By John Pickard
(Brentwood LP, personal capacity)
Angela Merkel may have won a fourth straight victory in the German General Election, but most socialist and labour activists will be focused on the rise of the extreme right Alternative for Germany, the AfD, in winning 94 seats out of around 700 in the lower house of parliament. This is a significant increase, especially for a party that has only existed for four years.
The AfD is openly anti-immigrant, ultra-nationalist and particularly anti-Muslim and it won 13% of the vote, compared to 4.7% in 2013 when it did not have enough votes to enter the Bundestag.
Both of the two main parties of the so-called “grand coalition”, the Christian Democrats/Social Union (CDU-CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) made significant losses. The vote of Angela Merkel’s party fell 8.5% compared the 2013 election, gaining 33% on this occasion. For the SPD the election was a disaster, its vote falling to 20.5%. Both of these parties got their lowest share of the vote since 1945.
The AfD party may not the German Nazi Party of 1933, but its election gains are a sober warning to the labour movement. Without any doubt, the party contains within its ranks a number of unreconstructed fascists, racists and Holocaust deniers and these reactionary elements often dominate the air waves and the party election manifesto.
Alexander Gauland, a Party co-leader declared that the aim of the Party is to “take our country back”. Lower Saxony’s AfD leader, Willhelm von Gottberg has described the Holocaust as “an effective instrument to criminalise Germans and their history.” Another leader, Jens Maier, called for an end to the “guilt cult” over the second world war. Gauland also urged Germans to be “proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.”
These out-and-out reactionaries dominated the campaign so much that in the day immediately after the election, co-leader Frauke Petry resigned from the Party. To the astonishment of AfD members and journalists present, she walked out of a press-conference and declared that she would sit in the Bundestag as an independent. Petry had seen herself as “moderating influence” in the AfD, but she clearly felt she was fighting a losing battle, in a party, she said, now positioning itself as a “party of anarchists”.
The AfD manifesto, despite the party’s claim to represent ‘ordinary’ Germans, is clearly aimed at the rich. It includes scrapping inheritance tax and forcing the long-term unemployed to work 30 hours a week for less than minimum wage, in other words a free charter for cheap labour.
The AfD has pledged to “hunt” Angela Merkel. They have called for a legal inquiry into the so-called refugee crisis. We can expect their representatives to show the same hooligan antics they showed in their jeering at other parties’ election rallies. In the Bundestag, their MPs will be noisy, threatening and aggressive, like their Nazi forbears in the 1920s and 1930s. Pressure will be put on whichever coalition Merkel finds herself heading to carry through measures that will legitimise the harassment of refugees. Outside parliament, we can expect a big increase in physical attacks on refugees and all Germans of Turkish or eastern heritage, with a nod and a wink from the AfD.
On the other hand, it is important to note that many of the millions who voted AfD are not racists or fascist sympathisers. Like their equivalent FN and UKIP voters in France and Britain, they were Germans who felt left behind in the scramble for some kind of economic prosperity and security.
For many more politically backward workers and middle class, the issue of immigration and their own insecurities and uncertainties became bound up together. Out of the huge influx of two million refugees in two years, many ended up precisely in the most economically deprived parts of Germany, areas already suffering shortages of good housing, jobs and services.
It was because of the economic insecurity and uncertainty facing millions of Germans – issues not addressed or even recognised by the other parties – that there was a shift to the AfD, for want of an alternative.
The German economy may present a picture of apparent strength and stability, but there are important areas of high deprivation, poverty and unemployment and it has been in these areas above all – natural areas of SPD support – that the AfD has found an echo.
About a quarter of German workers still receive what is officially deemed a “low income” and many workers have had their wage security reduced by a huge increase in ‘temporary’ employment and the burgeoning ‘gig’ economy, in part thanks to labour ‘reforms’ introduced by previous SPD/CDU government. In short, the election shows that by the poorest sections of the working class do not see the SPD as fighting for them any longer.
The Financial Times recently ran a feature on the decline of the SPD in the Ruhr valley industrial belt, once a bastion of SPD support. With hundreds of thousands of loyal coal-miners and steel-workers, this area was once an impregnable fortress for the SPD. Here, the SPD could just weight its votes. But now, many former SPD voters have felt that the party has deserted them. The paper quoted a retired coal miner expressing his doubts about a party he had supported all his life. “I think the SPD is a lot less ‘social’ than it used to be”.
The Financial Times focused especially on the town of Gelsenkirchen, a typical Ruhr mining town in the heart of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state and home to about one-fifth of the country’s 299 constituencies. NRW has been ruled by the SPD for 46 out of the past 51 years.
