Exclusive: Norman Birnbaum on GERMANY'S POLITICAL CRISIS -- And Why its Left is in Disarray (Updated)

The following report, the latest in an occasional series, was written especially for  DIRELAND by Norman Birnbaum -- who has just returned from Berlin, Brussels, and Paris.

Norman (left) is University Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law School, and author--most recently--of After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism In The Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press), among other books. Norman was a founding editor of New Left Review, was on the editorial board of Partisan Review, and is on the editorial board of The Nation. Norman, who got his doctorate in sociology from Harvard, has also taught at the London School of Economics, Oxford University, the University of Strasbourg and Amherst College, has had academic appointments in Italy and Germany, and has been a consultant to the National Security Council.

After Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder convinced many in his own party to abstain in a parliamentary vote of confidence, he deliberately lost the vote, and asked the President to dissolve the parliament and order new elections. Those who, in his own coalition (Greens and Social Democrats), actually lack confidence in the Chancellor also oppose elections this fall, and prefer to wait until the scheduled date next summer -- they refused Schroeder's request and voted confidence in the government. It is somewhat uncertain that the President will agree to the request, as he might decide that Schroeder (right) can indeed govern, however beleaguered, until next year. If he does agree, some parliamentarians will ask the Constitutional Court to intervene and order the elections to be held on the original schedule, Whatever happens, however, it is clear that Germany is experiencing a major political and social crisis.

The major elements of the crisis are: high unemployment (at 11 %); the resistance of a majority of citizens to changes in the welfare state which reduce social protection without increasing investment; and the continuing economic and social crisis in the new federal states once comprising Communist East Germany. The ruling coalition won the election in 2002 narrowly when Schroeder succeeded in making his refusal to send troops to Iraq (and his general criticism of US foreign policy) the central issue. That issue is now subsumed by another one: will the European Union succeed in developing a foreign and security policy which would unite its members in autonomy of the United States?

The conflicts within the European Union -- brought to the surface by the referenda in France and the Netherlands in which their citizenries  rejected the new European Constitution --  will have to be solved before that autonomy is achieved. Those conflicts include the effort by the managers of European capitalism to destroy the European social model, its welfare state --- efforts supported by many of the European Union’s senior officials in Brussels. The European Parliament is relatively powerless to reverse the process, and that intensifies another aspect of the present agony of Europe: the remoteness of the European Union’s decision making institutions and processes from democratic control. The European citizenries accept limitations on national sovereignty for the sake of achieving a more independent, prosperous and stable Europe. They did not sign on to surrendering their political rights.

To this is added yet another problem: the eastward extension of the European Union and the possible inclusion of Turkey strike many western Europeans as going too far, too fast. The potential inclusion of Turkey, in particular, reinforces the unease felt in France, Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands about increasing the resident Muslim immigrant populations. The  French referendum debate included considerable attention, as well, to the fictive figure of the "Polish plumber," (left) working at low wages outside the social protection system and taking jobs from French workers.

The incidence of these problems on Germany is considerable . The German public resents black market work by immigrants from eastern Europe---and the unions point out that large firms prefer to invest in new factories in countries like Hungary and Poland, where labor is cheaper..Indeed, the public in the old Federal Republic (what was West Germany) now thinks that the billions poured into public investment, subsidies and unemployment compensation in the Federal states that once comprised east Germany is good money thrown after bad. With some exceptions, those states are losing the more energetic and educated of their younger populations, who migrate to the west for employment ---leaving behind angry plebeians who are xenophobic and vote for the neo-Nazi groupings. The middle aged and elderly, meanwhile, begin to think that unification was not such a splendid idea. To a large extent, then, when the elections take place—there will be two, one in the west and one in the east.

