The Social Democrats are back
* Germany German's Social Democrats are back in government, after sixteen depressing years in opposition. Thies Gleiss The SPD lost the 1982 federal elections, but held three-quarters of the regional governments before its recent nationwide victory.
Almost all social movements - including the ecological, peace and women's movements - have remained so strongly dominated by the SPD that they have never seriously threatened bourgeois domination.
All the most radical developments are constrained politically by the SPD: it influences the political outlook of the NGOs, social movements and those organisations that have sprung from them. Such organisations provide the SPD with new members, and offer employment for the SPD's cadre. A few leaders of these movements once joined the Green party, but went back to the SPD quickly enough. In the past 15 years, only one significant mass movement was not led by the SPD - the 1987 movement opposed to the government census. The SPD has lost about 200,000 members since 1982, but it is still the country's largest and best-organised political party. Hegemony upheld
SPD hegemony is also unbroken in the trade unions. Policies won by the pro-Moscow Communist Party (DKP) or New Left activists in the 1970s and early 1980s are no longer tolerated by the SPD and have been overturned.
A rightist attempt to draw together a Christian Democratic-influenced wing of the union movement, potentially comprising the service sector-based DAG, a civil servants union, Christian unions and artisans' guilds also failed. The DAG is now joining the mainstream union federation, the DGB
In other words, the idea often heard on the left and the right, that we would see the twilight of the SPD, is either dreaming or one-sided impressionism.
However, the average SPD member is rather dissatisfied. During its 16 years in opposition, the SPD simply participated in the administration of the capitalist crisis. The CDU/CSU government's main goal was to cut spending and so reduce the national debt. Local and regional governments had to carry out these measures. 6 International Viewpoint #305 November 1998
Many SPD-run regional and local governments adopted the political neoliberalism of the Kohl government. Social-Democratic dominated unions, welfare organisations and employment services attempted to cushion, materially and socially, the impact of mass unemployment and poverty. SPD leaders agreed to every scandalous decision of the CDU government.
They were driven by their mixture of nationalism, statism and a direct pressure to both take part in the administration of the crisis and to prove their ability to govern in a "farsighted" way. They also accepted pension cuts, increasing the retirement age, more indirect taxes, longer shop opening hours, the re-militarisation of foreign policy and several limits on constitutional and political asylum rights.
The SPD moved so far right, it is as if SPD and the conservative CDU/CSU have been in a grand coalition for years. The SPD drift affected the political catastrophically. The SPD suffered quite dangerous losses — in elections and even of traditional supporters. Fall before the rise
Some say it is the evolution of the SPD that has weakened working class organisation. But this is a secondary factor. Before its victory in Lower Saxony, the SPD had undergone a series of failures. It was beaten nationally in 1983 (When Hans-Jochen Vogel was candidate), in 1987 (the candidacy of Rau Johannes) and again in 1994 (when
After Willy Brandt died in 1987, it had three presidents in eight years: Vogel, Björn Engholm and Scharping No wonder that young people, who grow up in worse conditions than their parents, are not tempted by the SPD.
The SPD also had to pay a high price for the collapse of East German's Stalinist regime. The SPD helped opened East Germany to West German capital in the 1970s. After reunification, the SPD hoped to inherit the former supporters of East German Stalinism. It dreamed of gigantic electoral success there.
This hope never materialised. The SPD still has fewer members in the whole of former East Germany than in the single western city of Dortmund.
By an irony of history there is now another, rather different, mass reformist party in the East. The PDS has risen from the ruins of the Socialist Unity Party, the former ruling party in the East, and has just broken through the five per cent threshold for national representatives to be elected into the parliament. Even in Germany, Social Democracy has not been able to take historic revenge against the socialist revolution. The road to Schröder
In this distressing setting, the SPD bureaucracy made an astonishing pirouette. Oskar Lafontaine declared himself SPD president early in 1995 Lafontaine is hardly an anti-capitalist But he is a very capable Social Democrat and able to adapt himself to the needs of the era.
The SPD's 1989 Berlin programme affirms that "a basic historic experience: repairs to capitalism are not sufficient. A new economic and social order is
According to Lafontaine this meant that the SPD must elaborate a programme to stimulate demand, including pay rises. However, he explained, social insurance costs must be reduced at the
Lafontaine called for the party to return to ideology. That rather frightened the party's right wing. This made Lafontaine appear to be on the left. He is certainly among the less nationalist Social Democrats, even if, like any good German Social Democrat, he wants to be the doctor at the bedside of German
Lafontaine struggled with former SPD leader Willy Brandt, who wanted the Social Democrats to be "patriotic" about German unity. Lafontaine has a preference for European structures, such as proposals for Franco-German checks on nuclear weapons. He also clashed with Gerhard Schröder on how to approach the world market.
