A semi-victory for the Kohl
International Viewpoint 23 February 1987 policy has nothing to do with justice, democracy, the safety of American citizens or anything of importance to working people anywhere.
In Central America and Southern Africa, workers, peasants and other oppressed are fighting to put an end to foreign domination and exploitation by the wealthy. Washington is trying to stop them. Those in this country who support the rights of the Central Americans and South African Blacks to determine their own
THE DAY AFTER the elections to the West German parliament, future should use this scandal to expose the US government. It is up the stockmarket in the second most powerful imperialist country to no good wherever it intervenes.
plunged. Nonetheless, the conservative and bourgeois liberal parties
It has no business interfering in the the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Christian Social Union affairs of any other country in the world.
(USU) and the Free Democrats (FDP) - won the January 25 elections and once again formed the government. The "red and green
Even before the scandal broke, the movement against Reagan's war polichaos" feared by the West German bosses, that is, a majority for cies had begun to set in motion the the social-democratic SPD and the Greens, had not come to pass.
machinery to respond in the necessary fashion. Work has already begun on organizing a march on Washington for next April 25, with a simultaneous action or actions on the West Coast, to demand an end to US intervention in Central America and an end to apar-
These demonstrations will be the which has actually been going on for years behind the backs of the American people, but which has only now
It is not only the illegal contra aid that we want stopped - we want all contra aid stopped! And it is important to keep in mind that the activities of the US government would not be significantly different if some
Ronald Reagan were president. We know that the same kinds of activites went on under Democrats like John
(Bay of Pigs), Lyndon
Johnson (Vietnam) and Jimmy Carter
(Iran) - not to mention other Republicans like Richard Nixon.
The revelation that US foreign policy is a cynical game of greed and murder and has nothing in common with the values of working people is a problem for the entire ruling class, not just for Reagan. Conversely, it is the working class - not its Demo.
cratic Party "friends" - who should respond to the current crisis.
If Reagan's presidency is the only of this affair, then we will have missed our opportunity. Working people of the United States should do their best to turn this scandal into the unraveling of the entire bipartisan counter-revolutionary foreign policy of our government and use it as a strong argument in favor of a break by the labor movement from its policy of giving support to the capitalist politicians of cratic and Republican parties.
WINFRIED WOLF
Another contradictory index of this election was that the mood in the left and in the factories and among organized workers and activists in the various movements can be summed up in the phrase: "We were lucky again - we had feared much worse."
If you study the results of this election more closely, and look at it against the background of this coun try's political and economic development, you find enlightening explanations for these apparent contradic-
Overall, the government parties -the CDU, CSU and FDP - got 53.4% of the vote and a corresponding majority of the seats in parliament. (In West Germany, there is a proportional representation law). The SPD got 37% and the Greens 8.3%.
If you add up the votes for the SPD and the Greens -• which, as will be seen, is only a mathematical exercise without a lot of political meaning, then "red" and "green" parties together got 45.3% Thus, they missed a majority by exactly five percentage Kohl government's victory seems conresult looks different against the background of the previous elections and the general mood that has since the second half of 1986.
In September 1982, the 13-yearlong era of "Social-Liberal" governments formed by the SPD and the small liberal party, the FDP, came to an end, when under the pressure of big industrialists and banking circles the FDP changed coalition partners and formed a government together with the CDU/CSU.
In the March 1983 election, the CDU/CSU got exactly 56% of the vote. The SPD got 38.2%, and the Greens, 5.6%, getting into parliament for the first time. (West Germany maintains a 5% threshold for representation of parties in parliament.) This conservative electoral success was generally taken as a grave defeat by the left and the organized workers.
In the subsequent period, running up to mid-1986, there were a series of developments that fostered hopes that the Kohl government could be ousted in the 1987 parliamentary elections in favor of an SPD government that in one way or another would collaborate with the Greens.
The landmarks of this period were
The Kohl government became involved in a series of scandals, the biggest of which was the discovery of massive operations by the big industrialist Flick and other capitalists and banking circles to influence the CDU, CSU and FDP.
1984, the biggest West German union, IG Metall, won an important victory with an agreement for a 38.5 hour workweek. That broke the bosses' and the government's taboo on shortening the 40-hour when the government introduced a law designed to undermine the right to strike and got it through parliament, the unions staged successful mass mobilizations and political strikes, a new experience for the West German unions, which have suffered from a parliamentary
For several years, the core of a new movement against nuclear
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government
International Viewpoint 23 February 1987 power plants developed around Wackersdorf in Bavaria. The concrete issue was the planned construction of a reprocessing facility. After the catastrophe in Chernobyl, anti-nuclear demonstrations developed throughout the country.
