What's Left
By Dr. Jackson Janes

A New Party Enters
The political party system in Germany got a new shove from the left last weekend. After almost two years of negotiating between the eastern Germany-based Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the western Germany-based party Election Alternative for Employment and Social Justice (WASG), the Left Party - Die Linke - emerged as a unified party and could pose a serious challenge to the Social Democrats (SPD). The future impact of this player on the overall party landscape remains uncertain, but all indications are that it will make a concerted effort to tap into the worries and concerns of many voters who are dissatisfied with their own lot and perhaps with the SPD.

After nine years of governing Germany, first under Gerhard Schröder and now in a grand coalition with Angela Merkel, the SPD is looking at plummeting polls and membership numbers, by some estimates losing some 3,000 members a month. Its current leader, Kurt Beck, Minister President of Rheinland-Pfalz and presumably the man who wants to challenge Merkel in 2009, is launching major broadsides against the CDU for pushing "neoliberal" policies which he claims undermine social justice. Yet such thunder is not translating into a stronger position for the party among the voters. The latest polls have the SPD at a historic 31 percent low in terms of popular electoral support. And many of those losses may be headed to the Left Party.

While the PDS and the WASG have been working together for the past three years and together have over fifty seats in the federal Parliament, the completed merger now has the potential of strengthening its impact on the national stage. The Left Party is the third largest in membership in Germany now. It is also seeing poll numbers which put it slightly ahead of both the Greens and the Free Democrats. The Left Party saw immediate good signs by generating enough support to be represented in Bremen after their recent state elections. Next year, there are elections in Niedersachsen, Hessen, and Hamburg and they will certainly be aiming to get traction there. And after that, in 2009, there are federal elections. The question many are raising is whether the option of naming the Left Party as a coalition partner will be a viable one for the Social Democrats, many of whom are hoping to find a way out of the coalition with Chancellor Merkel.

At the state level in eastern Germany, the PDS has shown its strength for several years. The Social Democratic mayor of Berlin is in a coalition with the PDS at the moment, and the PDS has a strong presence elsewhere in the east, having had experience in state governments in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and in Sachsen-Anhalt.

Despite the fact that many members of the PDS are ex-members of the party (the SED) that controlled the German Democratic Republic for all of its existence, the support of the party as a voice for eastern German concerns remains strong seventeen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The WASG is a broad alliance of left forces, disappointed social democrats, trade-unionists, attack and other movement activists, all of whom accuse the government policies of dismantling the German welfare state.

Can Success in Bremen Lead to Success on a Federal Level?
While neither the PDS nor the WASG have been able to gain a significant foothold in the west, the success in Bremen has now encouraged the leaders of the Left Party to see new possibilities. One of them is the former leader of the SPD, Oskar Lafontaine, who was instrumental in the victory of the SPD in 1998 and was Finance Minister in Gerhard Schröder's cabinet until he had a falling out with Schröder. After this falling out, Lafontaine left both his office and the party; but by early 2005, Lafontaine was able to form the WASG much to the dismay of his former SPD colleagues.

Lafontaine took that decision after watching the PDS pick up 2.3 percent of the state election vote in his home state of Saarland in September of 2004. And he now threatens to undermine the SPD support just at a time when the party is going through serious strains over its leadership, identity and direction. As one SPD loyalist has said: the SPD is like a church without a religion.

With such assessments in mind, the ambition of Lafontaine and his partner and leader of the PDS, Lothar Bisky, is to now raise the bar and have impact at the federal level of government. The question is whether they can accomplish that with a coherent program beyond the being primarily a protest party.

That would seem unlikely in light of the different backgrounds to the two parties and their culture. The PDS has been able to achieve a governing status in the east, whereas the WASG was primarily shaped by Lafontaine and his confrontation with his former party. As long as he is head of the party, it seems unlikely that the SPD leadership will seek him out as a partner. There is simply too much bad blood between the current leaders of the SPD and Lafontaine. Yet the fact that the SPD and the PDS have working relations at the state level suggests that the situation could be altered once there is a changing of the guard.

A New Coalition Partner
There are many who argue that Germany has a potential left of center majority, despite the fact they there is a popular conservative Chancellor running the country at the moment. If one counts together the supporters of the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party, however, the numbers don't add up to form a government, particularly with the SPD in the political cellar. On the other hand, the conservatives and the Liberals also do not have enough to comprise a workable government majority. A possible coalition between the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Greens is another scenario. That would leave the SPD in opposition with the Left Party, which might offer the Social Democrats a chance to win back those who were drifting to the Left Party.

For the moment, the idea of working together with the Left Party in a governing majority is not on the agenda of the other parties. Positions particularly on various foreign policy issues make them untenable, be it in regard to Israel, German troops in Afghanistan, or Kosovo. Whether that can change as the federal elections draw nearer will depend on whether the new party makes additional inroads in the west next year and into 2009 at the state level. But it will also depend on whether the Left Party can also sort itself out on any number of policy fronts. That might take far more time if it is possible to begin with.

Thirty years ago, the (west) German political party system was seen to be very inhospitable to new parties at the federal level. But the evolution of the Greens from a protest organization in 1980 to being represented in the Federal parliament to eventually becoming a governing partner in the coalition in Berlin in 1998 took eighteen years. It also took a lot of battles within the party, many of which are still operative today. Whether the Left Party can survive such an evolution, particularly after the founders leave, is only speculation. Yet with more voters drifting and not as tightly moored to party affiliations, the motivations for alignment and ultimately the choices made will be harder to anticipate across the entire political spectrum. One particular challenge will be to explore how the younger end of the political electorate responds to the Left Party, especially in light of the fact that the average age of its over 72,000 members is about 65, and the average of the PDS is about 70.

A Lasting Change?
In any event,  the Left Party is now a fifth party competing on the political stage in Germany. The current coalition in Berlin is generating adrenaline in all three of the smaller parties to show how they would offer a viable alternative in an alternative coalition. The Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats are also positioning themselves toward each other with an eye on the next federal elections in 2009 with frictions becoming increasingly visible. That might get enough brush fire going to even result in elections occurring in 2008; the last grand coalition also lasted only three years.

The question is whether the alternative to a grand coalition is from now on going to require three parties in coalition instead of the traditional two. If that is the case,  the Left Party might be seen by some in the SPD as a viable means to forming a government, assuming that the Greens would also agree to such a mix, which is not a given. The Greens can also look at a combination with the Liberals and the Christian Democrats under an already popular Chancellor.

But the SPD's main challenge now is to get its own act together and recapture many of those losing faith in the party. The emergence of  the Left Party is a wake up call for Germany's oldest party, but it is also a signal that the political battle lines will be formed around this political pentagon of competing parties for the foreseeable future.

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This essay appeared in the June 22, 2007, AICGS Advisor.

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Want to know more? Check out these links for more information.

"Germany's New Political Party is Born," by Hugh Williamson, The Financial Times, June 19, 2007.

"German Leftists Launch United Political Party," Deutsche Welle, June 16, 2007.

"Politbarometer June 22, 2007," Forschungsgruppe Wahlen e.V.