At the same time, Lafontaine had a much harder time of it. He had to create the necessary fervor himself and conjure up a state of emergency at the Mannheim party conference in 1995. He promised that there were still visions worth fighting for, but remained vague when it came to defining them. It is to this politics of pugnacious gestures that he owes his greatest triumph – Rudolf Scharping’s being voted out of office.
Gysi’s greatest success, too, presumed a kind of state of emergency. In 2001, the PDS almost achieved an absolute majority in the eastern part of Berlin; the city had been ruined once and for all by the machinations of the previous Senate;* Schröder’s declared belief in “unrestricted solidarity” with the United States had stirred up old fears in the East; and anti-Communist campaigns put the PDS in a glaring light once again. Gysi’s previous posture closely resembled his present one: I am ready in the hour of need and decision-making. When the harsh attacks never came in the 2002 Bundestag elections, and when resignation outstripped defiance in the East, the PDS’s heretofore stable milieu didn’t help all that much. They lost even though they were well-anchored in East German society.
The socialist Left party made up of the WASG** and the PDS cannot succeed without creating a fuss. Right now, they don’t have to worry about it. The conservatives have long since committed themselves to revolutionary rhetoric. In the fall of 2002, contemporary historian Arnulf Baring called citizens to action in order to prevent the Federal Republic from petrifying into a Western GDR at the last minute. The CDU has announced radical reforms. There is already great anger towards the new alliance. The necessary operating temperature thus appears to have been reached, and the auto-suggestion of “historical opportunity” will take care of the rest.
In programmatic terms, the new Left attracts notice for its run-of-the-mill slogans like “labor” and “justice” – the CDU and the SPD promise the same. Even the struggle against Hartz IV is not a special new Left issue. After all, in August 2004 Saxon minister president Georg Milbradt considered participating in the Monday demonstrations himself. This probably explains the public gesture of defense. The alliance works with issues, concepts, and slogans from the center of society and ties them to an oppositional impulse.
The programmatic void – to which the other parties are hardly responding with plenty – allows the WASG and the PDS to be relaxed in dealing with East-West differences. Even if one might appear bourgeois and the other superficial, one self-righteous and the other indulging in guilt, they are united by a fear of decline or the real experience of being demoted. They are united in the conviction that they will not be among the winners of the reforms, which they agree come at the expense of the ordinary people. They are united in the conviction that no other party represents their interests. Whoever responds by invoking harmonious and conflict-free social circumstances does not improve the situation. Guido Westerwelle claims that liberal economic policies are good for everyone, that, after all, Prosperity for All [Wohlstand für alle] was the name of Ludwig Erhardt’s book. That is no less nostalgic than Oskar Lafontaine’s romance with the social welfare state that promises “politics for all.” The supposedly neoliberal zeitgeist and its opponents aren’t very far apart. Both hope that by turning the right screws they will get the Germany-machine working again and be able to carry everyone along. An illusion.
* Governing body in the city-state of Berlin – eds.
** WASG is the acronym for Wahlalternative Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit, or the Electoral Alternative for Labor and Social Justice. WASG was founded in 2005; it emerged from an organization with a similar name – eds.
print version
return to list
previous document