The deep political crisis into which the Kohl government had fallen, explained why, in 1985 and early 1986, the question of dumping Helmut Kohl as chancellor and replacing him with a less compromised figure was being more or less openly discussed in business circles, the bourgeois parties and in the government parties. (Most often named as a possible replacement was the finance minister, Gerhard Stoltenberg.) Neue Heimat scandal
In mid-1986, roughly a half a year before the parliamentary elections, there was a drastic alteration in mood. In this, essentially five factors were decisive. First, from mid-1986 on it was not possible to develop the movements I mentioned any further. They all dried up for various reasons. In particular, the union leaders were not prepared to pursue their campaign against the undermining of the right to strike after the question was finally settled in parliament. Instead, they pointed to the elections coming in January 1987.
In this attitude of the union leaders, a second factor played an important role. It was the scandal around the union-owned home-builders firm Neue Heimat, which had been Europe's housing builder. Revelations and by a parliament investigating committee showed that the managers of the concern had not only led the company into bankruptcy by unheard-of mismanagement and at the same time lined their own pockets. These managers also showed the more and more dangerous financial burden that this concern represented
After a shady sale of the building concern to a fly-by-night speculator, the creditor banks forced the unions to re-purchase the company, with its 17,000 million in debts (and an expected loss of 1,000 million marks for 1987 alone).
For obvious reasons, the government used this scandal to mount a large-scale campaign against the unions and the SPD. The social democrats were thrown completely on the defensive, and took a safe distance from the union bosses, all of whom held SPD party cards. 14
The right managed Greens in its offensive. (For example, parliamentary investigating committee, the Greens voted together with the CDU/SU for the arrest of the Neue Heimat manager Lappas, which took place during gress of IG Metall in October 1986 in a big spash of publicity.)
Third, there was the position that the SPD had in effect taken in selecting Johannes Rau, with the program represented, as its candidate for meant drawing a line the same time, it meant that the party was setting its sights on winning an circumstances, unique in West German history - was totally lacking in credibility. Moreover, a large section of the SPD found the attempt to draw a line against the Greens to be sectarian.
With the SPD and its candidate, Rau declaring that under no circumstances would they agree after the Greens, the only conceivable parliaalternative to a CDU/CSU government - an SPD-Green majority ruled out. That discouraged a considerable part of the SPD's ranks and of its potential voters.
Fourth, like most other imperialist in 1983, West Germany experienced an economic upturn, even if modest. This coincided exactly with the life of the legislature under the conservative-liberal government, which it exploited to the fullest.
preceding of 1980-82 was blamed on the social democrats, while the government took the credit
From mid-1986 until the election, extensive media campaign was mounted, backed up by various "expert opinions," which played up the modest results of this upturn and pushed the idea that a conservative victory in January 1987 would mean that the upturn would continue.
Fifth, in the fall of 1986, the SPD suffered massive vote losses in two state parliamentary elections (in Bavaria and Hamburg) that were already being looked on as tests for the coming Bundestag election. It was absolutely clear that there was no chance that the SPD could get a majority of its "own". SPD leadership only stuck to its tactic and to drawing a line against the Greens.
Hamburg, lost their former majority but had the possibility of forming a majority with the Greens (the Green-Alternative List, the GAL), they rejected collaboration with the Greens, and
Greens arrive in the Bundestag for the fi took the first serious steps in the direction of a "great coalition," that is, collaboration with the CDU. Precisely such a policy was attributed to candidate for chancellor Rau -permitting a continuation of the CDU/ CSU-led government, if the alternative was a "red-green" majority. Scare of "red-green" chaos
In this situation, the government parties went on the offensive in the fall of 1986. The CDU/CSU struck out on a line that went far to the right. Their key phase of the election campaign was "a future red-green." Everywhere a scare was whipped up about "red-green chaos."
At the same time there were deliberate provocations aimed at inciting strong anti-communist moods, such as Kohl's likening of Gorbachev to Goebbels, and the claim that there
"concentration camps in East Germany." The CDU/CSU leaderships and a public opinion polling agency spread the claim that a landslide victory for the government coalition was a sure thing, that even an absolute majority for the CDU/SU alone was conceivable.