Simple nationalism
The rightist and nationalist wing of the SPD, linked to the circles of the ruling class, was obliged to offer different suggestions. The right addressed itself to the man from Hanover, Gerhard Schröder, now Germany's
Hated by the left of the SPD for having betrayed its principles, looked at with mistrust by the right because they are ill disposed to any "party patriotism", Schröder has two strong points in
Firstly, Schröder had kicked out the Greens from Lower Saxony's coalition government. Although the Green vote increased in the 1994 election, the falling vote for the right allowed the SPD to break its coalition with the Greens and take a majority of seats in the regional parliament.
Secondly, partly because of his vanity, Schröder felt lucky enough to fight for the Chancellorship in an American-style, personality led contest with the incumbent, Helmut Kohl.
Schröder appeared to be the SDP's only hope to win the national elections.
The initial euphoria for Lafontaine declined. SDP Prime Ministers in the länder (Regions) and the right of the party, became more and more concerned about Lafontaine's "oldfashionedness."
personalities Hamburg's former mayor, Henning Voscherau and the former finance minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Wolfgang Clement, oriented themselves
Schröder became the darling of the German press, particularly the rightist Axel-Springer publishing empire. After all, Schröder is a media product. His approach to the electoral terrain is inspired by US politics. He saw his personal performances as the fundamental element of Capitalism's champions
Over the last year, Schröder has been increasing inspired by Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister. He adopted Blair's slogan: "What counts is what
But there is one major difference between Tony and Gerhard. The most important part of the British ruling class wanted Tony Blair to be Prime Minster, with media magnate Rupert Murdoch heading up the queue. That was not the case in Germany.
Viewed conceptually, Blair's task has been, roughly, to organise a comparable change to the one that the SPD had completed at its 1959 Bad Godesberg congress. At that moment, the SPD abandoned all reference to the class struggle and to Marxism. In Germany, the SPD has long been what the Labour became
Britain's rulers saw that Blair was certainly best placed to carry Great
Britain into the heart of the European Union and to set up a strategy for the global market.
In Germany, the ruling CDU/CSU conservative coalition was the party which best represented the principal goals of the country's ruling class. Chancellor Kohl was reinforcing Germany's role as the European Union's reference point and vanguard in the opening of Eastern Europe to market forces.
The question is: "Who benefits when Schröder becomes chancellor, apart from himself and part of the SPD?" Even six months ago, we would have answered
• Influential circles were interested in Schröder as a candidate, not a victor. Many backed him to scare the CDU government and get it to take riskier socio-political choices.
The Schröder campaign was not easy. Scharping, the other potential candidate, seemed more "professional" and pragmatic. Initially, Scharping was preferred by employers, Although 40,000 small business people have party cards, the SPD does not have solid backing from the employers.
There are six business people within the SPD parliamentary fraction, Four hundred managers and petty bourgeois members of the SPD have founded an "economical initiative circle". This includes some directors of big enterprises, though most hold positions in denationalised industries, like Lufthansa, Landesbanken, Aral and Ruhrkohle.
This is a tiny minority of the business milieu. Quite unlike the massive presence of big capital inside the CDU/ CSU and the small liberal party (FDP).
Schröder has another handicap. Unlike Blair, he cannot claim that he alone — not the party's committees - will govern the country. Such a centralisation is certainly is not accepted by the parliamentary fraction, the regional Prime Ministers, or SPD members.
The protests of the Young Socialists ("Jusos") against the political emptiness of Schröder's media statements will not
Other voices have already been raised. The SPD "Working Group for Workers' Questions" (AFA) are demanding changes to Article 116 of the Labour Code, which forces unions to pay for workers who are not striking, but cannot work because of the consequences of a strike elsewhere. The new centre
Schröder's attempt to win the political middle ground is neither new nor necessarily effective - the three preceding governments had the same target. Some people in this middle ground are getting poorer or are "falling" into the working class. Others are jumping towards personal riches. What political voice can satisfy these contradictory
Schröder says, decrease taxes, nisti18 legally limit the ability to unionise, cut wages and social security costs and help exports and monetary stability. That is contradictory to his promises to the trade unions: for example, to cancel a series of Kohl's attacks on social security and invalidity pay
Now, Schröder need the unions to set up his "Alliance for jobs." Rather than create a "new centre," like Blair, Schröder looks prepared to make concessions to the "old centre". The SPD is talking of public measures for the development of the new industries (information technology, the media), special taxes for subsidised enterprises that do not hire and the introduction of taxes on the energy and the environment.
Germany's new government is a coalition between the SPD and the Green party. It will have objectives it cannot realise. It cannot both consolidate profits and develop social peace. It cannot be the "boss's friend". Schröder risks becoming a barely-tolerated Chancellor, doing the job that Helmut Kohl was so good at. * * Thies Gleiss is a trade unionist and a member of the works council in a metal factory. This article is an abridged update of an article in our German edition, Inprekorr.
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