Global Issues
EUROPE: Socialists Sinking Between Left and Right
The rise of The Left party in regional elections in Germany may signal a rearrangement at the cost of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), political analysts say.
The SPD obtained 10, 18, and 25 percent of the vote in the federal states Saxony, Thuringia, and Saarland, way below its historical high of around 40 percent.
The elections confirmed the substantial surge of The Left party, founded in 2007 by SPD dissidents and members of the East German post-communist Democratic Socialists. The Left, whose leader Oskar Lafontaine was chair of the SPD between 1995 and 2001, won 27.4 percent of the vote in Thuringia in Eastern Germany, and 21.3 percent in Saarland in the west on the border with France.
The Left's success in Saarland confirms the party's growing acceptance among West German voters, disappointed with the social and economic policies of the federal coalition government formed by the SPD and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
The SPD's disappointment was only alleviated by the big losses of its main rival, the CDU led by Chancellor Angela Merkel. The CDU lost 13 and 12 percent of the vote in Saarland and Thuringia, extending the string of losses the party has suffered since 2005.
The results should lead to leftist coalition governments in Thuringia under the leadership of The Left candidate Bodo Ramelow, and in Saarland under SPD regional chair Heiko Maas.
The stagnation of the SPD and the rise of The Left has led some analysts to believe that a new leftist national coalition is possible, which would mean the end of the SPD as the leading leftist party in Germany.
In an op-ed comment in the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel, chief editor Stephan Andreas Casdorf wrote Monday that the electoral results could pave the way for 'a unification of the German Left, following the Italian model of the Olive Tree coalition under (former prime minister) Romano Prodi.'
Created in 1995, the Olive Tree coalition was made up of the Progressives Alliance (including the Democratic Socialists, Greens, and the Italian Socialist Party), the Popular Party, and the Italian Renewal party. Romano Prodi successfully ran as prime ministerial candidate representing the Olive Tree in the 1996 elections against Silvio Berlusconi's former party Forza Italia.
Olive Tree was in government under Prodi until 1998. Prodi headed a Leftist coalition again between 2006 and 2008.
The SPD, which has been ruling Germany in coalition since 1998, has steadily lost popular support since 2005 as a consequence of the adoption of Agenda 2010, an economic plan that brought cuts in social benefits for the unemployed, tax reductions for corporations and upper class constituencies, and a partial deregulation of the labour market.
Since 1998, the SPD has lost more than 220,000 members.
According to opinion polls, the SPD could win at best 24 percent of the vote in the general elections scheduled for Sep 30. The SPD won the general elections in 1998 with 41 percent of the vote, and again in 2002 with 38.5 percent.
The party obtained 34.2 percent of the vote in the 2005 election, but lost by a narrow margin. It is a junior partner in the coalition led by CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The SPD has no easy way out of 'the ghetto represented by a 20 percent share of the vote,' says political analyst Klaus Hartung. 'The SPD is the first victim in the death of German big-tent parties.'
The SPD leadership has dismissed alliance with The Left, and is campaigning instead for remaining a partner in the 'grand coalition' with the CDU. The CDU says it would prefer to rule with the small right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (FDP), in which case the SPD would become an opposition party.
For the SPD, sitting in opposition could mean a struggle between the leftist wing that opposes Agenda 2010, and the official leadership of Frank Walter Steinmeier.
'Opposition could bring the breaking test, with left and right wings fighting each other over responsibility for the party's collapse,' says Sabine Adler, political correspondent with the national public radio Deutschland Funk.
A similar debate on the future of leftist parties is going on in France. The French Socialist Party (PS) has lost all national and regional elections since 2002. It obtained only 16 percent of the vote in elections for the European parliament in June.
The French result mirrored the European score - European Social Democrat parties lost 35 seats, while the right-wing Popular Party gained 21.
Some PS leaders are now openly discussing dissolution of the party. 'The death of the PS is a possibility,' World Trade Organisation director-general Pascal Lamy, formerly a leading strategist of the French PS, said in an interview to French daily Le Monde Aug. 26.
Lamy said European Social Democratic election results have been disappointing at a time when the crisis of capitalism should have been favourable for leftist options.
'The recent Social Democratic electoral scores are indeed paradoxical,' Lamy said. 'But at the same time, the crisis of social democracy is a logical consequence of its own failures.'
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service