The REAL election '08UPDATE: I found this Die Linke car in the street, but I'm not sure it's a Trabant. I know little about cars – do any car fans out there wish to tell me what this is? It does say Ford on the front… Coming back from work this evening, the bus I was in was overtaken by an old yellow banger with a massive flag poking out. After a closer look, it turned out be a tactically placed Trabant, the notoriously hard-to-come-by one-size-fits-all car of the old East German communist state.
And the flag – an election banner, urging Frankfurters to vote for the new boys on the block, Die Linke, the Left Party, in Sunday's crucial regional elections
In fact, new on the block may not be such an accurate description. The far-left outfit, who claim on their literature that privatisation is the theft of public property, were founded only last year. But they are the successors of a party that have been around for much longer – the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), itself a later incarnation of the Communist Party of the old German Democratic Republic (GDR). Marxist intellectual Alex Callinicos has said the party “represents a profound challenge to social democracy” (I think that was meant to be a good thing). Running the party are a former member of the old GDR’s legislative chamber Lothar Bisky, who chose to emigrate to the East at the age of 18, and Oskar Lafontaine, who led the opposition SPD during part of the Helmut Kohl era.
I tried to get a snap of the Trabi with my phone when it zoomed past proclaiming the glory of the old Communist East, but it was moving too fast. And the party, which must have destroyed several rainforests for all its mass advertising in the last few months, is doing the same thing to the political establishment too (sorry, it was late at night). By this time next week, these neo-communists might be some of the most politically powerful people in Germany.
How? Well, latest polls for Sunday’s state election show that the opposition social democrats, the SPD, are quickly catching up on the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU), and the Frankfurter Allgemeine put them both on 38% in this morning’s paper. This remarkable upturn for the moderate left has made the ruling CDU’s task of finding a majority in the house much smaller harder (sorry again). The SPD have benefited from the backfiring of some hard-line talk on crime and immigrants from the incumbent regional PM Roland Koch (CDU), which led to him being branded a racist and will have hurt his standing among the large ethnic minority community in the largely urban state. Andrea Ypsilanti, on the hand, turned out well at last night’s TV debate and look to be on an upper. The last time I blogged on the opinion polls, the CDU led by 43% to the SPD’s 32%. This could now go either way.
But, as so often with German politics, it will all come down to who can find allies to form a coalition that exceeds 50% of all votes. The centre-right Free Democrats will probably work with the CDU, while the Greens are expected to be up for an SPD-led coalition.
At play, though, is the crucial 5% rule — the minimum share of the vote a party must receive to get seats in parliament — and how this will affect Die Linke’s chances. If they reach the 5% mark, they could join forces with the SPD and tip the balance towards a left-wing coalition, giving the state Premiership to Ypsilanti, once considered a lightweight without a chance. The far-left may then be the party that holds the key to the coalition, and therefore a major influence on policy.
An editorial in Focus this week (not available online!) pointed out the likelihood that the fierce polarisation of the SPD-CDU battle would encourage votes for the centrist parties and screw up Die Linke’s hope’s of becoming Hessen’s kingmakers. If they succeed, their influence would be real. If they fail — well, maybe they’ll realise zooming up the Autobahn in a 1960s rustbucket isn’t the best electoral strategy.
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