Left Party (Germany)

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Template:Infobox German Political Party

The Left Party (In German: Die Linkspartei., officially with a period at the end), formerly Party of Democratic Socialism (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus, PDS) is a left-wing socialist political party in Germany. It is the legal successor to the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which ruled East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) until 1990. Between 1990 and 2005 the party's PDS predecessor had been seen as the leftwing "party of the East", and whilst achieving minimal support in western Germany regularly won 15-25% of the vote in eastern Germany, entering coalition government (with the SPD) in two of eastern Germany's five states. In 2005 the PDS, renamed the Left Party, entered an electoral alliance with the western Germany-based Labor and Social Justice Party, and won 8.7% of the vote in Germany's September 2005 federal elections (more than double the PDS' 4% share in the 2002 election).

At European level the PDS co-founded the European Left alliance of parties, and the Left Party is the largest party in the European Parliament's European United Left/Nordic Green Left parliamentary group.

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Background

The grassroots democracy movement that forced the dismissal of East German head of state Erich Honecker in 1989 also empowered a younger generation of reform politicians in East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party who looked to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika as their model for political change. Reformers like authors Stefan Heym and Christa Wolf and human rights attorney Gregor Gysi soon began to re-invent a party infamous for its rigid Marxist orthodoxy and police-state methods. By the end of 1989 the last hardline members of the party's Central Committee had resigned, followed in 1990 by 95% of the SED's 2.3 million members. A new name, "Party of Democratic Socialism," was adopted to distance the reformed party from its communist past (after a brief transitional period as the SED/PDS). By early 1990, the PDS was no longer a Marxist-Leninist party, though neo-marxist and communist minority factions continue to exist.

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In state and local government

The Left Party (then the Party of Democratic Socialism) has had several years of experience as a junior coalition partner in two federal states — Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania — where it co-governs with the Social Democratic Party. Political responsibility has burnished the Left's reputation as a pragmatic, rather than ideological party. It remains strong in local government in eastern Germany, with more than 6,500 town councillors and 64 elected mayors. The party continues to win eastern voters by emphasizing political competence and refuses to be labelled as merely a "protest party," although certainly the party attracted millions of protest voters in the federal election, profiting from growing dissatisfaction with high unemployment and cutbacks in health insurance, unemployment benefits, and workers' rights.

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In federal elections

In the first all-German elections in 1990, the PDS won only 2.4% of the nationwide vote, but under a one-time exception to Germany's electoral law entered the Bundestag with 17 deputies led by Gysi, one of Germany's most charismatic and articulate politicians. In the 1994 election, in spite of an anti-communist "Red Socks" campaign by the then-ruling Christian Democrats aimed at scaring off eastern voters, the PDS increased its vote to 4.4 percent, won a plurality in four eastern districts, and re-entered the Bundestag with an enlarged caucus of 30 deputies. In 1998 the party reached the high-water mark in its fortunes by electing 37 deputies with 5.1% of the national vote, thus clearing the critical 5% threshold required for guaranteed proportional representation and full parliamentary status. The party's future seemed bright, but it suffered from a number of weaknesses, not the least of which was its dependence on Gysi, considered by supporters and critics alike as a super-star in German politics who stood in stark contrast to a colorless general membership. Gysi's resignation in 2000 after losing a policy debate with party leftists soon spelled trouble for the PDS. In the 2002 election, the party's vote sank back to 4.0%, and was able to seat only two back-benchers elected directly from their districts, Petra Pau and Gesine Lötzsch.

After the 2002 debacle, the PDS adopted a new program and re-installed a respected moderate, long-time Gysi ally Lothar Bisky, as chair. A renewed sense of self-confidence soon re-energized the party. In the 2004 elections to the European Parliament, the PDS won 6.1% of the vote nationwide, its highest total at that time in a federal election. Its electoral base in the eastern German states continued to grow, where today it ranks with the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats as one of the region's three strong parties. However, low membership and voter support in Germany's western states continued to plague the party on the federal level until it formed an electoral alliance in July 2005 with the Labor and Social Justice Party (WASG), a leftist faction of dissident Social Democrats and trade unionists, with the merged list being called the Left Party. In the 2005 federal election the Left Party received 8.7% of the nationwide vote and won 54 seats in the German Bundestag.

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Alliance with the WASG (2005)

Image:Wahl 2005 Linke.jpg After marathon negotiations, the PDS and WASG agreed on terms for a combined ticket to compete in the 2005 federal elections and pledged to unify into a single left party in 2006 or 2007. According to the pact, the parties did not compete against each another in any district. Instead, WASG candidates—including the charismatic former Social Democratic leader, Oskar Lafontaine—were nominated on the PDS electoral list. To symbolize the new relationship, the PDS changed its name to The Left Party.PDS or The Left.PDS, with the letters "PDS" optional in western states where many voters still regarded the PDS as an "eastern" party.

The alliance provided a strong electoral base in the east and benefited from WASG's growing voter potential in the west. Gregor Gysi, returning to public life only months after brain surgery and two heart attacks, shared the spotlight with Lafontaine as co-leader of the party's energetic and professional campaign. Both politicians will co-chair the Left's caucus in the German Bundestag after the election.

