Germany

All at sea with the Pirate Party of Germany

A new-ish political party is changing German politics. Apparently. A secretive bunch in some ways, who often use “party names” in public and while discussing with other members, yet who at the same time have “transparency” as the main element in their as yet thin political programme. Largely male, the members use antiquated greetings and — for outsiders — an often strange language, impenetrable to those not in the know and those without the technical know-how to take part. After elections the group is now taking its maiden voyage in the Berlin city state parliament, further excursions as the...

European news in brief

Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union had its vote drop by 8% in provincial elections on 13 May in Germany’s most populous state, Nordrhein-Westfalen. The SPD (equivalent of the Labour Party) gained 5%, and the SPD/Green coalition in Nordrhein-Westfalen now has a majority where before the election it was a minority government. The maverick Pirate Party went up from 2% to 8%, and, maybe in part as a result, the leftish party Die Linke went down from 6% to 3%. This result will increase the pressure on Merkel to modify the EU’s hard-neoliberal policy by adding in some “growth initiatives”...

Discussions on a "New Anticapitalist Party" in Germany

A year ago, a small Berlin-based left group, dominated by ex-members of the German "Mandelite" (orthodox Trotskyist - like the ex-IMG/Socialist Resistance in the UK) organisation took the initiative in calling for the building of a new left-wing party in Germany, separate from the Left Party, which is social democratic with a nostalgic Stalinist wing. One of the originators of the idea, Michael Pruetz, is now on a tour around Germany to promote the idea and win more people to it. The model seems to be the New Anticapitalist Party in France, which so far, at least, has not been as successful as...

Unemployed woman shot in Frankfurt jobcentre

By a German socialist On 19 May a woman - poor, homeless, African and drug-addicted - was shot and killed by police in a Frankfurt jobcentre. This is a place where people are often treated as less than shit. The homeless woman had no bank account, which you can't get without a fixed address. She was told that benefits can only be transferred into a bank account (not true!) and that they could not give her money directly. She refused to leave the jobcentre without some money and started to complain loudly - so the office manager called the police. When they arrived and asked to see her passport...

Germany to go non-nuclear

250,000 people joined demonstrations across Germany following the Fukushima disaster, calling on the government to phase out nuclear power completely. And after a massive swing to the Greens in the regional elections, Merkel’s battered government now seems willing to comply, with the backing of a key power industry trade association, BDEW, which has called for a full phase out by 2020 or 2023 at the latest. Two of the association’s members, nuclear plant operators E.ON and RWE, opposed the decision, but were outvoted. Germany currently gets 26% of its electricity from nuclear and 17% from...

Alone in Berlin

By Matthew Thompson The 1947 novel Alone in Berlin ( Jeder stirbt für sich allein ) by Hans Fallada is remarkable in several ways. Firstly, with sales of a quarter of a million copies in Britain, it has become something of a publishing phenomenon, a previously obscure German novel that has entered the bestseller lists here and in the US since being translated in 2009 by the poet Michael Hofmann. Secondly, and more importantly, it is a rare depiction of working-class resistance to Nazism (not itself rare: 80,000 German soldiers were executed in World War II for breaches of military disciplne...

Life after "Marxism"

The Film Theatre worker lights your way, with the aid of a torch, down the darkened corridor to the cinema/classroom. You take your place at the battered school desk. The lecture has already started, but you pick it up quite quickly. A middle-aged German tutor is lecturing to a class of 20-something students and the subject is Marx’s Das Kapital. You’re confused. The seminar is relevant and engaging enough, but the sense of surreality is heightened by the interspersed scenes. A statue of Marx is swung through a Berlin park skyline, pitching up on what looks like a children’s toy train. All the...

Family friendly anti-fascism?

SWP activists often say that anti-racist and anti-fascist demonstrations can’t be confrontational because we need actions that everyone feels comfortable attending, that families and children need to be able to demonstrate. I have even heard it argued that women need this kind of demonstration (as if women were like children!) The SWP counterpose “inclusive and non-elitist demonstrations” in order to dodge a discussion about the need to physically take on the fascists. During the Bradford anti-fascist demonstrations, I spoke to German comrades who told me about a tactic they said was common in...

Germany: mass protests greet the "tough times"

German politics is in crisis, with all the mainstream parties seeing a falling-off in support. 90 percent of people say they disagree with the government. The CDU, our Tories, is at 29 percent in opinion polls - the first time it's had less than 30 percent since 1945. The neoliberal FDP has fallen from 15 to 4 percent. Any party with less than 5 percent cannot enter the national parliament! The SPD - comparable to the Blairites - is on 23 percent; they haven't climbed out of the hole since the last election as they hoped to. The Left Party got 12 percent last time; it is still on 10-12 percent...

Germany: "A perfect time for a working-class offensive"

Wladek Flakin, of the German section of the Revolutionary Internationalist Organisation, discusses opportunities and obstacles facing the German working class with Daniel Randall of Workers’ Liberty. What austerity measures does the government plan? They plan to cut 80 billion from the federal budget over the next 10 years. The cuts effect different sections of the working class in different ways. There are supposed to be 15,000 job cuts in the federal bureaucracy, combined with a wage freeze. There are also massive attacks on unemployed people: unemployed workers will no longer be eligible...

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