I leave in the former DDR, not really in the East, rather almost exactly in the middle or heart of Germany, in Thuringia. The political climate here can only be truthfully described as extremely right-wing and this is nothing new. Although at the centre of everything, H is a small village in Eichsfeld which seems to be only connected to the rest of the world by main roads. 608 people live here. Sure, we have TV and some kind of internet connection and almost a mobile telephone network, but little else in terms of civilization. Recently they built new bus stops on the main road, rumoured to have cost almost half a million Euros. Wonderful. A local building firm, where our village major works as a manager, got a nice fat contract to build them. It took a few months, but they are wonderful, now even people in wheelchairs can get on and off buses. Three buses a day leave H which go to our ‘county’ town, one at 5:42 in the morning, the next at 5:58. The third is a school bus, and runs once a day but only during school time. To get back, there are three ‘buses on call’ (RufBus) – where you need to book it at least an hour before. Saturdays, just one RufBus. It leaves at 7:01 and heads back at 15:00. Sundays: forget it. The only other bus goes to a neighbouring village, and no other buses go to other towns which are nearer than our County town. H is home to a collective administrative council (VG) which controls 14 villages, with a total population of 5615. Directly across the road from here are the VG’s offices, where about 10–15 people work. One department controls the registration of residents, voters and dogs etc. Another the buildings, roads etc. Probably the most important office is the one for ‘Safety and Order’ (Ordnungsamt), with duties and powers which merge with the police. The Chairman of the VG is appointed by the 14 majors of the member villages and is fully employed (yes, each village also has its own mayoral office, normally with a weekly surgery). Over the last twenty years or so the council workers in our village have adopted a policy of damaging our buildings in ‘subtle’ ways, by, for example, raising the public pathway next to our house above our damp-proof course, or by removing the pavement directly before our entrance so we step directly into the road when they resurfaced it. Recently, when I tried to discuss again these problems with H’s mayor, he basically told me that I should move away and give our property to someone else. Remigration is the policy of making migrants go back to where they came from, and the extreme-right has increasingly managed to create ‘migrant free zones’. To regain their Fatherland, they mob, attack and abuse people who were not born in Germany or have a ‘dodgy heritage’. Allegedly they have been quite successful over the last 20 years or so, extending the zone to a large area. Over the last few decades, the windows of our buildings have been smashed many times and ‘mysterious events’ have occurred like our rubbish bin daubed with swastikas. Many years ago the pub near us was run by a man from Greece, and he lived there with his family. Occasionally he organized gigs or discos which ran until late in the night. One Saturday we returned home late at about two o’clock from a birthday party and saw police and many people around the pub. The next day many of the neighbouring residents were standing around, and the police asked them what they had seen. One after one they explained to the police that they were in their houses asleep and saw nothing. The police gave up and drove off. I was then shocked to overhear the ensuing discussion. One said “did you see how they hit the Greek bloke with the baseball bats?”, another answered “yea, I thought he wouldn’t survive that”, and so on. For about an hour they discussed every gruesome detail of the attack before going back into their houses. Such things do not shock me any more. Both my wife and I have been assaulted, even on our own property, not yet seriously. These attacks were well-documented. Each time the public prosecutor dropped the cases because they were ‘not in the public interest’. I could give many more examples. All cases which migrants make against ‘native white Germans’ are not pursued by the public prosecutor here, but complaints against migrants are, with the utmost rigour and distortion. I installed a few basic video cameras on our house for our protection. In response, the Ordnungsamt implemented a lengthy full-blown investigation and initiated formal complaints with a threat of a fine of €50.000 against us because of the cameras. The case was set aside after a few years because, essentially, we had done nothing wrong. We had hoped this situation would improve when a ‘Leftie’ government was elected in 2014, but sadly this government has achieved little. If anything, it has got much worse. The fascist AfD are now the biggest party in the opinion polls but they are not in the majority. The ‘democratic parties’, as they refer to themselves, try to maintain a firewall between themselves and the AfD, but this is sometimes impractical as one cannot stop elected representatives voting according to their conscience, as indeed they should. The ‘Lefties’ and the ‘Greens’ seem content to verbally profile themselves, take well-paid minister posts and pose. Little has changed in the rural areas in terms of social amenities or public transport. The ‘Lefties’ will probably whinge even more when they are booted out of government later this year.