The Social Democrats and Greens took office in 1998, after Helmut Kohl (below right)and his Christian Democratic Union and the German party of the market, the Free Democrats,  had outworn their welcome --they'd been in power since 1982. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU) are social Christian parties---as much in favor of the welfare state as the Social Democrats and the Greens.The reforms to the welfare state in the period 1982-98 consisted predominantly of extensions of it---like the introduction of compulsory insurance for home care of the elderly. They negotiated with the unions and developed a large modus vivendi with them, the more so as the architect of Kohl’s social policies was himself a unionist (Norbert Blum.)

The two Christian parties are certainly more conservative in cultural terms (on issues like the rights of women and children, the rights of homosexuals, abortion) but they are quite aware that much of their electorate is quite secularized .The social Christian parliamentarians and thinkers who visit the United States regard the moral frenzies of our Protestant Fundamentalists and Catholic traditionalists as a strange reminder of a distant German past. They are decidedly more nationalistic in an ethnic sense, more likely to sympathize with parents and grandparents who were Nazis. Paradoxically, however, the social Christian parties have been from the beginning very active partisans of Franco-German collaboration in particular and the European Union in general. Throughout the Cold War, this was combined rather unsteadily with near total obedience to the commands of the United States.

The Free Democrats (FDP), on this point, were pronouncedly more independent.  Their leader and Foreign Minister for 18 years, Hans-Dietrich Genscher (left), agreed to have US first strike weapons, the Euromissiles, stationed on the territory of the Federal Republic. He then called for an end to armed confrontation in Europe with the words, "Let us modernize our ideas, not our weapons." His successors, should they take over the Foreign Ministry , are decidedly deficient in experience, independence and talent. They, however, opposed their possible future partners, the social Christians, by agreeing to the present coalition’s major alteration in nationality laws, which allowed many immigrants to become citizens

The coalition of Greens and Social Democrats, led by Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (below left) and Schroeder (who was governor of the industrial state of lower Saxony) took office with four major projects. They were "Sixty-Eighters," veterans of the 1968 revolt of the students and the intelligentsia who wished to replace German nationalism with a European cosmopolitanism. That led to emphasis on reconciliation with Poland and Russia, increased developmental assistance to the Third World, an interest in international campaigns for human rights. It also led to the first armed interventions by Germany outside of its borders since 1945—in the Balkans first (Fischer argued that the nation responsible for Auschwitz had a responsibility to intervene militarily against genocide), and later in Afghanistan. It occasioned the present government’s espousal of eventual Turkish membership in the European Union (strenuously opposed by the Christian Democratic and Christian Social parties). It led, too, to German participation in the European Union’s overly discreet but definite support for the Palestinians. Finally, the new German consciousness of international responsibility led to the rejection of the insistent US invitation to send troops to Iraq---and a refusal to allow NATO to become, as it once was, an ancillary of US policy.

The philosophers Juergen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (left)  termed the Franco-German rejection of the Iraq invasion a "European declaration of independence." Perhaps—but  when you next land at Frankfurt airport, look across the field from the passenger terminals. There is the US base with a daily contingent of some thirty or so large transport planes flying to and from Iraq: a really independent Europe would have denied the US overflight rights. It has apparently occurred to the Bush administration that open campaigning for the opposition in the German election can only strengthen Fischer and Schroeder.: The systematic denigration of the German government as a band of irresponsible and ungrateful cowards has been left to entire regiments of eager ideological volunteers in our media and universities.

The second part of the Red-Green project was (and remains) cultural and social. The rejection of a conception of nationality based on German descent (often quite contortedly described) by access to citizenship for immigrants was a belated triumph for the ideas of 1789. (I use the date since the late Josef Goebbels (right) declared in 1933 -- on January 30, when Hitler became Chancellor-- that Germany had finally finished with the legacy of 1789.)

The Kohl government, strenuously opposed by the Vatican, had already liberalized laws on abortion and these were liberalized further.The rights of children and women were reinforced in measures both direct and indirect. Communist Germany had all day kindergartens (as does France), but the new government has been slow to introduce these or reintroduce these in all of Germany---which would greatly  improve women’s ability to enter the labor market. Progress toward legitimizing homosexual unions has been slow, but the social atmosphere has been improved. (The mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit (left) -- a Social Democrat -- is openly gay...but so is the General Secretary of the Free Democratic Party, to the impotent distress of the energetic conservatives amongst the social Christians.)

