New regime plans more cutbacks

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic/ Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) party congresses on Nov. 14 ratified their agreement on a program to form a “grand coalition” to govern Germany. This agreement ends SPD Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder’s seven years in office. Their common program continues and extends the SPD’s most recent attacks on wages, workers’ rights, health care and pensions, known as Agenda 2010.

The SPD-CDU/CSU coalition has agreed on an anti-working class program to raise the sales tax from 16 to 19 percent, increase the work week, start pensions at age 67 instead of 65, and increase workers’ contributions for whatever benefits still exist. It extends the probationary period of working without job protection from six months to two years.

Labor unions and the anti-globalization group ATTAC have already said they will begin to organize popular opposition to the new regime in Berlin. How massive such opposition is will impact not only Germany but all of Europe.

The agreement focused mainly on German domestic politics. German participation in NATO’s occupation of Afghanistan, however, still managed to break into the news Nov. 14 when a German “peacekeeping” soldier was killed in a suicide bombing. In an absurd display of circular reasoning, outgoing Defense Minister Peter Struck said the attack showed “that there is not a stable, quiet situation in Afghanistan” and that the NATO force there was still needed.

The current leader of the Christian Democrats is Angela Merkel, who will be Germany’s first woman chancellor. She is from eastern Germany, was trained as a physicist, and, except for a role in a local chapter of the pro-socialist Free German Youth, only began her political career after the German Democratic Republic was swallowed up by imperialist West Germany in 1990.

Voters in last September’s national elections turned the SPD-Green coalition out of office after seven years. With the SPD’s Gerhard Schroeder as chancellor and Green’s Joschka Fischer as foreign minister, this coalition joined NATO’s war against Yugoslavia in 1999 and then projected German imperialist military power beyond Europe into Afghanistan. The CDU/CSU also supports both interventions.

Domestically, the SPD-Green regime opened a severe attack on workers’ rights, cutting back time limits on unemployment payments and introducing a sort of “workfare” program known as 1-Euro jobs for unemployed workers. Together these attacks were known as Agenda 2010.

No longer a traditional social democratic party, the SPD is more like the Clinton Democrats in the U.S. or the New Labor of Tony Blair in Britain. Agenda 2010 separated the SPD from its base in the labor unions. A series of mass demonstrations and some strikes greeted the SPD “reforms” in 2004 and 2005, but without reaching the level of struggle needed to stop Agenda 2010.

In the Sept. 18 elections, working-class voters punished the SPD-Greens coalition, not by voting for the right-wing parties, but by voting for a more left-wing electoral coalition known as the Left Party. This voting shift has shaken the SPD organization and provoked a change in party leadership but hasn’t changed its political program.

Meanwhile, the rightist CDU/CSU—about equivalent to Reagan Republicans—also lost total votes and seats in the lower house compared with the 2002 elections, narrowly becoming the number-one party with only 35 percent of the total vote.

German elections combine voting by district with proportional representation. This voting method allows some representation for minority parties, including more progressive ones, if they can get as much as 5 percent of the total vote. Proportional voting is usually more democratic than the U.S. winner-take-all system. But German elections, just like those in the U.S., are biased toward the big capitalist parties, depending on financing and distorted by the capitalist media monopoly.

The final result of the Sept. 18 national election was 226 seats for the CD/CSU; 61 for their usual capitalist allies, the Free Democrats; 222 seats for the SPD and 51 for the Greens; and, in a new development, 54 seats for the Left Party.

Since the big capitalist parties refused any bloc with the Left Party, this result meant the most likely new regime would be the “grand coalition” that finally occurred eight weeks after the election.

With 82 million people, Germany has the largest population in the European Union. It also is Europe’s biggest economy and the fifth-largest in the world. Germany leads the world in exports of goods and services, with $893 billion in 2004; the U.S. exported $795 billion and China $583 billion.

German workers still have better wages, unemployment insurance, job security, national and union health benefits, vacations, and retirement pay on the average than workers in the United States. Union struggles won these benefits during the Cold War period, when the West German capitalists had to take into account competition for workers’ loyalties from socialist East Germany and the Soviet Union.

Since the breakup of the USSR, the gains workers made earlier have all been under attack. The German capitalists aim to maximize profits and their competitive position worldwide; now they no longer worry about a neighboring socialist camp. Unemployment within Germany is at an official 11 percent as German capital seeks investment opportunities in low-wage areas in Eastern Europe and Asia.

While both parties in the “grand coalition” support big capital, they have their differences in tactics and competition for the political spoils, and their alliance is unstable.

The Left Party

A politician on the left of the SPD, Oscar Lafontaine, last June joined a recent left split from that party, the WASG. This summer Lafontaine’s group made an electoral alliance with the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the communist party that had led the German Democratic Republic in the East. Despite the PDS’s past, which the German capitalists have never forgiven, it has recently focused almost exclusively on electoral politics and “responsible” participation in local governments, which means it has accepted social service cutbacks.

This WASG-PDS coalition, now named the Left Party, then attracted support from some progressive trade unions, as well as from the German Communist Party (DKP), the anti-globalization movement known as ATTAC, and smaller left parties and anti-war forces. These groups all saw the Left Party as a means to get some voices into parliament that would speak and vote against the attack on the workers at home and military intervention abroad.

The Left Party won an unprecedented 8.7 percent of the vote and 54 seats, compared to the two seats the PDS won in 2002. The shift leftward was a message to the SPD that their pro-capitalist program was unacceptable to a growing section of the working class.

While this vote is a sign that many German workers want to oppose the SPD’s “reforms,” the Left Party’s role is strictly as an electoral bloc. The Left Party is not a centralized group of labor, social and political grass-roots organizers, which could coordinate a national struggle.

But those trying to mobilize a struggle outside of the parliamentary arena hope the Left Party can play a role of exposing and opposing the government program and thus encourage mass mobilization in the factories, the offices, the schools and the streets.