Some well-meaning people ask me why do I stay here if it’s like this – why don’t I simply live somewhere else? In answer, I try to explain that’s exactly what the Nazis say to me, but not so politely. I am a white North-European by both nationality and culture. I cannot really imagine how it is here for people who have a different background or skin colour. And, of course, most people here are decidedly anti-fascist. I just wish they would more actively improve the society directly, instead of simply demonstrating with the apparent expectation that somebody else should change things.
In Thuringia, a small federal state in the middle of Germany, the far right-wing party AfD is storming ahead in the polls. Thuringia was a border state within the GDR, with borders to the American and British sectors. Since reunification in 1990 it has reflected the political movements and highlighted the political turmoil in Germany. For the first twelve and a half years after reunification, Thuringia was first governed by conservatives who focussed on converting the state into a West-German style province and building a new national identity. In 2003 a more hard-line conservative took office and austerity became the guiding principle. A woman took over, but policies were no different. This energized the left, who reconfigured and built up the remnants of the party left-over from the GDR to create a more modern socialist/communist party (Die LINKE.pds/Die LINKE.). Whilst the more serious left did the work on the ground, the key posts were grabbed by the social-democratic wing, who ensured that any socialist policies were substituted for neoliberal austerity. Nevertheless, the party was able to maintain its aura of alternativeness, which led to it becoming the biggest faction in a government with the Social-Democrats (SPD) and the Greens. The cleansing of the party then began, with the left being mobbed out or simply having their membership cancelled. The coalition government continued and extended the hard neoliberalism policies, vigorously paying off state borrowing at the expense of children in poverty and public infrastructure like health-care, education and public transport. Die LINKE. has lost the broad basis it had in the communities and local councils – some even claim that this basis was deliberately jettisoned by the party in order to be free of any encumbrances like problems with schools and lefties who argue for left solutions. Instead, the party has targeted the conservative and the neoliberal Metronome vote. ______________________________
Metronomes are really the modern liberal/social-democratic/greens who fully accept neoliberalism and campaign for individual rights and their truth, often lobbying through charities/NGOs about single issues. ‘Metronomes’ because they are predominately middle-class, degree-educated younger people who live in metro-poles. Due to their vociferousness, social stratum, ‘professionalism’ and physical proximity to governments, they seem to be disproportionally listened to. They do not appear to have a political philosophy other than “I and my issues are the most important in the world”, nor do they seem to generalize their condition, which often makes them appear to be extremely intolerant. Parties like Die Linke. and the Greens seek creditability with Metronomes for their energy and publicity. Metronomes then take leading positions in such parties and become professional politicians. Consequently, the normal members of such parties are disenfranchised and the parties are hijacked to sail a different voyage. Often it seems that the Metronomes are the loudest to shout at the far right seeking to make themselves the centre of attention and completely failing to adopt a more sociological perspective and address the social issues which have led to the return of fascism in Germany. In one sense, they are a simple reflection of the AfD with their egocentricism and ‘professional’ lobbying, representing anger rather than a social or political solution to the recurring problems for democracies. In another sense, they are the new middle class who have benefited from socialist policies like universal education, but have little political understanding other than lobbyism … perhaps the biggest failing of the left. This has been successful only at one level , the ‘local’ federal state elections, but the party’s vote at the local, national and European elections has nosedived. This has exasperated the general frustration and no doubt fostered selfishness and intolerance. Many voters felt used, abused, left out, and cheated. They felt tricked not only by the West, the conservatives and also Die LINKE. who also played a significant role, and frustration is being replaced by anger. This has presented a wonderful opportunity for the newly-formed AfD, who continue to capitalise on an increasing feeling of being made to feel unimportant and worthless. In the ten years since its foundation, the AfD has built itself up from a capitalist ‘anti-European Central Bank’ party funded by a few medium-sized businesses who were threatened by international capitalism, to a party who is second in the opinion polls for the national parliament and leads the polls in five of the six federal states in the former East/GDR. It even competes with the established parties for first place at the next European election in 2024.
