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WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : Germany
State elections in Hesse
German political establishment shifts to the right
By Ute Reissner
12 February 1999
The elections in the German state of Hesse on February 7th were the first
since the formation of a Social Democratic-Green coalition on the national
level in autumn of last year. In the national elections of September 1998,
the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens ousted the conservative Christian
Democratic government under Helmut Kohl, which had been in power for the
previous sixteen years.
Now, only a few months later, the SPD-Green coalition which had ruled Hesse
for the past eight years has been defeated by the combined vote of the
Christian Democratic Union (CDU) under Roland Koch and the small Free
Democratic Party (FDP). The CDU and FDP will form the new state government.
The heavily industrialised state of Hesse is located in the middle of what
was formerly West Germany and has a population of 6 million, including many
immigrants. The city of Frankfurt, while not the state capital, is Hesse's
most important city. A major banking centre, it is the home of the European
Central Bank, which is charged with overseeing the new single European
currency, the euro.
The old government in Hesse lost its majority due to heavy losses suffered
by the Greens. This is particularly significant, because Hesse is the
cradle of the Green movement, where the first-ever Red-Green coalition was
formed in 1985. After a brief interruption, the SPD and the Greens had
formed the government for the past eight years. In the February 7
elections, the Greens lost a full third of their votes, falling from 11.2
to 7.1 percent. The SPD vote improved slightly to 39.6 percent, but this
could not make up for the losses of the Greens.
On the other hand, the CDU vote rose by almost 4 percent to 43.1 percent.
The CDU campaigned on an openly racist platform. In face of heavy
opposition within the CDU itself, their candidate for state premier
initiated a campaign against the introduction of a new citizenship law by
the federal government. Under certain conditions, the new law would enable
immigrants to acquire a German passport without giving up their original
nationality. It would also guarantee children born in Germany the right to
citizenship.
The CDU initiated a campaign against this projected legislation by
collecting signatures on the streets, thereby encouraging a veritable lynch
mob atmosphere. This xenophobic campaign was a clear breach of what had
previously been a taboo in official German politics, given the horrific
history of Nazi racism. Almost on a daily basis, police intervened to
protect CDU activists from angry passers-by and spontaneous protests, while
the SPD and the Greens remained all but silent on the issue.
The following comment on the election has been translated from the German
section of the World Socialist Web Site.
Major losses for the Greens and an openly racist campaign by the Christian
Democrats (CDU) decided the outcome of the state elections in Hesse on
February 7.
This was the first election to a state parliament since the change of
government in Bonn last September. It has brought to the fore the more
fundamental problems that were obscured by the triumphant election victory
of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Greens at the federal level.
The utter collapse of the Greens in the Hesse election and the mobilisation
of the most backward layers by the CDU signature campaign are the first
outward signs of the rifts opening up in the old party and parliamentary
system. The old political order is beginning to crack under the pressure of
social tensions.
The SPD's victory in the federal elections last September could be traced
back to pent up dissatisfaction resulting from permanently high
unemployment and ongoing social cuts. However, the supposedly democratic
way out of this impasse--a change of government--has turned out to be a
sham solution. The real programme of Chancellor Schröder is directly
counterposed to the needs of the people. His models are Holland, Britain
and the USA, where state-enforced cheap labour and drastic cuts in wages
and social benefits are the norm.
The entry of the Greens into the federal government served not only to
secure a majority, but also to lend this right-wing agenda a progressive
appearance. However, after just three months in office, the Greens have
succeeded in completely discrediting themselves. On all the essential
questions they have been brought to their knees without even a murmur.
This was seen most clearly in their agreement last October to send the
Bundeswehr (armed forces) into Kosovo. It was also the case when, despite a
coalition agreement promising an end to the reprocessing of nuclear waste,
Schröder peremptorily dropped it and agreed to the wishes of the energy
companies.