Polls early in the summer showed the unifed Left list on a "high-altitude flight," winning the support of as many as 12 percent of the vote, and for a time it seemed possible the party would surge past the German Greens and the pro-business Free Democratic Party and become the third-strongest force in the Bundestag. But, alarmed by the Left's unexpected rise in the polls, Germany's mainstream politicians hit back at Lafontaine and Gysi as "left populists" and "demagogues" and accused the party of flirting with neo-Nazi voters. A gaffe by Lafontaine, who described "foreign workers" as a threat in one speech early in the campaign, provided ammunition for charges that the Left was attempting to exploit German xenophobia. The party's anti-racist, pro-immigrant platform and its support by Germany's leading Turkish politician, Hakkı Keskin, received scant attention.

Although Germany's once-powerful trade unions distanced themselves from the Left in the 2005 election, some union leaders have expressed interest in cooperating with the party after the election. A number of regional trade union leaders and mid-level functionaries are active supporters.

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2005 federal election outcome

Image:FRGElections.PNG At the 2005 federal election, the Left Party became the fourth-largest party in the Bundestag, with 54 Members of Parliament (MPs) (full list), ahead of the Greens (51) but behind the Free Democrats (61). Three Left Party MPs were directly elected on a constituency basis: Gregor Gysi, Gesine Lötzsch and Petra Pau, all in Eastern Berlin constituencies. In addition, 51 Left Party MPs were elected through the party list element of Germany's Additional Member System of proportional representation. These include Lothar Bisky, Katja Kipping, Oskar Lafontaine, and Paul Schäfer. Besides Lafontaine, a number of other prominent SPD defectors won election to the Bundestag on the Left Party list, including a prominent leader of Germany's Turkish minority, Hakki Keskin, German Federal Constitutional Court justice Wolfgang Neskovic, and the former SPD leader in Baden-Württemberg, Ulrich Maurer.

When the votes were counted, the party doubled its federal vote from 1.9 (PDS result in 2002) to more than 4 million—including an electoral breakthrough in industrial Saarland where, for the first time in a western state, it surpassed the Greens and FDP due, in large part to Lafontaine's popularity and Saarland roots. It is now the second strongest party in three states,all of them in the former GDR, (Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia) and the third strongest in four others, all but Saarland in the former GDR, (Saarland, Berlin, Saxony, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). It was the only party to win over protest voters broadly across Germany's political spectrum: nearly one million Social Democratic voters defected to the Left while the Christian Democrats and Greens together lost half a million votes to the resurgent party.

Exit polls showed the Left had a unique appeal to alienated non-voters: 390,000 Germans who refused to support any party in 2002 returned to the ballot box to vote for the reformed party. The Left's image as the last line of defense for Germany's traditional "social state" (Sozialstaat) proved to be a magnet for voters in western as well as eastern Germany.

All other established parties had ruled out the possibility of a coalition with the Left Party prior to the election, and refused to reconsider in the light of the closeness of the election result, which prevented either of the usual ideologically-coherent coalitions from attaining a majority. The possibility of a minority SPD-Green government tolerated by the Left Party was the closest the Left Party came to potential participation in government at this election.

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Stasi connections

Since German reunification, the PDS has always been target of suspicions of Stasi connections. After the 2005 election, the Bundesbeauftragte für die Stasi-Unterlagen Marianne Birthler accused the Left Party of having at least 7 former Stasi informants in its parliamentarian group [1]. It was also revealed that Lutz Heilmann, their top candidate from Schleswig-Holstein, had worked permanently for the Stasi for several years [2]. While the first proved to be false, Lutz Heilmann's work for the Stasi became a problem weeks after the election. While his work as a guard for the Stasi wasn't in any way suspicious (most secret services have guard-troops for politicians), Heilmann would have been forced by a law of the left-party to reveal his work for the Stasi, which he didn't. In a very close vote, the members of the Left-Party in Schleswig-Holstein passed a vote of confidence in Heilmann. Suspicion of Stasi past led to their candidate Lothar Bisky not being elected as one of the vice presidents of the parliament, although the Left accused the SPD to have voted against Bisky to get revenge for the treachery of many ex-SPD-members, now working for the Left. In Saxony, the chairman of the Left Party group Peter Porsch may lose his mandate in the Saxon parliament because of Stasi past. All representatives in the parliament (CDU, SPD, NPD, Greens and FDP) except the Left Party faction voted to open the process against Porsch. [3]

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Miscellaneous facts

  • The party supports expanding partnership rights for same-sex couples and advocates elimination of Germany's tax on beer. It has strict rules on gender equality, and one half of its Bundestag executive committee will be women.
  • A Left Party Member of the European Parliament, Feleknas Uca, was the world's only elected Yezidi politician until three were elected to the Iraqi legislature in 2005.
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See also

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External links

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Further reading

  • Thompson, Peter (2005) The Crisis of the German Left. The PDS, Stalinism and the Global Economy Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford. ISBN 1-57181-543-0
  • Oswald, Franz (2002). The Party That Came Out of the Cold War : The Party of Democratic Socialism in United Germany. Praeger Publishers. ISBN 0275977315
  • Hough, Dan (2001). The Fall and Rise of the PDS in Eastern Germany (1st ed.). The University of Birmingham Press. ISBN 1-902459-14-8cs:Die Linkspartei

da:Die Linkspartei de:Die Linkspartei. es:Die Linkspartei. fa:حزب چپ (آلمان) fr:Die Linke nl:Die Linkspartei ja:左翼党 (ドイツ) no:Die Linkspartei pl:Die Linkspartei. ru:Левая партия fi:Die Linkspartei. sv:Die Linkspartei

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