2. In Thuringia the AfD is currently predicated to get more than a third of the votes at the federal-state election next year (2024) and win at least 30 of the 44 direct seats. In Thuringia the Federal-state parliament is composed of at least 88 seats, and people get two votes (constituency and list). The first 44 are for the directly elected MPs, the rest are distributed proportionally so that the proportion of all the MPs reflect the list vote. If parties get less direct MPs than their proportion of the list vote, more seats are added to the parliament (‘overhang’ seats). If a candidate wins a direct seat but is not on their party’s list they get priority and enter the house, the candidate on the bottom of the party’s list is ‘knocked-off’ (does not come into the parliament). For a party’s list to be considered, they need more than 5% of the vote. Therefore, the vote for the parties with more than 5% of the votes is positively weighted. Thuringia currently has 90 MPs and the next election will be in the autumn 2024. But with ‘only’ 33% and 27 direct seats, they will have at least 32 MPs, thirteen more than they currently have and will be the largest party.
3. The FDP are predicted to fall below the 5% hurdle and fall out of the parliament. Consequently, the list vote for the AfD will be worth more than 33%.] It is generally considered that they will get more than this, but the basic majority of MPs of 44 needed to form a government alone is not so far off (without overhang MPs).
The various battle lines are still vague and opaqueness prevails but momentum is building for a number of clashes at the forthcoming national conference. This could be the most significant watershed for the Linke (DIE LINKE.), or the party could suppress the internal festering again for another year.
The main confrontation, about which few activists now speak, was the rumoured contest for the party leadership. The incumbents of the split post, Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger, have stumbled along for six years already, somehow holding the party together, presiding over the demise of the party in the former East with some exceptions, and benefitting from a new spark of life in the former West. A challenge was rumoured to be mounting from Sahra Wagenknecht who is originally from the East and has enjoyed a model career in the party. Wagenknecht seems to have abandoned her radicalism and become more comfortable with the Reformers (see below Reformers) in the party since she personally paired up with ex-Social-Democrat (SPD) minister Oskar Lafontaine, and co-chaired the parliamentary group of the party with Dietmar Bartsch who is a leading figure in the social-democratic right flank of the party, the FDS (“Forum Demokratischer Sozialismus”, see Reformers below). Whether or not she mounts a challenge for the leadership, and with which, if any, running partner, remains to be seen.
Traditionally Wagenknecht’s base in the party was the hard left, but her recent repeated remarks about limiting migration and forming a new left movement, portraying more or less the same views as the Reformers, has rapidly lost her some of her former supporters and left the rest insecure. Whilst Wagenknecht’s history has shown that she is a force to be reckoned with, it is clear from her recent manoeuvres that she is again repositioning herself politically and risks losing her base from which she spring-boarded herself into the national limelight. The most significant group in her youth was the Communist Platform (KPF – the KPF is mainly composed of prolific Marxists, GDR left-overs, pacifists and other systematic thinkers).
The conference next week will also elect its new executive committee and the Reformers have nominated candidates for key posts in the party like treasurer, general secretary, and vice-chairs etc. The Reformers have also tabled a number of motions to the forthcoming conference. The most significant motion from the strongest reformers, the FDS, is an attempt to establish a select commission, in which they hope they would have an inbuilt majority, to review and change the programme of the party. Probably, they will move to get this referred to the party’s executive committee where they think they will have a majority so that they can push their changes through without interference from the members. It is typical for the FDS, at least in the former East, to create an “authority” – a committee, commission or a select group at a higher level, then bully and mob themselves into the controlling positions and spring the ‘results’ on the rest of the party, without ever really making the content of their proposals transparent or tabling a straightforward motion to allow party members to discuss and vote on any proposed changes.