It is obvious that the Greens' loss of votes can be traced back to their
role in Bonn. Even up to late January, opinion polls forecast a clear
Red-Green (SPD-Greens) majority for Hesse. This is of course not to suggest
that the many years of right-wing policies carried out by Green ministers
in Hesse, such as their brutal deportations policy, has not also played a
role.
The experience as a government party at the federal level, however, has
unmistakably shown Green voters and the whole population that their "social
and ecological alternative" buckles miserably whenever a representative of
the financial and political elite merely furrows his brow. Faced with the
deep gulf in society between rich and poor, they fear a mobilisation of the
masses from below and throw themselves into the arms of state power. Their
positions and their incomes lie far closer to their hearts than the faded
ideals of their youthful rebellion.
The CDU, whose contradictory internal tendencies have become ever clearer
following the loss of power, are reacting to the same social polarisation.
Roland Koch, CDU chairman in Hesse and future state premier, stands on the
far right of this so-called "peoples party", which has up to now united the
most varied strata and interests.
In response to the social crisis, this wing of the party is seeking to
mobilise the racist dregs of society. This was clearly the content of their
campaign against dual nationality, which Koch began in Hesse against
considerable opposition even from within the CDU itself. Their motto "Yes
to integration. No to dual nationality" was obvious hypocrisy.
But for the time being, Koch's strategy has been successful. It enabled the
CDU to pull the dissatisfaction of the most desperate layers behind it.
In return for a short-term election victory, the CDU has reawakened the
spirit of minority oppression and pogroms on the streets as part of
official political life. The chairman of the federal advisory council on
foreign immigrants, Murat Cakir, said quite correctly that he now feared "a
wild fire, such as had never been seen before". He warned in a radio
interview that "similar attacks like Solingen and Mölln" (where Turkish
families were burned to death) would occur if the CDU continued its
campaign against foreigners.
The director of the asylum and refugee organisation Pro Asyl, Günter
Burkhard, noted, "It is a serious error that the SPD and the Greens did not
mount an offensive against this challenge... Ducking the issue did not pay
off."
In the past, despite implementing anti-foreigner laws, all the parties in
parliament publicly condemned racist attacks. Now it seems that the refined
"democratic consensus" can no longer be taken for granted. Official
politics is leaving its traditional salons and placing one foot in the
gutter. Barely a four-percent increase in the CDU vote turns out to be
sufficient temptation to shake the much-vaunted democratic foundations of
the establishment parties.
Dieter Wiefelspütz, SPD speaker on domestic affairs, immediately declared
that the Hesse elections had been a "referendum against dual nationality".
He said that it was now time to "bid farewell to a general acceptance of
dual nationality". Party chairman and Minister of Finance Oskar Lafontaine
also announced immediate "consequences for the reform of citizenship law".
For the time beeing SPD Minister of the Interior Otto Schily is holding on
to his draft legislation on dual nationality.
The Greens' spokesman on immigrant affairs, Cem Özdemir, said that although
the Greens continued to support easier dual citizenship, they should "make
clear that dual nationality is not the aim".
CDU politician Heiner Geissler, who had strongly criticised the signature
campaign, also backed down. He said he had feared that the campaign might
strengthen the extreme right-wing parties, but this had not happened.
Ruth Wagner, chair of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in Hesse, toned down
her earlier criticisms, saying voters had "not recognised that the FDP
rejected dual citizenship", they had "misinterpreted its criticism of the
CDU's signature action".
Party spokesmen in Bonn and the mass media have generally interpreted the
Hesse elections as confirmation that "the people" reject dual nationality
and are susceptible to racist slogans.
The facts and figures refute this interpretation. The Elections Research
Group drew the conclusion that the change of government in Hesse "came
about less through any massive change of opinions in the population as a
whole than through the very unequal mobilisation of party supporters".
Disappointed former SPD and Green voters behaved more passively, whereas
the CDU was able to mobilise new layers.
