PDS is "Social Home"
for East Germans
Bodo Ramelow is the deputy leader of the PDS fraction in the Thuringia state assembly. We talked to him about the situation facing the party in eastern Germany, and its changing relationship with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). • You failed to become become Minister of Labor in Thuringia. Are you disappointed?
I did not want to become Minister of Labor; I only said that I would be willing to undertake the job! The PDS election program said that we wanted to reorganize the Ministries for Economy, Labor and Social Matters, and Science, and form a Ministry for Development and a Ministry for the Future. The budget for the promotion of the economy was to be combined with the budget for labor market policies, which would allow a certain number of initiatives to be undertaken in the public employment sector. That was our political concept. •The SPD declined your proposal for a coalition government
Since the start of the Kosovo war, it was not clear anymore to me personally whether it would actually be possible with the local SPD to work towards a common change in basic political questions in the sense of a policy change. Not because I think of the SPD in Thuringia as particularly rabid war mongers, but because, since Germany joined the war in Kosovo, the basic conditions for a political discussion on domestic matters have changed. The total activity among the Greens and the SPD was directed to bring all elected official on board the war course. This paralyzed and used up all efforts for a meaningful debate in these parties. Since that time there has not been a real meaningful exchange about alternative labor and economic models. To build a public employment sector would have been an incredibly difficult task with the existing politicians of the SPD. • After the election in Brandenburg the state chairperson, Anita Tack, said that the majority voted left. She came to this conclusion by adding the votes of the SPD and the PDS. Do you agree?
It is hard to say what counts as left in the SPD and if everything other than the CDU can be counted as left. Arithmetically the assertion is correct but that is a very mechanical view. As a matter of fact our Kashmir-wearing chancellor is not a representative of the left wing. My problem is also that the was represented best by Lafontaine was lost totally inside the SPD. With the Greens I have the feeling that they have mutated into a greenpainted FDP [centre liberal party]. They incline more towards the neoliberal course than to a strategy for fundamental societal change that looks for alternatives to the policies proposed by economic liberalism. So I would not dare anymore these days to simply add together the SPD and the PDS vote to get a "left spectrum."
When a party such as the PDS runs candidates, it must indicate how it is going to transform politics; that can be done under parliamentarism only through coalitions, because the PDS alone will not become a majority party (and that is a good thing). Changes will come in this society only when they are demanded outside of parliament with mass pressure. Parliament is only a part of the government through which movements can be channelled. • The PDS will not be in a position to join coalition governments in the foreseeable future. What does that mean for the strategic orientation of the PDS in East Germany? Will it take the place of social democracy in the East German party configuration? What consequences will that have?
In Eastern Germany, a traditional social democracy has not regrown in the last ten years. There were people from the period of the transformation who functioned as social democrats: They defined themselves as victims of the SED [Socialist Unity Party, i.e., the Stalinist party]; they would never consider themselves as lefts or as natural partners of the PDS. They are only busy with drawing lines of demarcation. In some ways they are representatives in Eastern Germany, who blindly follow orders from their
Western bosses.
In the past years the PDS has achieved its social democratization, with integration into the existing party configuration. This did not happen because the PDS became a substitute social democratic party, but because it picked up the currents that existed in the East [of Germany] and for whom the party became a home and more than a milieu. When I compare the programs of the PDS in Thuringia with those of the South Hessian SPD in the Seventies and the Eighties, then the latter probably had a more left approach than the PDS today.
Old established views do not apply anymore. The PDS is considered a social home in the new Federal states [East Germany] and the more we become fleshed out as a party, the more we will grow. But that is not enough for me. My perspective calls for it to become an allGerman left party, to the left of the SPD. That means that we must work towards an all-German left profile. At this time the breach between the West PDS and the East PDS is clearly visible: there exist completely different ways of looking at things, completely different socializations. We will only become an all-German party if we succeed in finding common political assessments in the roots of both socializations. • How to move towards this goal?
The best would be if we could finally discuss a common all-German constitution that is actually antimilitaristic, that lays out social rights, makes direct democracy possible, and where other life styles and social planning have room.
But other discussions can make do in the meantime: the right of asylum, the inviolability of the private sphere, the strengthening of those fundamental laws that guarantee civil rights. At the next census we shall see if there is once again a dispute over the informal right of self-determination, among other things, and if it can lead making an all-German political movement possible.
I will work towards this [goal] in the PDS. That is why I joined the PDS. At this moment apparently I am still the exception, still very much a vanguard West German. Many West Germans here in Thuringia are angry with me about joining the PDS. * This article first appeared in the German bi-weekly SoZ. Translated by Ed Kovacs, Los Angeles, U.S. Solidarity International Viewpoint #316 November 1999 23