Germany

US Neocon Wars Open Pandora's Box in Europe

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/28/us-neocon-wars-open-pandoras-box...

"The dreaded scourge of instability has now reached the heart of the empire..."

If they go into coalition with Merkel, they will never again have a distinct identity and will never again win an election in Germany.  The AfD will be, in effect, the official opposition and that can't lead to anything but the AfD perpetually gaining in support.

At this stage, I'd say the only hope for any part of the Left in Germany surviving would be for both SPD and Die Linke to dissolve and a new Left party to be formed whose policies would reflect anti-austerity Occupy values, while avoiding any connection to either the right-wing SPD tradition of Gerhard Schroeder or Helmut Schmidt(neither of whom should ever have been in the SPD) OR any part of the GDR past(I suggest this because Die Linke is held back by its refusal to expel the tiny, powerless, irrelevant faction within it who came out of the SED and are nostalgic for the pointless repression of the Warsaw Pact era).  
 

Welcome to the world of proportional representation.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

 

 

But they aren't the same, and they haven't been the same since they split just over 100 years ago (over some of the exact same issues they face today).

On the broader issue, I don't know enough about the situation there to have an opinion on whether this coalition is a good or a bad thing. It may well be that there is no point in driving another fight that will only have the same result. But while we are focused on the divide on the left, this is also a divide on the right. It not, Merkel would have had her majority.

Besides, there is a long history of these coalitions. It no more means erasure of party identity than the existence of factions within a party means erasure. But sometimes it is what is necessary to govern.

I know that SPD and Die Linke are different-although it's simplistic to treat Die Linke as simply the successor to the old KPD or the SED-it contains a lot of people who started on the left wing of the SPD, and various independent leftists.  Almost nobody in the party, other than the 100 fossils in the Communist Platform group, are anywhere close to being Marxist-Leninists.

What I'm saying there is that both the SPD-due to its decades long slide towards the postion somewhere between Blairism and the CDU its leaders usually inhabit on the political spectrum now-and Die Linke, due to the fact that people can't let it go that it still has a trivial handful of members who started in the SED, an infinitismally small faction who have no influence over what the party does or stands for-are essentially discredited in the eyes of the German electorate-are both permanently stagnant, neither has any possibility of ever gaining additional popularity in the future, and that therefore a party that is Left but not exclusively or specifically associated with either of them, a party that encompasses anti-globalization and social movement values as much as anything else, is the only way forward.

And another SPD coalition with the CDU-CSU would guarantee that there would never be another SPD victory at any future German election.  There's no way the party could be junior partners with the CDU-CSU for this long a time and still be seen by the electorate as a possible alternative government OR as a party with any remaining meaningful differences with the CDU-CSU.  It goes without saying that, since the SPD will always be powerless in such coalitions, Merkel will never against make any concessions to anything even close to social democratic values.

There's also the fact that the Greens won't work with Die Linke because they're still in a snit about the GDR era-an era that nobody even close to Die Linke's leadership played any signicant role in,  which has no chance of ever being re-created-even thought this refusal makes the election of any sort of progressive government mathematically impossible.

At this stage, I'd say the only hope for any part of the Left in Germany surviving would be for both SPD and Die Linke to dissolve and a new Left party not dominated by either should be formed.

One more CDU/CSU-SPD coalition and the SPD will be reduced for the rest of eternity to the pathetic position of every other social democratic party on the european mainland-a rump party, always in third or fourth place at best, no longer even pretending to seek any real alternative to the status quo, simply there to occasionally hold three of four cabinet seats in which they administer the austerity policies just as savagely as the right-wing parties in the coalition they're in.

Hundreds of Thousands of Industrial Workers Strike in Germany

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/31/pers-j31.html

"As Germany's ruling elite conspires to form a new government to slash workers' wages, attack democratic rights and remilitarize the country, the working class is giving its response in the form of the country's biggest strike movement in 15 years..."