Wagenknecht’s career in the left has steadily developed up through the Linke party and she still has a number of good years before her. She is now on the highest plateau in the Linke and, given her record, will be unlikely to want to sit on her laurels. She faces three possible options: either to reconfigure the Linke and broaden its base to the right, or to formally leave the Linke and form a new party or at least a movement. The latter would be an attempt to outflank and include as much of the Linke and dissatisfied SPD members as possible in a Mélenchon style gambit to collect many “Social-Democrats” together to realign German politics and counter the long-term dominance of the right and to win back the many voters lost to the AfD. The third option is to leave things as they are, at least for another year or so.
Wagenknecht has recently reconfirmed her support for a new Coalition Movement (“Sammelbewegung” – rumoured to be “#fairLand”) and undoubtedly sees herself a one of the key figures in it. Apparently the Movement will be launched in September this year, after the football world cup (ARD 27.5.2018).
Wagenknecht may be very cautious about jumping ship as her husband Lafontaine tried this in 2005 with, at best, mediocre results, which led to his disappearance from the centre stage of the political arena. Lafontaine has been at the very top, rising to minister, party chairman and the SPD candidate for chancellor in 1990, and he was already past his political peak when he defected into a less prominent world. There is much room for Wagenknecht to go upwards in the German political world, to become, for example, a national minister or the Chancellor. However, although she has not directly ruled out candidating for the party leadership, she has implied that she will not. If she does candidate, she may well candidate on a joint ticket with Dietmar Bartsch to ensure the reformers are on board. To allow Riexinger to keep his post to pacify the SL (see below Reformers) – where Lafontaine enjoys the most resonance in the Linke – would suggest that Wagenknecht and Lafontaine have forgiven Riexinger for his alleged personal campaigns against Wagenknecht earlier this year, which is rather fanciful. Consequently, Bartsch is the only real candidate, if, and it is a big if, there is a contest.
Wagenknecht has skilfully repositioned herself over time to get where she is, and has run out of space in the Linke, and she is a politically maturer than the incumbent co-chairs. To abandon the Linke would also mean to directly confront not only the Linke itself, but also the SPD and probably also the AfD, and might well lead her to obscurity (unless deals with other parties are in the pipeline). To take control of the Linke, and then to relaunch and redefine it as a party is a safer course for her, although she risks embarrassment if she loses, and, if she wins, will then face the very significant problem of how to sell ‘New Linke’ as a new product rather than a simply a new flavour of the left.
Even though Mélenchon and his La France Insoumise could be an example for Wagenknecht to follow it does not translate easily into the German arena – there are fundamental differences between the German and French electoral systems and also the voters.
Firstly, Germans do not elect presidents, ministers or the chancellor directly. Consequently the appearance of independents at the higher levels of the political world in Germany is extremely rare indeed. Wagenknecht needs a party behind her. She is a career parliamentarian and her ego is not so big as to imagine that she could not only redirect the political direction of Germany but also fundamentally change the electoral system from the ‘bottom up’ in one fell sweep. About half the Bundestag is elected through a party list, and the vast majority of the direct candidates wear a party badge. Often the chancellor is agreed upon through horse-trading between the party groups in the Bundestag, and she or he appoints the cabinet based on what was agreed in the horse-trading rounds.
Secondly, Germans are very much authority orientated and democracy for them is simply getting a group of people to agree to something, whatever it might be. Parties give the aura of collectivity, authority and powerfulness to candidates, and to which parliament they are electing influences how people vote in Germany. Like everybody, Germans want their vote to count.
Thirdly in Germany, like France, money also plays a big role politics. To go it alone makes it more difficult to benefit from the state funding of political parties, at least until the Movement is recognised as an official party. And, although much smaller than the big German parties, the Linke has, officially, assets of at least 33 Million €, and an annual income of 30 Million € (2016). Wagenknecht’s journey upwards would be far more comfortable with at least some of these resources being available to her.