In this situation, the liberal FDP appeared as insurance against a sweep by the CDU/CSU and an associated revival of the cold war, as a guarantee of a "rational" conservative government. Promptly, the big liberal week-
International Viewpoint 23 February 1987 e in 1983 (DR) lies, Der Spiegel and Stern, the only mass-circulation publications that supported the social-liberal coalition in the 1970s, came out for a vote for the FDP as the "lesser evil" in the event of for the coalition government. If you consider that the got 9.1% of the vote, that is about 3.5 million votes, the importance of the stand they took becomes obvious.
Thus, the FDP was the only government party that managed to score a slight advance (an increase of 2.1%). The CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, on the other hand, registered a loss of 4.5 percentage points. This was their worst result since the first election in 1949, and fell even below their score in 1980, when Strauss bombed as a candidate for chancellor against Helmut Schmidt. Even if you look at it from the standpoint of the total vote for the government parties, the coalition lost 2.4 percentage points.
The drop of 1.2% for the SPD was less than expected. But this result also represented an historic low point - the party's lowest vote since 1961. The big winner on the left was the managed to gain 2.7 election, thereby increasing their total
Along with CDU/SU's losses and the relative weakening of the parties as a whole, the Greens' vote is the that prompted among the left and the organized workers that the outcome was "not
A more detailed study of the SPD and Green vote reveals the following
The SPD suffered losses above all in the big cities where there is a concentration of administrative workers (such as Munich, Frankfurt and Stuttgart). Its sharp losses in Hamburg (-6.2%) can be attributed to its orientation toward a "great coalition" with
On the other hand, in traditional industrial areas with high unemployment, the SPD gained. Throughout the Ruhr and in Saarland, the SPD its vote. This marked in solidly working-class voting many's industrial
54.2% for the (+0.8%), 32.3% for the CDU (-4.3%), and 7% for the Greens (+2.1%).
Once again, their biggest wins in the university
(such as Freiberg, Tubingen, Heidelberg, Munster), where in every sometimes with more At the same time, they were able to increase their base among teachers and technical intellectuals and in the
The results of a separate study union members underscore the above observations. Out of the 7 million union members combined in the German Confederation of Unions (DGB), exactly 70% voted for the SPD, 22% for the CDU/CSU and a trace element for the FDP (around 1%). The Greens got about 8% of union members votes. That means that their vote among trade-union members is still slightly below percentage among all voters
The assertion that has often been made that the Greens have achieved among workers, among the most progressive sections, the organized workers, is therenot tenable. It is true, on the other hand, that they are getting workers as among the general population, attracting about a tenth of the vote that the SPD gets in this category.
After the elections, the SPD made a screeching turn. The day after the election, the candidate for chancellor, Rau, already declared that his "task" was "ended," and that he "was not available for any new posts," which that he is not a candidate to succeed Willy Brandt no later than 1988. At the same time, Oskar Lafontaine, the state premier of the Saar, said on the night of the election itself that the SPD rejection of an alliance with the Greens was a crucial error. At the same time, he indirectly announced his candidacy to be the next chancellor designate, or perhaps Willy Brandt's successor in the party chair.
Up until now Oskar Lafontaine has been seen as leader of the party's left wing. Already in 1979 he was the most important spokesperson of the SPD minority that opposed the NATO Double-Track Decision, that is the deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles. He argued for disengagement from nuclear energy production and is considered an opponent of NATO. Compromises of SPD's left leader
The London Economist of January described Lafontaine as a "whose views shade easily into the pro-ecology, anti-nuclear and anti-NATO policies of the Greens." With the SPD "turning greenwards, the Social Democrats would startle Germany's allies....
striking thing is little resistance is being within the SPD to Lafontaine's march to the top. The former candidate for rejection of the Greens applied "only to this election," soon be a change around. It is more the right-oriented state associations of the SPD, such as the Bavarian one, that are already declaring for Lafontaine as the next candidate for chancellor. Even big bourgeois papers are coming out for Lafontaine. all, they are stressing that the task of the SPD is now to draw the Greens into "mainstream politics."