Germany: Merkel's Re-Election and the Fight Against Militarism, Welfare Cuts, and Dictatorship

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/15/comm-m15.html

"With the re-election of Angela Merkel (CDU) as chancellor and the swearing in of the new federal cabinet by President Frank Walter Steinmeier (SPD), the most right-wing German government has taken office since the fall of the Third Reich..."

Goldman Sachs Appointment To German Finance Ministry Sparks Outcry

http://www.dw.com/en/goldman-sachs-appointment-to-german-finance-ministr...

"Making the arsonists the fire-fighters  - it gives an indication of the problems in the SPD when a social democrat entrusts responsibility for banking regulations to an investment banker." 

Who really runs the EU?

Yes. Hooray for PR, because left-leaning Germans can switch their vote to the Greens or Die Linke without fear of "vote-splitting" and electing the AfD.

"Germany must speak up about widespread glorification of Nazi collaborators throughout eastern Europe. In Lithuania, Ukraine, [Latvia], Croatia and many other places WW2-era ultranationalist leaders/orgs are lionized as independence fighters while their crimes are whitewashed."

https://twitter.com/DefendingHistor/status/1031991417080569857

Rose: A Tectonic Shift in German Politics

https://braveneweurope.com/mathew-d-rose-a-tectonic-shift-in-german-poli...

"...The German political establishment has lost its credibility among a now decisive number of German citizens. This is not a crisis of centrist parties, it is the loss of trust in a highly corrupt political class. The Germans are rapidly turning their backs on their political establishment, seeking change, which never seems to come. As Joao Badal so astutely observes: 'I fear ours are becoming procedural democracies, where citizens are afforded their fundamental rights to complain, to organize, to protest, even to vote out the Government - they are just not afforded the right to make change."

Sound familiar?

josh wrote:

Linke finishes first in a state election for the first time.

https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-left-party-tops-thuringia-election-far-right-afd-surges-to-second/a-51010071

They outperformed every single poll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Thuringian_state_election#Vote_share

"The Berlin protection wall was necessary to safeguard East Germany's right to exist in peace and security as a German socialist state. The destruction of a Greater Germany where Nazism is on the rise is no cause for celebration."

https://twitter.com/AliAbunimah/status/1193128818397138947

Washington's Woman in Berlin: How Germany's Foreign Minister is Helping the US Crush the German Economy

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/11/washingtons-woman-in-berlin-how-...

"As Michael Hudson has pointed out, one of the targets in the US war against Russia is actually Germany, and Baerbock is helping Washington accomplish its mission.

Despite all the damage the Russian conflict has done to her country's economy, Baerbock (and other hawks in Germany) are eager to join with Washington against its next target: China..."

No wonder Baerbock gets on so well with Jolie and Freeland. 'Birds of a feather' on the same flight path.

Getting Closer

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/getting-closer

"The Greens - recently called 'The most hypocritical, aloof, mendacious, incompetent and, measured by the damage they cause, the most dangerous party we currently have in the Bundestag' by the indestructible Sahra Wagenknecht - are rather more afraid of nuclear power than nuclear arms.

None of the suddenly numerous German 'defence experts' seems willing to confirm that what Biden calls Armageddon is a future that may become a present..."

NDPP wrote:

Germany's Draft Budget: More Military Spending to be Paid For with Social Benefits

Where is the money for Russia’s military’s wars and invasions coming from? Who spends more per capita on their military, Russia or Germany? Which country leads the world in having nuclear weapons?

 Annalena Baerbock's Opa Was a Nazi Too

https://twitter.com/djuric_zlatko/status/1755893765762355678

"...[There is] an assessment in the dossier that Colonel Waldemar Baerbock was not just an officer but an ardent supporter of Nazism.

It literally says he was an 'unqualified National Socialist'. In 1944 Baerbock was awarded Hitler's Merit Cross with swords.

The German Foreign Ministry said that the minister was not aware of these 'documents'..."

No wonder she and Chrystia hit it off so well.