Germany's new left party, Die Linke.PDS, will be the largest left opposition in Parliament to a probable "grand coalition" government of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the main right-wing opposition, the CDU/CSU.
In the country's 18 September general election, the SPD got 222 seats, the CDU/CSU 226. The press speculates that the "grand coalition" which they are likely to be form will not be able to carry through the hard-edged Thatcherite programme that CDU leader Angela Merkel offered in the election. But it may. In any case, it will certainly carry on the more gradual neo-liberal policy initiated by the SPD-Green government with its "Hartz IV" plan.
Die Linke.PDS's 8.7% on 18 September certainly reflects some substantial left-wing sentiment. The main planks of Die Linke.PDS's election platform included: work for all; renew and guarantee social provision; more direct democracy; a renewed European Union...
Die Linke.PDS's best-known leader, the former leading SPD politician Oskar Lafontaine, has made nationalist speeches, but the party's election platform said: "Germany is a country of immigration... Foreigners should no longer be alien".
According to Die Linke.PDS, a lot of their voters are young. An opinion survey across Germany in April found only one quarter of the population had "a good opinion" of capitalism, and 45% had "no good opinion" of it.
But Lafontaine is certainly no working-class socialist; and Die Linke.PDS's other leader, Gregor Gysi, comes from the former ruling party of East Germany, the SED. The question is, how much potential is there within Die Linke.PDS to group together a working-class political force independent of Lafontaine and Gysi?
Most of the groups of the German would-be Marxist left - Linksruck (linked to the SWP), SAV (linked to the Socialist Party), and the ISL (linked to Socialist Resistance) - have enthusiastically jumped into Die Linke.PDS. RSB/Avanti (also linked to Socialist Resistance) remains outside, and some would-be Marxists remain as oppositionists in the SPD.
But the SPD still has over 500,000 members. Die Linke.PDS was formed in July 2005 by the coming-together of the PDS (the reconstructed remnant of the old SED), Lafontaine, and WASG, a splinter from the SPD led by officials in the IG Metall trade union. It has 62,000 members, of whom 5,000 are in West Germany. The five thousand West German members, and maybe a section of the East German members, must surely be people whom Marxists must reach. How far they can get within Die Linke.PDS remains to be seen, because there is huge deadweight.
Die Linke.PDS is still mainly Eastern-based. It got over 20% of the vote on 18 September in most parts of East Germany, but under 5% in most of the West outside Lafontaine's bastion in the Saar (www.euroneuzeit.de/blog/?p=881).
The 57,000 East German members are mostly ex-SED, and two-thirds of them are over 60 years old. The PDS is in the state (provincial) governments in Berlin and Mecklenburg Vorpommern, and has carried through policies there no different from the SPD.