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Germany, Thuringia

Germany’s Left Party comes of age with Ramelow victory

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bodoramelow

After months of inter-party negotiations, the east-central German state of Thuringia will have a government led by Bodo Ramelow, the state leader of the democratic socialist Die Linke (Left Party).thuringiaGermany Flag Icon

On the surface, it means that Die Linke, partially the successor to  Socialist Unity Party (SED) that ruled the eastern German Democratic Republic, will control a state government for the first time since reunification, which has bred a significant amount of controversy:

Never before in a fully democratic Germany has a regional election triggered so much protest, with thousands demonstrating outside the parliament in Erfurt on Thursday evening ahead of the vote, declaring that the “perpetrators” were heading back into office.

Demonstrators included former East German dissidents, some of whom had spent time behind bars for their opposition views. They shouted “Stasi out!” in reference to East Germany’s repressive secret police, and “The Social Democrats have betrayed us”.

Even center-right chancellor Angela Merkel has used stark language to reject a Left-led government, arguing that Ramelow’s victory is equivalent to putting Karl Marx in charge of government.

But that’s a fairly oversimplified narrative.

Ramelow and the Left will govern in coalition with two far more moderate center-left parties, the Die Grünen (the Greens) and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party). The SPD, nationally, governs in a ‘grand coalition’ with chancellor Merkel’s conservative Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Union).

Moreover, the Left isn’t even the largest party in the Thuringia Landtag, the regional assembly:

thuringia landtag

Far from bringing a police state or a socialist revolution to the tranquil streets of sleepy Erfurt, the Left will be governing in coalition with two far more moderate partners. With the support of the Greens and the SPD, Ramelow’s government will have a one-vote margin in the Landtag. So even if it wanted to introduce radical far-left measures, the Left wouldn’t get very far.

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RELATED: Thuringia and Brandenburg results: Left & AfD on the rise

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in German state elections

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It’s not clear, however, that it wants to do so. Thuringia provides the party with the opportunity that it can govern responsibly, even with a different ideological perspective than Merkel’s prevailing CDU or the moderate SPD. While the Left is relatively pro-Russia, plenty of former chancellors, from Gerhard Schröder to Helmut Kohl, have struck more lenient views toward Russia than most European figures. While the Left is also anti-NATO, that’s because it’s on the more ultra-pacifist side of a political culture that for decades has been incredibly pacifist.

Ramelow, a Lutheran union leader born in West Germany, is hardly a flamethrower, and he’s an advocate of pro-growth, anti-austerity policies. He’s called for wider investment in education and wants to provide a free year of kindergarten to every child in the state.

Continue reading Germany’s Left Party comes of age with Ramelow victory →

Germany

Photo of the day: Helmut Kohl at Brandenburg Gate

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amazingPhoto credit to Andreas Mühe/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn for BILD.

This is perhaps the most haunting photo in world politics in 2014.Germany Flag Icon

Helmut Kohl, who was first elected chancellor of West Germany in 1982 and who left office in 1998 following his final term as the chancellor of a reunified Germany, is today long out of frontline politics and, since a 2008 stroke, has been confined to a wheelchair. He sits alone in this photo for Bild at night in the glow of the Brandenburg Gate, one of many points that divided East Berlin from West Berlin for the better part of 28 years.

It’s astonishing that, with Sunday’s 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which ultimately resulted in the reunification of Germany and became a harbinger of the collapse of the Soviet Union, we’ve almost reached the point where the Berlin Wall has been down longer than it initially stood.

Even as Mikhail Gorbachev, still around as an icon of the revolutionary change of that era (and despised, to this day, in Russia), is warning that Ukraine could spur a new 21st century cold war, Sunday was an opportunity to celebrate the universal desire for freedom. That was as true in 1989 as it is in 2014, when many walls still remain, from Gaza to China’s ‘great firewall.’

For Germany, the reunification of East and West has been very successful in some ways, others not. It’s almost comical today to imagine British prime minister Margaret Thatcher telephoning Gorbachev, frantically and practically begging him to stop German reunification. But when we think about the chiefly German-led European Union of 2014, with its emphasis on tight budgets (instead of GDP and jobs growth) and its peculiarly German reticence as regards debt and inflation (even in the face of growing deflationary pressure), there may have been something to Thatcher’s warnings, after all. Ulrich Beck captures the peculiar problem of German Europe in a new short book, translated earlier this summer into English.

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RELATED: Has the first Ossi chancellor been good or bad
for the former East Germany?

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German reunification is itself something of a cautionary tale about the perils of implementing a currency union in what, in 1990, was most certainly not an optimal currency zone. Though the past 25 years haven’t been horrific for the six eastern German states that once constituted the German Democratic Republic, it’s hard to say that the former GDR has done better than Poland or other former ‘Iron Curtain’ countries. That, in part, may have been due to the effects of conversion of East German currency on a 1:1 ratio with the West German deutsche mark.

Continue reading Photo of the day: Helmut Kohl at Brandenburg Gate →

Germany, Hungary

A Hungarian remembers the Berlin Wall’s fall

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Guest post by Dániel Kiss

berlinwall

Photo credit to DPA/ZUMA Press.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, I was in my fourth year of primary school in Budapest, Hungary. I was too young to understand politics, but I do remember the excitement of the adults around me during that eventful year. What I do have clear memories of is how the end of Communism affected my life as a schoolboy.Germany Flag IconHungary Flag Icon

At the start of my first year at school, my classmates and I had entered the Young Pioneers, the Communist youth organisation, which all youngsters in the country effectively had to join. Our parents bought us a uniform consisting of an awkward white shirt, dark trousers, a blue nylon scarf, and a smart whistle of which I was very fond. We formed brigades each with a leader and a name; I recall that one of them was called the Panda Brigade. Occasionally we would have to stand in formation, listen as our brigade leaders delivered formal reports to our teachers, or march around to patriotic music in our gym hall on special days such as 4 April, the day of the liberation of Hungary by the Red Army after World War II. These events had a strange atmosphere of make-believe, as the adults leading them seemed to lack all passion and conviction. But these ceremonies gradually petered out without explanation, and at one point (I think it was at the start of my fourth schoolyear in September 1989) our activities as pioneers too came to an unexplained end. Soon afterwards Hungary started preparing for its first political elections, with a burgeoning growth of political parties of all sorts, and my classmates and I joined the fun by founding, naming, dividing and uniting parties among ourselves.

Hungary had a softer brand of Communism than East Germany and its fall was less spectacular, but the basic reason for which it collapsed was very likely the same: Communism had been imposed by force on the countries occupied by the Soviet army since the end of World War II, and when the Soviets relaxed their hold, these countries shook off the Communist system one way or other. In Hungary Communism is probably gone for ever, as it is widely regarded as disgraceful and ridiculous. However, its heritage still survives in a large but inefficient and corrupt state sector, in an atomized, weakly organised society, and in people’s distrust of capitalism. Communism may have collapsed quickly, but we are still tidying up its ruins.

Dániel Kiss is a postdoctoral research fellow in classics at University College Dublin. His hometown is Budapest.