But decades of loyalty have resulted only in feelings of neglect and disenchantment. While the SPD has been in coalition with the CDU, there have been no serious attempts made to address the social and economic problems of the region. In the May elections this year the writing was already on the wall, as the SPD was well beaten by the Christian Democrats. The collapse in SPD support was typified by Gelsenkirchen, a town with 14 per cent unemployment (compared to a national average of 3.8 per cent), where there had been a high level of immigration. In this town, according to the Financial Times, there are 2500 applicants for 1500 traineeships.
Whereas in 2012, the SPD had won 57 per cent of the vote, in May, it polled only 38 per cent, to the AfD’s 15 per cent. In Sunday’s election, the SPD slipped further in Gelsenkirchen, to 33 per cent, as the AfD climbed further to 17 per cent. “There are a lot of people in parts of the Ruhr who have been left behind economically, and they see the SPD as the cause of their problems,” says Karl-Rudolf Korte, politics professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen. “They never forgave the party for Schröder’s reforms.” (Financial Times, August 2017)
The Financial Times also quoted Guido Reil, “a burly coalminer from Essen”, who symbolises the drift from the SPD to the AfD. Reil is a former SPD town councillor in Essen, and when he defected to the AfD last year, his justification was that “The SPD is no longer the party of the workers — the AfD is.”
According to a study by the DIW think-tank, “the social structure of SPD voters had changed more radically than in any other party, with a marked shift away from manual labour to white-collar workers and pensioners. Ordinary workers now make up only 17 per cent of the Social Democratic electorate, and 34 per cent of the AfD’s”.
“West Germany used to have 173 coal mines, employing 600,000 people and producing 150m tonnes of hard coal a year. Coal was Gelsenkirchen’s lifeblood — there were so many flares from its coking plants that it was called the “city of a thousand fires”. But since the 1970s, most of the mines have gone, and with them, 60,000 coal industry jobs.”
“All the good, well-paid, secure jobs have gone and they’re not being replaced by work of the same quality,” says Thomas Steinberg, Gelsenkirchen head of the IGBCE, Germany’s main mining union.
Whereas in the past, workers automatically joined the SPD at the same time as they joined their trade union, today, “nothing is automatic any more”. The SPD has “lost its connection to real people…They don’t speak their language…They’re people who have never worked, they’re all careerists and professional politicians.”
The retired miner admitted to having “cried” when he left the SPD after 26 years. But he did not regret his decision. “The workers here feel they’ve been treated unfairly — and rightly so,” he said. “The SPD just looked away as the Ruhr turned into the poorhouse of Germany.”
According to exit polls, out of the AfD’s six million votes, something like half a million came from those who voted SPD in 2013. The majority of new AfD votes came from former non-voters and CDU supporters. Nevertheless, as is clear from the comments above, the main political responsibility for the rise of the AfD must fall to the leadership of the SPD, which has utterly failed to offer a way forward to its natural base of support.
For the SPD, this general election result has been a disaster, the party gaining just over 20 per cent of the vote. Its leader, Martin Schulz struggled to make his policies in the least bit distinguishable from Angela Merkel’s. This is hardly surprising, given that his party has been in coalition with the CDU and has been for eight out of the last twelve years. Even the TV debate between Merkel and Schulz was described as more of a “duet” than a “duel”.
Merkel’s CDU does not itself have enough Bundestag members to govern alone and there will now by protracted negotiations to establish a new coalition. It has been suggested that Merkel will have to try to form what is called a “Jamaica” coalition, based on the black, yellow and green party colours of the three parties, the CDU, the FDP and the Greens. This will not be an easy option because the Greens will expect significant concessions on phasing out nuclear power and other things.
On the other hand, Schulz has said that the SPD will definitely not be in coalition with the CDU. It can only be hoped that the coming period will be one of honest discussion and debate inside the SPD as to the way forward. Shadowing the CDU, without offering anything for the big majority of the working class will only lead to further disaster. The SPD, established in the nineteenth century, substantially on the ideas of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, has fallen a long way.
The choice before the SPD is a simple one: either the party moves in the direction of radical, anti-austerity, class policies and measures in the interests of all workers – in which case it can revive the support it has lost all over Germany. There are some signs that party members are thinking along those lines. On the other hand, if it continues on its present path – and even more if it decides, after all, to go back into coalition with the CDU – it can fall even further, as its sister parties have done in Spain, France and Greece.
In the not too distant past, the two main parties between them got nearly 90 per cent of the vote, but in this election they got just over half the vote. This general election marks a milestone. It shows that ‘strong’ and ‘stable’ Germany is now being drawn into the maelstrom of political instability and volatility into which most other European states have already fallen. The ideas of real socialism, not the milk-and-water imitations of the current SPD leaders, will find an echo in the future, as they will elsewhere in the world. There is no other way out of the chaos of austerity, uncertainty, economic chaos and national and ethnic conflicts, which is all that is offered by capitalism.
September 26 2017