With the Greens in government, there has been considerable attention to environmental policy---notably, a gradual cessation of the use of nuclear power plants to generate electricity. Investment in alternative sources of energy have been increased (Germany is now covered with windmills). Consumer protection has centered recently on protection against genetically altered foodstuffs -- environmental consciousness in general is high in Germany (it was Kohl who initiated an environmental ministry.) Much of the debate is not in our terribly regressive terms (some regulation against no regulation) but entails arguments on the degree and rate of change to environmental protection. The present coalition claims, correctly, that its environmental policies have created jobs in new technologies.

All of these achievements pale, however, when contrasted with the huge failure of the government to have reduced unemployment. Indeed, it has increased steadily since 1998.  There has been a considerable amount of experimentation—with subsidized low wage jobs, with subsidies for starting one-person firms, with alterations in the Byzantine tax code. These have had no long term effect because of a strike by German capital: it refuses, by and large, to invest a nd that is a matter of political calculation, designed to oust the government or force it to capitulate to capital’s program. What that program is was stated just the other day by a German economist working for the American Morgan Stanley bank. "Neither the SPD nor the CDU propose a profound deregulation of the labor market, an abolition of the industry-wide wage bargaining system, an end of co-determination, an increase in the pension age, or an overhaul of the federal system."

In other words, German capital seeks the Americanization of the German economy.

The most disastrous aspect of Schroeder’s policy has been its lack of clarity. His government, by fits and starts, has attempted to reduce labor costs, to rationalize a system of social benefits (for health, retirement and unemployment) which is directly tied to the job. He and his Ministers have been unclear, however, whether they are dealing with the consequences of demographic change (an aging population with fewer new entrants into the labor force), whether they are seeking to lift burdens on capital, and as to how far they will go in shifting social costs back to the ordinary citizen---whether in the form of cuts in government subsidies or increases in the burden on individual households in paying for essential social provisions. They have adopted—a grave strategic mistake---the term "reform" to designate reductions in social benefits, but have been unable to convince the citizenry that they have a larger design which will in the end maintain the German welfare state.

The Chancellor, despite his own working class roots, must bear some of the responsibility for his government’s failure to reassure its own electorate. His own familiarity with and ease with the managerial elite has not been reciprocated. That elite has been relentless in its sponsorship of its large demolition project---with a veritable army of economists and publicists working for it. The conventional wisdom in Germany once insisted on the superiority of its social model: capital-labor cooperation, investment in the education of a very skilled labor force, the state as legitimate agency of redistribution and economic steering, lifetime employment with an assured share for labor of the nation’s increasing social product. Now, everything has been reversed: one only has to read Der Spiegel, once the relentless defender of Germany’s post-war social achievements and now bitterly denouncing them.

The jagged course of the coalition, its political emergencies and defeats too numerous to enumerate, may flow from an initial conflict. The party’s chair on the eve of the 1998 election was the Governor of the Saarland, Oskar Lafontaine (left). Lafontaine, raised as a Catholic and much influenced by the Church’s doctrines of social solidarity, was originally a physicist. He attracted the hostility of the US by his leadership in the protest movement of the early eighties against the stationing of the Euromissiles, was always a proponent of an independent Europe (I remember a West Berlin politician telling me: "What does Oskar know of the rest of the country—he goes to France for dinner every night."). It was he, however, who proposed that Schroeder run as candidate for the Chancellorship—since he doubted his own national electability. Schroeder, in turn, left the formulation of the common program with the Greens to Lafontaine and took the view that in politics, as in industry, managerial talent was everything. That talent failed him: it became obvious that he had no long term project of his own. In the first months of his government, he agitated the party by issuing a letter with Tony Blair praising the Third Way and its encouragement of individual responsibility and competitiveness, but not mentioning social justice and redistribution. Lafontaine retained the Chairmanship of the Party and was Minister of Finance. Convinced that he was being undermined by the Chancellor, he abruptly resigned in March of 1999 and for the time being left political life altogether. Lafontaine and his advisers were skeptical of the utility and necessity of adhering to the European union’s "stability" pact, which limited the members to budgetary deficits of three percent of Gross National Product, were critical of the anti-inflationary and monetarist concerns (which they rightly thought of as obsessions) of the European Central Bank, and advocated policies which we could term "left Keynesianism." The present situation, in which fear of unemployment and uncertainty as to social provision has led Germany’s citizens to save rather than spend---a situation replicated in France and the Netherlands as well---is one bit of evidence that suggests how right Lafontaine was. To a strike of capital there has been joined a strike of consumers -- no wonder the European economy’s growth rates are low.