There is broad opposition in the population to racism and xenophobia. This
was shown by the confrontations that occurred at the campaign tables of the
CDU, where its supporters sought to collect signatures. It was also
demonstrated in the success of the counter-campaign mounted by the daily
Frankfurter Rundschau, which collected some 80,000 signatures in a very
short time. However, this political opposition has not yet found its own
political representation and therefore lacks power. The experience with the
Greens shows it would be a dangerous mistake to expect this party of
windbags to defend democratic rights.
The failure of the Greens, so clearly reflected in the Hesse elections, has
social roots. In the final analysis, the Greens rest on the same privileged
layers as the SPD, CDU and FDP.
The Partei für Soziale Gleichheit, German section of the Fourth
International, is seeking to construct an opposition based on working
people which will defend their interests. Only a socialist programme that
represents the interests of the majority can prevent the division of the
population along national lines.
See Also:
Germany: Christian Democrats mount racist campaign
[12 February 1999]
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Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1998-99
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
~~~~~~~~~~~~
WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : Germany
Germany: Christian Democrats mount racist campaign
By Ulrich Rippert
12 February 1999
The campaign initiated by the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social
Union (CDU/CSU) against the introduction of a new law permitting dual
citizenship has unleashed a considerable political conflict. While extreme
right-wing parties such as the DVU, the NPD and the Republicans have
declared their enthusiastic support, calling upon their members to support
the action, the campaign itself has met with growing rejection and
opposition from the population. Opposition is also growing inside the CDU.
Within the leading committee of the CDU, in part because the party has only
recently elected a new party chairman, Wolfgang Schäuble, only three
members of the executive voted against the campaign. But inside the party
as a whole opposition has become more audible.
The Frankfurter Rundschau, one of Germany's main newspapers, published in
the city with the highest proportion of foreign workers, has initiated a
counter-campaign and is collecting signatures for its "Frankfurt Appeal,"
which reads: "We are concerned about peaceful cohabitation in this city. We
therefore emphatically condemn the way in which a difficult issue of
domestic policy has been dragged onto the streets with the intention of
encouraging ill-feeling".
A Rundschau article from February 3 throws light on the opposition inside
the CDU to the racist campaign. The former CDU minister Christian
Schwarz-Schilling and the executive member of the Jewish community Michel
Friedmann (CDU) are quoted as decrying "the intensification of emotions
with regard to the issue of immigration".
The minister president of the state of Baden-Württemberg, Erwin Teufel,
until recently a vice-chairman of the CDU, said he "was never enthusiastic
about the campaign". The local CDU branch in Lörrach and the CDU youth
organisation in Stuttgart are refusing to support the campaign. The local
branch in Oldenburg voted unanimously to boycott the action: "After 16
years [of CDU rule in Germany] we are no longer prepared to accept as a
command every wrong decision made by the party leadership in Bonn and
Munich".
The clearest statement against the campaign came from the chairman of the
CDU state organisation in the Saarland, Peter Müller. This area bordering
France has a varied history--at times in German hands, at times French--and
has many inhabitants who already have joint nationality.
The Rundschau article described the situation in Berlin, which has 440,000
foreign workers: "At the signature tables the atmosphere is tense. Many
groups and organisations, whole classes of school children, and passers-by
loudly make clear their anger over the action. The chairman of the CDU in
Berlin, Klaus Landovsky, a symbol of party nepotism, corruption and
scandal, described the opponents of the campaign as "rabble" and said that
the CDU 'would not bow to pressure from the streets'. A remarkable
statement, when one bears in mind the repeated assertion that the whole
action is designed to test out public opinion."
Why, despite warning voices within his own ranks, has Wolfgang Schäuble
initiated this campaign of hostility to foreigners?
There are several reasons. For 25 years Helmut Kohl was chairman of the
party, in recent years leading it like a patriarch who held together the
various squabbling fractions. He wanted to retire one and a half years ago,
but there was such an acute danger of the party dissolving, it seemed only
Kohl could hold it together. Now, with his retirement, the long suppressed
contradictions are erupting with redoubled force.
