the chief investigator of Stasi files.
He has been outraged by developments in Thuringia. In an interview with ARD, Germany’s equivalent of the BBC, he broke with protocol – the president is supposed to be above day-to-day politics – and said: ‘Is the party which the minister president will represent really so very different from the communist party, which oppressed the people, that we can really trust it?’
Some in Germany hoped the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 would lead to a reunification of the left. They hoped the split that had occurred between the communists and the social democrats in 1914 could be healed as the two countries came together.
Others hoped at least for a soft reunification of both countries and that the two political cultures would gently merge to form a better, more leftwing, but not communist society.
In the 1990 election the Social Democrat leader Oskar Lafontaine ran a campaign more or less on that basis, and opposed the CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s plans for quick reunification. It seems like a crazy policy now, but Lafontaine was sceptical of German nationalism and a strong proponent of Europe. He had support from other European leaders like Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand, scared of a strong Germany. Lafontaine was, of course, on the wrong side of history, something his erstwhile hero and mentor Willy Brandt knew well when he declared just after the fall of the Wall: ‘Now grows together what belongs together.’ Kohl triumphed on the back of Social Democrat divisions and went on to push through a currency union at the economically disastrous, but politically expedient rate of one to one. This was no ‘soft’ reunification but was forged on a tide of popular euphoria.
We lived in Berlin for much of that time and witnessed a ruthless political triumph for the West German system. Though there were large subsidies, the East German economy was effectively shut down and many lost their jobs. West German firms subsumed or closed down all industry and West Germans took over many of the leading positions in universities and the public sector.
Towards the end of the 1990s Kohl was mired in scandal and the Social Democrats won an election with the Greens. Gerhard Schroeder’s uninspiring promise was: ‘We won’t do everything differently, but we will do it a lot better.’ Schroeder ran a ‘third way’ government inspired by the Clinton presidency in the United States and the Blair administration in the United Kingdom, with socially progressive policies on immigration and gay rights. But he also pursued a more neoliberal agenda than Germany was used to, cutting welfare and pension payments and lowering direct taxation.
While in Britain the discontented left had nowhere to go, in Germany there was the ready-made PDS, successor to the East German communists, with its charismatic leader Gregor Gysi. It was there that the former SPD leader Lafontaine ended up, and since Schroeder lost the election in 2005 the left has not known what it is doing.
After last year’s general election a coalition between the Left, the Greens and the Social Democrats would have seen an overall left majority in the German Bundestag, but the Social Democrats, would not even contemplate it and instead went into coalition as a junior partner with the conservative CDU.
It is not surprising the SPD is so reluctant: as the anniversary of the reunification approaches, Social Democrats find themselves again accused by conservative opponents of being against reunification. The TV channel ZDF mischieviously ran a ‘fact or fiction’ check on this last week – concluding it to be fiction.
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Sally Gimson is a journalist and councillor in the London borough of Camden. She lived in Berlin from 1994 to 2000 and worked as a news producer for Deutsche Welle Television. She tweets @SallyGimson
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