The Schroeder government has been practicing involuntary economic asceticism ever since. Its measures have included a complex and as yet untested fusion of unemployment benefits and welfare, an unsuccessful attempt at partial privatization of pensions, the imposition of increased payments for the provision of health services. The budget deficit has continued to rise, despite the selling off (under pressure from the European Union bureaucracy, which seeks to eliminate the public economic sector) of state owned assets.

The SPD's own political deficit has risen, too. Despite the narrow victory in the 2002 elections (made possible by votes in the east), there have been a succession of defeats in state elections. The states of Hesse, Lower Saxony, Saarland, Hamburg were lost in the first term (1998-2002.) This year, there were serious defeats in Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhineland-Westphalia. Schleswig-Holstein is small but had Germany’s only woman Governor, who actually won the election but was sabotaged in the secret vote for the Governorship in the legislature by someone from her own party. North Rhineland-Westphalia is Germany’s largest state and had been governed by Social Democrats for forty years---ever since the Catholic workers of the Ruhr began to vote Social Democratic. With large scale unemployment and uncertainty, their offspring switched electoral allegiances.

That precipitated what Schroeder thought of as a blow for freedom. No sooner the defeat in North Rhineland-Westphalia confirmed than he announced that he would ask the President to dissolve the Parliament so that new elections can be held. His argument is that he has no governing majority, since the opposition controls the upper house (Federal Council) and can use its two-thirds majority there to block legislation passed by the Social Democratic-Green coalition in the Parliament. More surprising is  Schroeder’s frank declaration that his own party and coalition partner’s party are likely to vote against his program in the Parliament. He reached the decision to ask for new elections virtually alone, possibly against the advice of his very intelligent chief of staff---with the man who succeeded him as Chair of the Social Democrats last year, Franz Munterfering (left).

Munterfering has had to deal with vertiginously declining membership in a party which served its members in the recent past as a secular church, with the extreme discontent of both those who think Schroeder has moved far too far to the right and those who think he has not gone far enough, and with the large possibility that after the election, he will be the sole leader of the party. Defeated, Schroeder is very unlikely to continue in politics.

Munterfering, from the industrial Ruhr, is a traditional Social Democrat---and that accounts, no doubt, for his sudden rediscovery of the existence of social classes the other week, when he shocked those who think that class conflict these days is decent only when conducted from the top against the bottom. The managers of international capital, he said, with their German allies, behaved like "locusts"—moving in on Germany and then moving on after devastating it. Indeed, the Social Democrats’ hastily devised electoral program promises to revive the institutions of solidarity and save the welfare state. The public, polled, does not believe this—but it is equally skeptical of the declarations of the other parties. That is regrettable in one respect, since the Greens have produced a document both honest and thoughtful.

