GERMANY'S ELECTIONS ON SUNDAY: WHAT'S AT STAKE? A DIRELAND Exclusive from Germany

The following report from Germany on the coming elections on Sunday -- written exclusively for DIRELAND -- is by Stefan Reinecke, a senior editor of Die Tageszeitung, the left-wing German daily known familiarly to everyone as TAZ. This 25-year-old non-commercial, Berlin-based daily --which also has editions in Bremen and Hanover -- is sustained by contributions from a 6000-plus member readers' association, and has a national circulation of around 100,000. TAZ was born out of the ecologist, feminist, and pacifist movements of the '70s, but is respected for its seriousness -- TAZ is also publisher of the German edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. Stefan Reinecke's article was translated from the German by our old friend and frequent DIRELAND contributor, Norman Birnbaum (who dissected Germany's Political Crisis for this blog in July).

The latest polls suggest that Chancellor Schroeder and the Social Democrats are still in the running, even though it seemed only a few weeks ago that the center-right parties (the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party Christian Social Union, and the Free Democrats) were certain to win. What is really happening, three days before the election?

Let’s take a brief look back. What Germans call the Red-Green coalition [of the SPD and the Greens] capitulated to electoral unrest in May of this year, after it lost the election in Germany’s largest state, North Rhineland-Westphalia, where the Social Demcorats had ruled for 39 years. Schroeder (left), despite his continuing parliamentary majority, decided to hold an early election. His record was miserable: five million unemployed, a large budgetary deficit, and a profound ideological crisis in his own party.

The Red-Green coalition began in 1998 with a clear program tht included ending nuclear power and an ecological energy policy, the modernization of nationality-and-immigration law, and the defense of the welfare state. After its 2002 re-election, the coalition's politics took on a different coloration. Yes, civil rights and nationality laws were successfully altered. But the welfare state was reorganized. Medical payments were increased, and the unemployed were put under pressure to look for jobs or face loss of their unemployment insurance -- but there were  no jobs. Had conservative Chancellor Helmuth Kohl (right) attempted this program in the '90s, the trade unions and the SPD would have rebelled. Schroeder concentrrated on helping business by reducing taxes. No doubt, compared with the US or the UK. Germany still has a large welfare state.and solidary institutions. Still, the deregulation of the labor market brought no new jobs, and unemployment now extends from the unskilled to the educated middle classes. Schroeder behaved like an authoritarian, declaring that there was no alternative -- but why remain a Social Democrat, just to obey the force of constraint? The SPD since 1998 has lost almost a quarter of its members, was deserted by workers and the unemployed in the last fifteen state elections -- and lost them. Since taking power from the conservatives, Schroeder’s SPD has never made clear just how far its shrinking of the welfare state will go. As the election campaign began, only a third of the original voters for the Red-Green coalition wished for a new edition of it -- the SPD and Greens together had sunk dramatically from around 49 percent of the electorate to less than 35 percent, while the CDU-CSU and Free Democrats -- although no one knew what they would do in office -- seemed to have a clear majority.

All that has changed in the last two weeks. The SPD alone should be able to bring its own share of the vote to upwards of 35 percent. A majority for the CDU-CSU and the Free Democrats is very uncertain. What happened? Angela Merkel (left), the conservatives' candiate for Chancellor, climbed to the top of the CDU by a relentless striving for power, and has been generally underestimated. An East German by origin, she has not adopted the West German model of consensus on the welfare state, but instead is an unabashed supporter of deregulation of the economy and slashing the size of government and the social safety net.. She seeks a break with the German tradition, going back to Bismarck, of a strong welfare state. What made all of this clear to the public was the egregious and unsympathetic figure of her advisor and potential Finance Minister, Professor Paul Kirchhof (lower left), a flat-taxer who wants everyone to pay 25 percent. Now Merkel's previous handy majority in the polls has shrunk, and the workers are returning to the SPD as the lesser evil.

What about the Greens and the new Left Party [Die Linkspartei]? At the moment, whether there is a coalition of the CDU-CSU and Free Democrats, or of the CDU and CSU with the Social Democrats, the Greens will go into oppposition .That is not a catastrophe for the Greens, whose electorate consists of the ageing but socially integrated supporters of the alternative social movements of the '70s. The Green party  in government has had to follow the SPD, and has become dependent upon the leadership of Joschka Fischer (right), Schroeder's Foreign Minister and the former leader of the party's "realo" [or realist] faction. In opposition, the Greens could liberate themselves from SPD domination (and from Fischer) and seek to find an identity—somewhere between a modern left party and an ecologically-oriented neoconservative one. The Greens live from and for surplus morality, and will expire if they only serve as a means for the SPD to form a majority.