In a debate with the Greens' rep-
Ditfurth in Der Spiegel of February 2, 1987, Lafontaine made an open offer of political collaboration and even coalitions with the Greens. Nevertheless, in the same discussion, on the three that the Economist cited, he made it clear that he is prepared accept wide-ranging compromises in order both to hold the SPD right and to avoid frightening the bourresistance to nuclear power plants. In the Schwandorf OST TEA of Bavaria, where Wackersdorf, the site of the planned reprocessing 18 located, considerable part of the local population sides with the opposition To this project. In this election, the SPD, which has also taken a strong position against the reprocessing plant, gained 6.7 percentage points, getting 32.7% of the vote. The CSU, previously overwhelmingly dominant, dropped from 65.3% in 1983 to 54.2%. The Greens were able increase their vote from 3.9% to 5.6%, that is, less than proportionately.
15
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International Viewpoint 23 February 1987
Disengagement from nuclear power is to be aimed for only in the mediumterm. This can only be achieved when, apart from the Bonn parliament, there is a majority for it in the states, local governments and in the state energy company. This position reflects the conception of a "national consensus" that the SPD has officially adopted on this question.
The same goes for a reversal of the deployment of the Pershing II missiles. In the event of a red-green majority, the parliament is to "ask" the United States to withdraw these missiles. Lafontaine assumes that "a democracy like America will respect the of a parliament in another most interesting point While he was regarded in the early 1980s as an opponent of NATO, for some time he has been
La precise France or Spain" - that is, membership of NATO but no military integration. Now, looking forward to his advancement, position in the following way in the
"Out of NATO is not position... I consider NATO reforit goes without saying. I would like more sovereignty for West
And the Greens? Here the Economist's analysis largely fits: "They are deeply divided between a 'realistic wing, which favours some sort of links with the Social Democrats and the 'fundamentalists' who do not." The conclusion also can be agreed with: "if anything, this division is becoming deeper as the bigger and more established party gets
However, the speculation about this division leading to a split, which is naturally being indulged in in the SPD and the bourgeois camp, may prove premature. It is true that the proposal that the SPD is now making for the first time for red-green collaboration on the countrywide level will strengthen the "Realo" [realist]
Greens on important questions - above three mentioned before. It will now be tested how far the Greens will retreat extent the "realist," that is, the right which up until now has dominated the party's parliamentopposition of the "fundamentalists," who have been the majority in the party leadership. Red-green coalition experience
There is already experience. For a year, the Greens have been coalition partners with the SPD in the state of Hesse. (2) The association of the Greens in Hesse was considered a year ago to have a "fundamentalist" majority. The Ministry of the Environment in this state is now held by a Green, Joschka Fischer, while the state has the biggest power plant in demands for a "disengagement" of this state from nuclear energy production - especially after Chernobyl - this red-green coalition in Hesse and the assumption governmental responsibility the Greens (voting for the budget police, prisons, and so on has not been opposed by the ranks of the Greens. There has not even been a debate on this.
That indicates that it is possible that the Greens may arrive at an orientation of "red-green" collaboration without sharp controversies or debates, to say nothing of a split. That is particularly true for the states, which are the only places the question will be posed in the next few years.
An important reason for this is the structure of the Greens. Nominally, they have 45,000 members. In reality, about 15,000 can be considered more or less active. At the same time, the Greens have 8,000 elected rep. resentatives in parliamentary bodies -on the local, city, state and countrywide level. This total, moreover, does not include the party's top functionaries. That means that the majority of the active members, those who generally come to membership meetings, are implicated in parliamentary functions. The great majority of these parliamentary representatives of the Greens have to be considered to belong to the "Realo" wing.
This takes nothing away from the fact that the 3.1 million people who voted for the Green party in this parliamentary election voted for the most progressive program that was presented. It takes nothing away either from the fact that the great majority of the 14 million people who voted for the SPD are also for a red-green alliance, and therefore criticize the SPD from the left.
The SPD and the Greens could have won several hundred thousand more votes and a chance to form a common majority, if they had posed such a red-green majority as a political pos sibility. Another record was set in this election - the lowest voter participation since 1949. And undoubtedly in the coming confron-
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16 tations that will be provoked by beginning recession and the strikes for the 35-hour week that are expected in the spring, such a red-green alliance will be seen as the only conceivable parliamentary alterconservative-liberal government under Kohl.
Revolutionary connect up with these expectations advocate such a red-green alliance, while criticizing the Greens and the left in the SPD when they and policies which are in the interests of wage earners and of the various
2. On February 9, shortly after this article was written, the SPD-Greens coalition in Hesse collapsed. This was due to Joschka Fischer, the Green environment minister, resigning over the SPD's agree. ment to allow the Alkem plutonium ium plant