The immediate form of the crisis in the Christian Democratic Union is the
continual threat by its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social
Union, to end its coalition with the CDU and emerge as an independent
right-wing party on a national basis. The head of the CSU, Edmund Stoiber,
has already made extensive preparations and established his own personnel
in a number of local and regional CDU leaderships. Schäuble has reacted for
his part by going onto the offensive with right-wing nationalist positions.
But it would be wrong to present Schäuble as merely the victim of intrigues
in Bavaria, as do many newspaper articles and commentaries. Schäuble has a
history of reacting to political difficulties by adopting a right-wing and
nationalist stance. In his book Turning to the Future, published prior to
the national elections in 1994, he complained that among Germans
"patriotism does not count as one of their outstanding characteristics".
"Where this leads, when only a stunted national consciousness exists ...",
he wrote at that time, "we can see with our own debate on the issue of
Europe." According to Schäuble a people (Volk) require a "transcendental
dimension" when it seeks to successfully deal with its future. Because the
"religious dimension" has been lost, Schäuble speaks instead of the
"safe-keeping of the community [Gemeinschaft], the community of the family,
the community of the village, of the group, and also the nation."
With the loosening of the grip of religious community, Schäuble propagates
nationalism in its stead. In a country where in the name of
"Volksgemeinschaft"--a favorite term of the Nazis--the greatest crimes in
the history of humanity were committed, such words have a special
significance, and are evidence of unparalleled political irresponsibility.
Following objections and protests over his nationalist slogans, Schäuble
retorted that his book merely served to undermine the position of
right-wing radical parties in the elections.
Schäuble's present conduct shows that this is not the case. Moreover, this
line of argument makes clear his similarity to Stoiber, who has likewise
claimed that in taking up extreme right-wing slogans his own party, the
CSU, has prevented the entry of the fascists into the Bavarian parliament.
Leaving to one side a few peculiarities of German history, one observes a
development that can be seen in a number of countries. Under conditions of
growing social inequality and tension, a number of parties, which up until
now have operated within the framework of certain forms of social
harmonisation, are undergoing a rapid turn to the right. They fear a social
explosion and are attempting as a precaution to mobilise the most backward
elements of society. The result is a radical change in the party landscape.
A look across the border underlines this process. In a number of European
countries the influence of the Christian Democrats and other conservative
parties which dominated post-war development for decades has declined
dramatically. In Great Britain the Conservative (Tory) Party is deeply
split, and in the last elections was virtually reduced to the status of a
fringe group. The Gaullists in France are no less divided, and the
Christian Democrats in Italy lost 20 percent of their vote before splitting
apart in all directions.
The situation has been especially desperate for the Christian Democrats in
Holland, a party that governed for seven decades and was frequently able to
win over 50 percent of the vote. In last year's election they received a
miserable 18.4 percent of the vote and are fighting for their survival.
Reunification in 1990 slowed down this process in Germany, but now--as so
often in German history--it is expressed in an intensified form. The
break-up of the so-called "people's parties" takes the form of a marked
turn towards the right.
Post-war origins
To understand the depth of the present changes it is useful to look back in
history. When the CDU and the CSU emerged from the ruins of war and fascism
they were not parties in a classical form, with clear programs and support
from specifically delineated groups of voters. They were rather founded as
a union, i.e., a mishmash of various parties and political tendencies. The
parties addressed the most varied social layers: peasants and craftsmen,
together with workers, salesmen and small shop keepers, clerical workers
and intellectuals, students and housewives, as well as apprentices and
pensioners.
This broadly-based social orientation was matched by a program which lacked
any kind of firm statement, and in a nebulous fashion was intended to be
acceptable to everybody. In addition there were strong local and regional
connections. In his book The CDU after Kohl, Peter Lösche writes: "From
below, the CDU was founded from various local groups out of Berlin,
Frankfurt and Cologne circles." He continues: "Christian Socialists stood
alongside German nationalist Protestant conservatives. In Berlin the CDU
was socialist and radical, in Cologne clerical and conservative, in Hamburg
capitalist and reactionary, in Munich counterrevolutionary and
particularist--a multicoloured patchwork of ideologies."