The most interesting thing in this election is the emergence of the new Left Party, a hastily constructed fusion of the PDS) the Party of Democratic Socialism—the successor party to the Socialist Unity Party, the state party in Communist Germany) and the WASG (Electoral Alternative for Employment and Social Justice.) The WASG was organized above all by left trade unionists repelled by Schroeder’s course. The PDS has never attracted voters  in the West, although it is a strong party in the East, and is even part of the Berlin city government (in coalition there with the SPD.) Moreover, the PDS is colorless and routinized.. The WASG has one strong figure -- the former SPD Chair and Finance Minister, Oskar Lafontaine (right), who left ministry, party and political life in 1999 in a break with Schroeder. The SPD prizes loyalty, and has never forgiven him. Lafontaine is a gifted tribune of the people, although some suspect he's motivated by ego-driven revenge as much as by the desire to build a new left-democratic force. The staying power of the new Left Party is very much in doubt, since in the West it appeals almost exclusively to male trade unionists. If in the West it could attract those who now are on the left wing of the Greens, the situation would be different.-- but this fused Linkspartei does not seem able to break out of a narrow Western milieu, and has a somewhat aged Keynesianism as its ideology. Still, this Left Party coalition (with the PDS getting nearly thirty percent of the vote in the east) should win eight or nine percent of the national vote That would make it the third largest party in the Parliament, ahead of both the Free Democrats and Greens. The chances of a coalition government of SPD, Greens and Left Party---even if arithmetically possible—are almost nonexistent: Lafontaine and the ex-Communist cadres in the east do not appeal to the SPD or to the Greens as serious partners. Moreover, Shroeder just told the daily Passauer Neue Presse that such a coalition is out of the question, and that there would be "no form of collaboration" witth the Left Party.

What now? On Sunday, the Germans have the choice between a coalition of CDU-CSU and Free Democrats, and with it a free-maket revolt against the Federal Republic’s political consensus around the welfare state ---or a Grand Coalition of SPD and CDU-CSU, which would continue Schroeder’s present economic course. Even if Merkel should become Chancellor of a government witb the FDP, and therefore much more autonomous and powerful than if she were constrained by the SPD, we will not experience Thatcherism. There are too many checks and balances in the German political system. Although the old social Christian and trade union grouping in the CDU and CSU have lost influence, they are still there. How far Merkel (and the FDP leader, Guido Westerwelle) can go is an open question: it depends upon how much resistance the trade unions could organize. One thing is clear: Merkel, herself a woman from east Germany, will not lead a cultural crusade against the values of the '60s social movements. Westerwelle (left) himself is openly homosexual, and that the right has accepted these two leaders shows that the '60s movements have won the German cultural struggle.

Should there result a Grand Coalition of SPD and CDU-CSU, presumably under Merkel and withoiut Schroeder, the prospects of those seeking to retain the welfare state will be appreciably greater. The SPD will brake the market party and win support for doing so. Meanwhile, the Greens can reinvent themselves in the opposition, and the Left Party can attempt to establish itself. The chances for the left as a whole would be larger. The example of Sweden shows that the split in the Social Democratic party, even if lengthy, may have positive consequences. The left is helped when its traditionalists, no onger attracted by the Schroeder-led SPD, have their own political home. An alliance of the Social Democrats, the Left Party and the Greens might then be possible in the next election four years hence.

In the background, however, there is a threat of voter alienation. The voters are fed up with politics, and judge all the parties with devastating negativity. On the one hand, he erstwhile supporters of the Red-Green coalition no longer approve of it -- and on the other hand, even when the CDU-CSU had an absolute majority in the polls, two-thirds of the public said they did not believe that Merkel would improve the economy. Ten years ago, half of the voters said they were interested in politics -- but now it is only 25 percent.

There's a lot to be said for the notion that Germans will elect Merkel (left) as Chancellor because they think it does not matter who is in office. Even if the electoral participation is high on Sunday, many Germans vote casually. This absence of .selectivity, this new moodiness of the voters, is not entirely irrational. After all, Schroeder’s SPD proclaimed for years that there was no alternative political project, that national politics could not do anything against the power of global capitalism. Under these circumstances, the public is left with the vague hope that "the others" can do better.

This contempt for politics is true of party politics but not of civil society. New social movements keep forming, and one sees everything from help for refugees to volunteer work with kids in sports clubs. The Germans are cranky and even unreliable as voters, but not as citizens. In some other European nations -- Austria, the Netherlands, France -- contempt for politics has led to extremist right wing populist politics; but the parties of Jorg Haider (left), Pim Fortuyn (right) and Jean-Marie Le Pen have virtually destroyed themselves. In Germany, this sort of politics -- a kind of populist "soft post-fascism" -- has been taboo, but the sensibility behind it is present. Perhaps the rapid rise of the Left Party is a signal, for it, too, also attracts an authoritarian group of followers, seeking relief from the demands of globalization and the precarious freedoms of post-Fordism. The once exceedingly stable German party system may face, in the immediate future, a real earthquake. -- by Stefan Reinecke (left)

If you missed the Christopher Hitchens - George Galloway debate on Iraq live, and would like to see as well as hear it, C-SPAN 2 is telecasting it on Saturday, September 17 at 9:00 pm and Sunday, September 18 at 12:00 pm and Monday, September 19 at 5:30 am