Amid economic turmoil, left is right for many Germans

Erich Honecker may be dancing in his grave. The stodgy Communist Party apparatchik vilified in history as the last leader of the dying East Germany would be proud to know that his political heirs are making a comeback.

Germans watching their economic prospects founder, banks getting bailed out by the billions of euros and workers turned out into the streets are taking out their fury by voting in unprecedented numbers for the party called the Left, whose ranks include ideological descendants of Honecker.

FOR THE RECORD:
East Germany: An article about German politics in Friday’s Section A described Erich Honecker as the last leader of a dying East Germany. After his rule ended in 1989, he was followed by two more officials before the reunification of East and West Germany in late 1990. —

In last year’s nationwide elections, the party extended its parliamentary bloc from 54 to 76 seats out of 622. In state elections in North Rhein-Westpahlia and Saarland over the last year, the Left managed to win representation in local legislatures in western Germany for the first time.

Experts say the support has grown because of the perceived economic mismanagement by mainstream parties. Another factor is the impending social welfare cut that would have an inordinate effect on the poor and unemployed. Electoral volatility appears to cut across regional lines and also benefits the left-leaning Green Party, which picked up 17 seats in the last parliamentary election.

“Germans don’t go to the streets,” said Sven Behrendt, an economic expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They go to the voting booth.”

Smooth politicking has also paved the way for the Left’s rise.

East German Communists — renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism, or PDS, after reunification — held on to a steady but unchanging bloc of voters in the economically devastated formerly Soviet-controlled states. Then in 2005, under the leadership of the charismatic former Social Democratic Party leader Oskar Lafontaine, a former finance minister, the PDS began joining forces with a far-left western German party. The two merged and branded themselves Die Linke, or the Left.

“Lafontaine is a left-wing populist who really knows how to address the people,” said Juergen Falter, a political scientist at the University of Mainz, near Frankfurt. “He knows how to use the anxieties and prejudices of people.”

The Left has also replenished its ranks with such fresh faces such as Katja Kipping, a 32-year-old with candy-red hair who won election to the parliament in 2005, and 31-year-old Steffen Bockhahn, who won a seat last year.

“Before they always had these old men,” said Peggi Liebisch, the head of a Berlin association that helps single parents. “They would have even more success if they would get some more young people in there.”

The party attributes its recent successes to economic turmoil, the continued stagnation in the states of the former East Germany and the deeply unpopular German commitment to the war in Afghanistan, which it strenuously opposes.

“There’s a real need for a left-wing party that talks about social justice,” said Dagmar Enkelmann, leader of the Left’s parliamentary faction. “I consider myself a socialist. This new crisis gives Karl Marx a new meaning. But we have to modernize Marx and learn how to reform our society.”

Many observers blame the centrist drift of the Social Democratic Party, known by the abbreviation SPD, for the rise of the Left. Ever since the Social Democrats formed a grand coalition government with the center-right Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, in 2005, they’ve steadily lost street credibility with leftists.

“Most of the strength of the Left is the weakness of the SPD,” said Uwe Meinhardt, a leader of IG Metall, the German industrial union. “If the SPD should recover, I think the Left party will lose again.”

But others see the nation as a whole moving toward the left end of the political spectrum, especially concerning economic policy in response to the growing polarization between rich and poor. Even the market-oriented Free Democratic Party has been forced to adjust its rhetoric in the face of an electorate angry over multibillion-dollar bailouts for German banks and their southern European debtor nations combined with proposed austerity measures to cut public spending.

“The dissatisfaction with the injustice has never been so high,” said Ulrich Schneider, executive director of Paritaet, a union of charity groups — a sort of United Way, but allowed to lobby. “It’s not for the benefit of this party or that party. Even some factions in the CDU are calling to raise taxes.”

The rise of the leftist parties also contrasts starkly with the stagnation of the extreme right. Germany’s tiny National Democratic Party has never won seats in the national parliament and performs tepidly at the state and local levels. After picking up some support in the early 1990s, experts say, the right withered away, unlike similar parties in neighboring Netherlands or France.

“In Germany, the protest vote tends to go to the left, not the right,” said Falter, the political scientist.

Despite advances by the Left and the Greens, the majority of voters still cast ballots for one of the two major centrist parties, the SPD or the CDU. The environmentally minded Green Party disagrees with the Left on such issues as coal mining, preventing them from joining to mount a formidable challenge to the main parties.

“I have the feeling,” union official Meinhardt said, “that the German people are not a left people.”

daragahi@latimes.com

Beirut Bureau chief Daragahi was recently on assignment in Berlin.