Robert Wrubel wrote:
> Lenin's Tomb has a comment on an article in Die Zeit
> which shows Germany's voters in a decidedly left
tilt.
Mere wishful thinking on the part of Anglophone leftists whose capacity for self-delusion regarding Europe is boundless.
A study carried out by Bodo Zeuner and Michael Fichter, two excellent left-wing professors at the FU Berlin specializing in trade unions, indicates that 19% of skilled workers organized in trade unions and 20% of unorganized skilled workers have extreme right-wing views.
Meanwhile, Oskar Lafontaine, a man who contributed substantially to the abolishing of the German asylum laws at the beginning of the 1990s, continues to service this clientel with tirades against "Fremdarbeiter" who take jobs away from German workers. And for all of Lafontaine's opportunist posturing against the Hartz IV reforms, he was one of the leading figures in the SPD advocating the merging of unemployment insurance with social insurance.
Any fatuous blather about a "left turn" in Germany is the result of nervousness on the part of the SPD that the Linkspartei might take votes from it by this sort of demagogic populist appeal. Meanwhile, the Neo-Nazi NPD sees a basic compatibility with Lafontaine's politics and fantasizes about an anti-neoliberal coalition between Red and Brown: http://www.npd.de/index.php?sek=0&pfad_id=7&cmsint_id=1&detail=908
Anglophone leftists who continue to provide left cover for this sort of racist welfare-chauvinism deserve Bush and Blair.
White skin privilege everywhere needs to be smashed, no matter how ostensibly "anti-neoliberal" and pro-welfare state it dresses itself up.
____________________________________________________________________________________ Need a vacation? Get great deals to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel. http://travel.yahoo.com/