German left parties won 8% of the vote in the last election which was a rise of around 3.6%, mostly stolen from the SPD - hardly the 'huge backlash' of support you seem to be talking about and quite in keeping with the relative volatility seen elsewhere in Europe.
Ordinary Germans weren't stupid - the lack of resistance to winding up a failed system is surely to do with lack of popular confidence that it was going anywhere rather than due to some Cola-bribed elite selling everyone down the river. Certainly the social welfare programmes you talk about seem to have been insufficient inducement to put up a fight against reunification.
[WS:] Two points. Fist, the idea that GDR represented some fabulous welfare state is a bunch of crap. Most of the social welfare structure in Germany as well as the rest of Western Europe has been established prior to WW2. The same holds for the US (cf. Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer (eds.), _The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America_ New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987; and Theda Skocpol, _Social Policy in the United States_ , Princeton University Press, 1995). What is more, in terms of government social spending, Western democracies were far more generous than the Eastern communist states, both in terms of money spent (about 25% to 30% of the GDP) and availability of services.
Second, the notion of "failure" is far more complex than a simple East-West comparison. The US has crumbling infrastructure, lax or non-existing government regulations, undemocratic political system, poor public services, bloated military and one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. In that respect, it pretty much resembles the "failed states" of Eastern Europe, yet nobody perceived it as a "failed state." Au contraire, most US-esrs perceived their beloved 'Murica as the paradise on earth, head and shoulder above everyone else, even though they struggle to pay their bills. In that respect, they do resemble the USSR in the 1950s, whose large segments of population believed that their living standards are superior to those in the West.
Popular dissatisfaction with the system in Eastern Europe can be tracked, in my opinion, to several factors: progressive decline in growth rates (cf. Bernard Chavance, _The transformation of Communist Systems_ Westview Press, 1992, Figure I.1, due to decline in labor productivity, accompanied by growing popular demand for consumer goods. The planners were put in an impossible situation of two conflicting demands - for greater investment to improve labor productivity, and for greater consumption to satisfy consumer demand. In the end, they were unable to satisfy neither. Their investment decisions were insufficient to improve productivity - and some of them were simply buying Western licenses for consumer goods. At the same time, growing purchasing power of the population created hidden inflation thanks to administrative regulation of prices, which manifested itself in the chronic shortage of goods (as opposed to price hikes in Western economies.)
So they ended up with mediocre economic growth, unsatisfied consumer demand, and consequently pissed off consumers. To add insult to injury, the arrogant party apparatchiks ("red bourgeoisie") were living in luxury, while the state propaganda was broadcasting crude lies about politics and the economy. The US again is pretty much similar in that respect, but it also has something that Eastern Europe did not - abundance of cheap foreign-made consumer goods and a superb propaganda system. Last but not least, Eastern Europeans believed that there is an alternative to what they had (the mythical "market system") whereas most US-sers firmly believe in TINA.
So the bottom line is that the supposed "failure" of the communist system had more to do with subjective perceptions of the status quo and available alternatives, rather than with the actual reality.
Wojtek