It's time to put the social democrat-communist feud to rest, schiesskopfs. The Wall's been down for almost twenty years now. The DDR's never coming back. And the Cold War never benefited anyone in Germany but the wealthy anyway.

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Kurt Beck, who tried to steer the SPD to the left, was deeply unpopular and it was widely believed that Mr Beck would have led the SPD to electoral oblivion.

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:
And of course, there's the continuing stupidity that lies in the fact that the CDU is leading the German government even though the combined theoretically left-of-centre parties(SPD-Gruenen-Die Linke)have had a majority since the last election.

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:
It's time to put the social democrat-communist feud to rest, schiesskopfs.

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We can expect a few dramas in the next year or so to demonstrate this to voters.

See this report on how the Hesse Left Party is ostentatiously taming itself.

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At the party conference, those who are opposed to driving that price up too high got their way, with the help of Left Party co-chairman Oskar Lafontaine.

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Still, the Left Party has growing support, much of it coming from former members of the SPD who jumped ship due to the centrist reforms passed during the Schröder era.

The SPD under Kurt Beck has found it difficult to define its relationship to the Left Party. With the Left Party growing in popularity, the SPD, should it want to avoid being relegated to the opposition, might have to consider forming governing coalitions with the far left. One such SPD-Left Party coalition currently heads up the city-state of Berlin, but the idea has proven much more controversial in states in former West Germany. In Hesse at the moment, the SPD is currently trying to patch together a minority government coalition with the Greens -- using votes from the Left Party.

One day after Germany's Social Democrats leaked the news that Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier would be the party's candidate for chancellor, SPD leader Kurt Beck resigned in frustration.

Both Steinmeier and Beck had long said that the decision would not be made under pressure and that they wanted to wait until the Hesse government had been formed and elections in Bavaria, scheduled for later this month, had been held.

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At its state convention, the Left Party made clear that it is ready to swallow anything in order to support a change of government in Hesse. The energetic assistance of the party executive in Berlin and its chairman, Oskar Lafontaine, ensured all obstacles were removed to cooperation with Ypsilanti and the SPD in Hesse. The delegates spared no efforts in order to present the Left Party as a responsible and reliable supporter of the new government.

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Andrea Ypsilanti, the SPD's leader in Hesse, is scheduled to begin talks with the Left tomorrow on receiving backing to become state premier.

"It all begins in Hesse, whether Ypsilanti goes left."

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And that link about the "taming" of Die Linke is from an article that's basically a collection of quotes from the right wing of the German press(with a pretendy "center-left" publication thrown in for cover).

Finally, as to Stockholm's point:

If the SPD has been losing support to Die Linke while being led by a somewhat left leader, that's hardly going to be reversed by their choice of a leader who backs Schroeder's conservatism and is thus committed to making an SPD victory meaningless.

The SPD should just do the decent thing and disband if it's not going to be part of the radical wing of German politics. It's not worth it for that party to get in and end up(as it's new leader clearly wants it too)to the right of Helmut Schmidt. That's worse than losing.

[ 14 September 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:
Are the Trots ever NOT outraged?

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"Recently, the SPD - which rules in a coalition with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - has been torn apart by internal bickering, with economic modernisers pitted against left-wingers."

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Why the gratuitous snark? Don't you share their concern on this issue?

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I was reacting to the fact that the phrase "The Trots Are Outraged" is such an inherent cliche. I'm not sure whether I share their concern or not, in that coalition politics always results in some sort of compromises.

Die Linke was never going to produce a compromise-free politics. Instead, it was going to increase the range of possibilities that might be included in whatever compromise was achieved.

And, while the ICFI is capable of raising legitimate issues about such things, the fact that there default response to any political development seems to be denounciation and rage, it becomes a little hard to separate the things they should be outraged about from the things they seem to be outraged about for the sheer adrenaline rush of BEING outraged.

The SPD are Tony Blair clones, the Greens are no longer either radical or pacifist, and the Left Party, like most communist, ex-communist, and left-populist parties in central and Eastern Europe have weird attitudes on a lot of issues that are very insular and reactionary.