The major development of the campaign thus far, however, involves not the established parties but a half new one. A year or so ago, dissidents within and from the Social Democrats began to meet to consider their alternatives. The group consisted of trade unionists, party activists, some academics---but lacked leaders with profile. The group, WASG (Electoral Alternative For Employment And Social Justice), ran candidates in the North Rhineland-Westphalia election and scored a dull two and one-half percent. Five percent is necessary in state and national elections for a party to enter the state and local parliaments. A leader with plenty of profile has now re-emerged, Oskar Lafontaine. He has talked with the leaders of the post-Communist party, the Party of Democratic Socialism -- led by Gregor Gysi (left) -- and they are succeeding in forming a common electoral coalition, east and west. The latest poll showed this new WASG coalition as the leading party in the east, with over 30 % of the vote---and with a score of at least eight percent nationally. The Social Democrats are managing a dismal 27%, the Christian Democratic Union and the Bavarian Christian Social Union together get 44%, the Greens a very solid nine percent, and the Free Democrats obtain seven percent. This last would be enough to qualify them as coalition partners of the Christian parties in the next government.

It is, however---quite apart from the question of whether the election will take place in the fall at all -- far too early to be making predictions. Angela Merkel (right), the pastor’s daughter from the east who leads the Christian Democratic Union, has never fought a national election (or, for that matter, one in a state.) She has been effective in out-maneuvering the older national and younger regional leaders of her party---but they, in turn, are hardly enthusiastic about her becoming Chancellor. Her electoral program is vague, but in agreeing to raise the Value Added Tax, she has opened the party to charges that it will depress consumption even more while placing unfair burdens on ordinary citizens. She and the rest of the party are counting on the fact that many Social Democratic voters no longer trust Schroeder to represent their interests---and are beginning to emphasize that they as social Christians are the authentic defenders of the welfare state. To that has to be added an intimation that immigration ought to be severely slowed, skepticism about the European project in its present form, and a very discreet promise to improve relations with the US---as well as extreme opposition to having the Turks join the European Union. As far as the foreign policy possibilities of a government led by Merkel are concerned, I cite the depressed prophecy of a very senior Christian Democrat who will not be part of it: "She and Stoiber (Edmund Stoiber--right-- the Bavarian Governor who lost the election last time to Schroeder) will manage to antagonize Poland and Russia, the Czechs and the Turks, alienate the French, and cannot in any event drag the nation back into submission to the US, which they might prefer. . We re headed for a disaster."

That much said, one should not under estimate the electoral skills of Fischer and Schroeder (left). Lafontaine has just declared that, were it not for him and his new alliance, the other parties would be talking about strengthening the market. Now, he says, they are outbidding each other to demonstrate their fidelity to Germany’s welfare state traditions. I have, he adds, pushed my old party to the left again—and everyone else, too.

• It is simply too early to make any single prediction. The most likely result remains a coalition of the Christian parties with the Free Democrats---notably weak in talent and likely to exhibit as many internal divisions as the Social Democrats. Of course, the Social Democrats could increase their present score to let us say, 32 %, while the new left alliance WASG  -- led by Gysi and LaFontaine (left) -- could obtain eight, and the Greens another eight. That would allow a left coalition. Schroeder has declared he would not participate in any such arrangement, but other Social Democrats have been loudly silent on that score.

A more probable alternative result is that, with some five percent of the electorate throwing away its votes on right wing parties which do not get into the next parliament, the Christian parties and the Free Democrats would lack the seats to form a majority. In that case, the Social Democrats would be able to function as junior partners in a coalition with their adversaries. Schroeder would leave, of course—but Munterfering would presumably be the next Foreign Minister. In the opposition, meanwhile, Greens and the new left alliance would lay the groundwork for a new opening to the left.

Those are optimistic scenarios, in their way. Should unemployment continue, the state become ever more impoverished, the European project disintegrate, the older demons of German history could return. The German crisis is part of a larger European one---just as in the fourth decade of the last century. On Germany, however, falls the burden of assuming a vanguard role in leading Europe out of it. The gravest criticism one can make of the present government is that it did not take its European responsibilities consistently and seriously enough---leaving the French and Italian left coalitions on their own and allowing the oleaginous Blair to pose as the defender of Europe’s political distinctiveness. Still, Germany is always good for historical surprises: let us hope for a modestly positive one. -- NORMAN BIRNBAUM

UPDATE, JULY 17 -- PDS CHANGES NAME: Deutsche Welle reports today on the special PDS party congress, at which the PDS has confirmed its participation in the coalition-merger with WASG by changing its name. "With the move, the PDS will now be known, together with the WASG party headed by former Social Democrat chairman Oskar Lafontaine, as 'Die Linkspartei,' or 'The Left Party.' The letters 'PDS' may still be tacked on at the end, an option that particularly the party's eastern German branches intend to make use of," Deutsche Welle said.

