East German regional elections:
Big rise in abstentions
International Viewpoint #194 • November 12, 1990
GERMANY weeks and the appeal, tens of thousands of copies of which have been distributed, has been reprinted several times.
At the same time as the East German elections, regional elections took place in Bavaria. Here the Christian Socials kept their absolute majority with 54.9% of the
THE ELECTION RESULTS in the five new länder (regions) of the ex-GDR have been interpreted in most of the media as a victory for the conservative Christian Democrats and Liberals, and therefore as a victory for Chancellor Kohl and his policy of breakneck Anschluss. MANUEL KELLNER
T HE Christian Democrats came
out of the elections as the largest party in all the Länder apart from Brandenburg. In Saxony they gained an absolute majority. However, a closer look at the vote will lead us to introduce certain nuances into our assessment of these results. Some 30% of the electorate did not participate, while the March 18 elections to the East German Volkskammer (people's chamber) saw a 90% turnout. Even in the local elections in May the turnout was far higher.
The CDU was the main loser from the abstentions, which reflected the erosion of popular confidence in the political agents of big capital. For example, in Thuringen, the CDU, which gained 45.5% in place of 52.5% in March, lost 400,000 votes in absolute terms.
But, if no signs of a continued rightwing trend can be observed, there is, equally, no clear movement leftward. If we add together the parties of big capital, the CDU, DSU (a creation of the Bavarian CSO, which came nowhere in these elections) and the liberals of the FDP, and the Social Democrats (SPD), all of whom represent the new greater German consensus, we find a total loss of 2 million votes since March.
Social democrats' thin itself clearly from the parties of the West German coalition government and the fact that, in the
West, the SPD is closely tied to powerful trade union bureaucracies, which is not the case in the
East.
The Party of Democratic
Socialism (previously the ruling
Communist Party) kept its position as the third political force in the new Länder with the exception of Saxe-Anhalt, where it fell behind the liberals. In Thuringen the PDS got 9.7% and in
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern its best score,
15.7%. The party's position declined in comparison with March. The Greens, on the other hand, got over the 5% barrier in an alliance with "Bundnis '90" which brings together civic movements from
Mecklenburg-
Vorpommern, the Greens and Bundnis
'90 stood separately, and neither got over
5%. In Brandenburg, same situation, Bundnis '90 got 6.4% and
Republicans made no impact — their best score was 1.2% in
Brandenburg.
Political void appears and
Jakob Moneta, a member of the VSP and a candidate on the PDS/Left List the forthcoming all-German elections on December 2, commented on the results in SoZ, the VSP paper. He concluded that there seemed to be a political void which could well develop in the way seen in Hungary. After one or two free elections, people start to abstain en masse ment of the capimarkct" wanes.
some grounds for vote (55.8% in 1986). The SPD got only 26% (27.5% in 1986) and the Greens fell from 7.5% to 6.4%. The liberals on the other hand got 5.2% and entered the regional assembly. The Republicans came within a whisker of getting representation with 4.9% as against 3% in 1986. This later result is all the more worrying in that the Anschluss has removed one of their favourite propaganda themes.
In the last couple of weeks, the PDS has, for the first time, got relatively favourable commentaries from the Western bourgeois press, after its offices were attacked by 150 police without any official warrant.
Proofs of illegal transfers sought
This action clearly violated the parlia mentary immunity of the PDS leader Gregor Gysi, whose office was ransacked The person responsible for this attack was the SPD senator for security affairs in Berlin. He was hoping to find proofs of illegal transfers of some of the millions of D-Marks held by the PDS. However afterwards it had to be admitted that the PDS' operations had been legal.
The majority of establishment politicians criticized the police action as a major tactical error, which had allowed the PDS to look like a martyr and denounce the democratic state as a state whose principles are selectively applied. The PDS' electoral campaigns in the exGDR were not especially exciting - the PDS has shown itself to be more or less integrated into the bourgeois democratic consensus, while at the same time appealing to the historic regionalism of the five new Länder. * excuses
The SPD has gained slightly since
March, with 19.1%,
26% and
22.8%,
27% in four of the new Länder, and a
DEUTSCHE winning 38.3% in Brandenburg. On the
MAAL other hand, this party had explained away its poor showing in the GDR in March with the argument that it had a far weaker organization than the conservatives and liberals, who had taken over wholesale parties from the ruling bloc of the Stalinist state.
It is now clear that the reasons for the
SPD's poor showing go deeper. These
12 include the fact that it did not demarcate optimism. The waters willbe tested on November 3, when there will be an international demonstration against German nationalism, racism and imperialism in Berlin. United support for this demonstration has been growing over the last few
NEW ZEALAND