A parallel between the Movement and Corbyn’s revitalisation of Labour in the UK is often claimed by activists in the Linke, but the cases are very dissimilar. Corbyn attracted many former Labour members who had effectively exiled themselves from the party in a sulky protest against Blairism. And, although there were a few initiatives, like Respect, the majority of the exiled had not become members of other parties and were keen to re-join Labour. Corbyn inspired them to believe that ‘old Labour’ was re-emerging.
If Wagenknecht contends the leadership and wins it would certainly get her in the news next weekend, and it might generate enough attention to get more widespread support for the Movement. If she intends to side-step the party, the internal ulcerations will continue to cause major discomfort and further paralysis in the Linke for some time.
Two main groups form the reformist wing of the Linke: the FDS and the SL (“Sozialistische Linke”), even though they may not see themselves in this light. The reformers have, more or less, three main positions:
They argue for limits on migration – they oppose the “no border, no nation” stance which often coexists with Marxist thinking.
At the very best, they present some poorly considered, outdated Keynesian theories and seem to regard Germany as an economically isolated nation.
As the name implies, they argue for some improvements in the capitalist system but present no fundamental critique – they want to make capitalism a bit nicer.
The SL position is best described as profering a nostalgic return to pre-neoliberal industrial capitalism, or Fordism, where workers participate more in the share of profits. The adoption of the neoliberal policies by the SPD and the consequent freeing up of the labour market and the slashing of unemployment benefits triggered Oskar Lafontaine and others to leave the SPD and later join the WASG (“Wahlalternative Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit”). The WASG merged with DIE LINKE.PDS to form ‘Die LINKE.’ in 2007. The SL membership is dominated by people inherited into the Linke via the WASG. The SL, which targets unionised factory workers mainly in former West Germany, oppose unlimited migration because, in effect, it will ‘upset their differentials’ and lead to a brain drain in other countries. They talk trade-unionism high, and enjoy limited relationships with a few major trade unions in Germany. As the trade-unions in Germany are now in serious decline, the SL tries to extend their ‘customer base’ to include the service and care sectors and is home to Bernd Riexinger, the current male chair of the Linke.
The FDS is essentially an entryist group in the Linke, dominated by a minority of former East Germans who were refused membership of the SPD and people who later joined the Linke in order to further their career by, for example, becoming ministers. The FDS is the most Machiavellian and secretive of any group in the Linke and their mafia style tactics and Stalinist methods of control in the former East have already led to a haemorrhaging of members from the Linke, widespread apathy and a huge loss of their voter base to the newer protest party, the AfD. (Alternativ für Deutschland – the AfD is a populistic and nationalistic right-wing party whose rhetoric, perhaps oddly, seems occasionally to agree with Wagenknecht’s.) The tactics of the FDS and its closest associates smell like those of the secret service of the GDR – they operate by taking control through authority by seizing key posts and publications and then employing methods like bullying, mobbing, deleting members from the party lists, trying to forcibly remove members from meetings and denying ‘difficult’ elected delegates the right to participate at party conferences, etc. etc. – quite an uncivilised group of people, to say the least. New jobs in the party and in FDS controlled ministries are then given to FDS sympathisers. And so their network builds up. Spinning and Blairism are second nature to them and through their various strategies they have amplified their importance and power considerably. Possibly, they even have their own handshake. On the down side, they appear to have almost no political philosophy and when in office often readily adopt conservative or SPD policies without blinking an eye lid. Consequently, when the FDS takes over the party and participates in government, like in the former East, the Linke rapidly loses its credibility to its own voter base. Like all parasitoids, the FDS kills off its own host. It now appears to look for a new voter base, or ‘market’, to survive – time will tell whether it succeeds in attracting right-of-centre voter support. Although the Coalition Movement could become a new host for them, they are unlikely to jettison the Linke as they control most of its assets and resources. The FDS are almost a perfect example of Big Brother with a double helping of Doublespeak, but with little political ideology other than that ‘power is good’. They seldom win arguments, but often steal power.
Upon leaving the plane at this small but powerful European capital, I am immediately confronted with solders carrying machine guns. This shocks me, and the solders respond by giving a smile, but the police remain grim-faced, searching peoples’ crevices with their eyes — for our safety, of course.