"By merging with Lafontaine's leftist splinter party, the PDS hope to turn The Left Party into a socialist force to be reckoned with should early elections go ahead in September, as widely anticipated. Pollsters have already forecast that the alliance could win 12 percent of the vote. 'This is an extremely important chance for us," said Gregor Gysi (right), the charismatic leader of the PDS. "Who would have thought in 1990 that we would be part of a pan-German party that is left of the SPD? I have to admit I couldn't have imagined it.'

"At Sunday's congress of the PDS, party chairman Lothar Bisky called on members to agree to the name change to pave the way for yet another new start, this time at the side of Lafontaine and the WASG. Bisky stressed that the alliance was the best way for the PDS to make inroads in western Germany, where the party has traditionally turned in a dismal performance at the polls, due to a high degree of scepticism on the part of westerners about its communist roots," Deutsche Welle added.

Also, in response to a query from a DIRELAND reader about Gysi's role following revelations of a one-time connection to the Stasi (the GDR's secret police), I wanted to confirm my own impressions of Gysi (given in my response to the reader in the "Comments" section below) by checking my perceptions with Norman Birnbaum, who replied, interestingly, as follows:

"I think that what is held against Gysi in the left is not so much the Stasi connection but the fact that he quit his job as City Commissioner in Berlin (Senator, they call it, he was in charge of the economy) to continue to star on TV as a very frequent talkshow guest. As for the Stasi, it was very much a situation of being either a hero or 'normal' [for the GDR], i.e.,  working with the Stasi--in his case especially disturbing, since he was the lawyer for the dissidents... but his argument (I never talked with him about it) is that he was able to help them somewhat, obtaining somewhat clement results like exiling  to the West (at one point for Barbel Bohley, right). The SPD has its Stasi inrterlocutor too, the Transport Minister and former Minister-President of Brandenburg, Manfred Stolpe, left ( whom I knew when he was the  Legal Counsel and Director of Administration for the EKD DDR, the Protestant Church in the GDR.) And the CDU had one, too, the lawyer Lothar De Maziere (Hugenot family, cousin on  the other side of the East-West line was a chief of staff of the West German armed forces) -- De Maziere (lower right) was the only elected Premier of the GDR in the last months of its existence [while current CDU leader Angela Merkel was, at that time, De Maziere's deputy spokeswoman.] I have no doubt that Gysi and Stolpe and De Maziere thought  it [cooperting with the Stasi] a compromise they had to make to remain effective and not marginalized,  and in view of their belief that nothing would change--i.e.,  that the regime was likely to last for another two generations---one understands the choice,  even if I would have made a different one, maybe. As for Gysi, he is very much a media star. very quick and lively, in striking contrast to the dullness of most German politicians, left, right, center (even the neo-Nazis are dull and the Greens, with some exceptions, are increasingly stolid -- vide Joschka Fischer's transformation, while the women are like department chairwomen at large  universities....Gysi is an ambitious man, but I would not think him likely to betray the general cause or become too routinized," Norman Birnbaum added.

UPDATE: ELECTIONS SET FOR SEPT. 18 -- Germany's President Horst Kohler has announced (July 21) that he's dissolving parliament, and that nationwide elections will be held on September 18. For details see the report in the International Herald-Tribune. ......UPDATE, July 25 -- Deutsche Welle reports today that " Police departments in three federal states use a software program that records whether or not a person involved in a case is homosexual. One parliamentarian said it reminds him of the Nazis' notorious 'Pink Lists.'..." For details, click here.

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