Two ideological attributes quickly came to dominate: Christian and
anticommunist. Conservatism without Christianity is like "a woman without a
womb", wrote Hans Zehrer at the beginning of the 50s. In the 30s, Zehrer
had made a name for himself as the editor of the right-wing conservative
magazine Tat. He and others claimed that the churches of both confessions
were the only institutions to survive the Third Reich with a morally clean
slate.
In the early years after the war, Christian conservatism was used by the
party to divert the discussion over Hitler and fascism into reactionary
canals. The catastrophe in Germany was said to have been the result of a
secularism which began with the Enlightenment. The years 1933 to 1945 "only
made clear what had been prepared by the long tradition of a liberal,
Marxist, god-hating world view based on equality", according to the church
pamphlets circulated at the time--a message which was also intoned in CDU
party speeches.
Anticommunism as the second ideological pillar became more pronounced with
the intensification of the class struggle. It fed upon the crimes of the
Stalinist regime which, in the form of the GDR, lay just across the border.
It dominated political slogans during elections. The battle cry "Freedom or
Socialism!" was repeated in a welter of variants. Anticommunism lies so
deep in the CDU that, on the occasion of the last election, the national
organiser of the CDU, Peter Hinze, resorted to the old slogans, even though
the East German GDR government has ceased to exist some time before.
A determining factor for the further development of the Union parties was
the rapid economic upturn, which began with the million-dollar loans
provided by the Marshall Plan and the currency union in the summer of 1948.
The rapid improvement in living and working conditions for all sections of
the population created the basis for policies which essentially sought to
balance between the varied interests of different social layers and make
concessions to everyone.
This type of "client politics" formed the basis for the "recipe for
success" of the Union as a "people's party". In the 50 years of the
existence of the Federal Republic, until September of 1998, there were only
13 years in which the Chancellor was not a member of the CDU, and only one
occasion when the Union was not the strongest party, following the national
elections of 1972.
Since the mid-80s the economic framework has changed completely and pulled
the ground from beneath such a policy. The development of new technology,
the accompanying growth of productivity and the globalisation of production
have been used by the ruling circles in economics and politics to impose
ever-more extensive redundancies. Growing unemployment serves at the same
time as an instrument to push through wage cuts and attacks on social
rights. The more the social divisions intensify, the sharper and more
irreconcilable the conflict of social and political interests inside the
so-called peoples parties.
In the last two decades the CDU has lost more than 10 percent of its
members. The internal conflicts and tensions could hardly be more
pronounced. The milieu of the Catholic workers movement, once upon a time
the "heart and power source" of the Union and its various social
committees, has continually lost influence over recent years, while the
middle class groups have grown in strength. In the past, new generations of
functionaries were primarily recruited from the circles of church youth and
had close connections to the workers' wing of the party. Today the
leadership consists of lawyers or tax and company advisers who demand the
rapid destruction of all the institutions of the social state.
With Wolfgang Schäuble a political tendency now dominates which vehemently
and rabidly attempts to divert the growing social tensions along
nationalist and racist paths. In the next period this will lead to
considerable conflicts. But neither the advocates of social reform nor the
supporters of the Catholic Church inside the party--such as Geißler, Blüm
and Süssmuth, nor, indeed, the governing SPD-Green coalition--can offer any
serious alternative to this reactionary course.
The only basis for ending this nationalist furore lies in the political
activity of a broad majority of workers to implement the profound social
changes necessary to overcome mass unemployment and social misery.
See Also:
State elections in Hesse: German political establishment shifts to the
right
[12 February 1999]
Citizenship and loyalty to the constitution
A critical look at the proposed new German citizenship law
[23 January 1999]
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