A walk around Brussels centre early the next day revels a cosmopolitan city almost over its collective grief, hundreds of flowers lying before the Stock Exchange, some no longer so fresh. More armed soldiers discretely hover in the background whilst the city prepares for its Festival of World Cultures as part of the Diversity Project for which visitors are welcomed, food offerings are presented from many countries, and local artists sing together to “share messages of peace, tolerance and coexistence”. For me, back to boring work. Not a great deal of enthusiasm prevails this weekend, only two people show up. The rest either have important VE day celebrations the next day or are simply enjoying the weather.
Evening closes in and we visit the Food-Trailer festival in the public park. Wonderful atmosphere with all sorts of burgers, falafel, wines, crêpes and other gastric delights. All too soon it is midnight and the start of a new day. Before the clocks finish striking, security guards and police swoop through the crowds in the public park. People are frightened, nervous and swiftly thin out, half running away. The slower, not so-young ones, like me, drink our last drop, but one minute is too slow for the police. All discussion refused, thrown face down to the dry dirt, clothes ripped, thick plastic cable-ties used as handcuffs, kicked and dragged to another part of town. Passers-by manage to look the other way, despite my screams for help. Thrown to the ground again, cable ties violently cut off drawing blood, abandoned in an unknown place. Covered in dust and sore, slowly adrenalin subsides to pain and awareness of bruises, cuts and wounds, but at least free. Or should I say liberated? Very odd, really. I’m no hippy, punk or freak, rather a white, somewhat disabled, middle-aged, boringly dressed family man. Is Brussels now too uncivilized for me, despite being host to “our European democratic apparatuses”? Did they need an example to say “Look! We do this to him, so what do you think we will do to you if you do not run away from us or you do not do what we demand?” Maybe the locals knew that, which is why they fled at the sight of the police — for their safety, of course.
8th May, VE or Liberation day. The day the Nazis capitulated to the western Allied forces in Berlin. VE day commemorates the day the Nazi terror was defeated and people in West Europe started saying things like “never again”, and “this is the day we, the people, start winning the peace”. The British and the Soviets were the clear European military victors, but France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Poland and ‘the rest’ of the liberated countries in Europe have a more complicated conscience when it comes to their national history, to say nothing about the new European economic super-power Germany.
My experience during the IRA bombing and other ‘freedom’ campaigns in England, was, that despite whatever feelings of support for their cause, we Brits do not change our lifestyle as a result of being terrorized, arguing that the terrorists would then have already won. We should keep or drink a stiff one, remain civilised and vote to change things.
In contrast the continentals as Republicans appear to react differently, probably because of what is a relatively normal feeling of alienation from the state and its apparatuses, even though it is their own state, and not owned or ruled by a monarch or foreign power. One example is that of the German “Red Army Faction”, although the rationale often attributed to them can only be considered to be partly effective. It seems correct that terrorist acts cause an overreaction of the state, leading to increased suppression, centralisation of power and control, and the domestic deployment of armies ready to be used against the civilians and so on, as now happens at least in Belgium and France. In Germany the CSU, the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s CDU, calls for the constitution to be changed because they need the deployment of the army for “public safety”. More generally, the Republics in Europe are increasing the powers of their governments and ministers to allow them to make more direct decisions, thereby removing some of the checks and balances set up to prevent dictatorships and lunatic fringes taking over. The ISIS must get much comfort from this. For a few suicide bombers they not only kill indiscriminately and inconvenience many more, but they get us to give up what we claim to value more than anything: our freedoms.
But that is where the truth of the RAF argument seems to end. Even now there seems little or no provoked reaction, revolt or rebellion from the ‘European’ people who are entrenched in the “Me, Me, Me” culture. And that was supposed to be the justification for terrorism – the people would resist the over reaction of the state(s) to acts of terror and create a more civilised society. Maybe the state needs to be really fascistic and 60 million again sacrificed before liberty, equality and sisterhood / brotherhood become interesting or we become “We, We, We” again. For our safety, of course.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
