German Social Democrats Mulling Grand Deal with Former Communists

This does not mean, however, that the re-election of Chancellor Merkel and the formation of a “conservative” coalition government under her leadership is a foregone conclusion. (If this did come to pass, the – by German standards, at any rate – economically liberal “Free Democrats” would be the junior partners of the Christian Democrats.) Despite frequent denials, many signs suggest that should the electoral math favor such a solution the SPD would be prepared to cooperate not only with the Greens, but also with the party known simply as “the Left” (Die Linke). Such cooperation could take the form of a full-fledged broad left coalition including all three parties or of a minority SPD-Green government that governs with the support of “the Left.”

Such a prospect is highly controversial, since the “Left” party is the product of a 2007 merger between the small “Labor and Social Justice” party (WASG) of SPD renegade Oskar Lafontaine and the much larger, “post-Communist,” Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). The PDS in turn was just the re-branded successor party of the old East German Communist Party. Some prominent members of the Left party decidedly reject the “post-Communist” label – i.e., the “post” part. They have their own internal party faction known as “The Communist Platform.”

One clear sign that the SPD might be prepared to form a minority government with the support of “the Left” is the fact that the local SPD in the German state of Hessen attempted last year to do precisely that. The attempt failed when four SPD members of the state parliament announced that under the circumstances they could not in good conscience vote for SPD governor candidate Andrea Ypsilanti.

An even clearer sign is the treatment that has been reserved by the party for the four MPs who deviated from the party line. The four are commonly described in the German media as “deviationists” [Abweichler]. Thus on Tuesday, an internal SPD disciplinary body upheld an earlier party decision to ban the most prominent of the four, Jürgen Walter, from holding any party offices for a period of two years. Walter had previously served as vice-chair of the Hessen Social Democrats. As reported in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the SPD disciplinary body accuses “Comrade Walter” of “grossly disloyal” behavior that has done the party “severe harm.”

The disciplinary ruling is supposed somehow to be unrelated to Walter’s freedom as an elected representative to vote as he sees fit. According to the Hessen SPD, it is rather “strictly a matter of [his] behavior.” This is apparently an allusion to the fact that Walter only made his opposition known the day before the scheduled parliamentary vote on Ypsilanti’s candidacy and is reported earlier to have voiced his approval for her plans to form a minority government with the Left’s support. Thus it would seem that in the SPD, changing one’s mind is evidence of “gross disloyalty” and “intrigue.” It should be noted that some nine months had passed between the January 2008 state elections in Hessen and the parliamentary vote in question (which was scheduled for November 4).

In any case, whereas one of the four “deviationists” quickly made known her opposition, the other three have long acknowledged that the party’s plans to take power with the help of the Left party placed them before a difficult moral dilemma. This is hardly surprising when one considers their biographies. Indeed, one of them, Carmen Everts, had even written a doctoral dissertation on the Left party’s most recent prior incarnation, the PDS: namely as an example of “political extremism” in Germany.