The Historic Significance of the New German Left Party Ingar Solty
[...] In a similar vein, commentaries in the bourgeois press have expressed much concern regarding the return of a positive connotation to the term socialism. Der Spiegel, in commenting on a poll they conducted November 2007 (marking the coming of age of the generation born around the fall of the Berlin Wall), was disturbed that the traditional West German historical portrayal of the GDR apparently did not lead to the expected common-sense reaction of the population. Instead, 73% of East Germans between the age of 35 and 50, 44% of West Germans between the age of 35 and 50, 47% of East Germans between the age of 14 and 24, and 36% of West Germans between the age of 14 and 24 thought that “socialism is a good idea which until now has only been translated badly into public policy” (Der Spiegel, Online Edition, “Deutschland uneinig Vaterland.” November 6, 2007). And under the heading of the return of “The Alluring Sound of Socialism,” commenting on a poll conducted by the Allensbach polling institute, the national-conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung found that
> today 45% of the citizens of the formerly West German states say that
> socialism is a good idea which was only applied badly; only 27%
> disagree with this statement. Therefore, arguing that socialism has
> failed in the GDR is going to fall on deaf ears. The notion that the
> socialist system was doomed to failure from the start due to its
> fundamental collectivist principle is now less widely accepted than
> ever before. The same thing can be said about the notion that it would
> be unjustified to believe that the state might be able to run the
> lives of humans better than they could themselves. The ideal of
> socialism has survived the end of the communist dictatorships in a
> remarkably unharmed manner” (FAZ, “Der Zauberklang des Sozialismus,”
> July 18, 2007, p.5).23
In short, the general plausibility of neoliberalism has been radically undermined. What was shown by the protests against Hartz IV, by the electorally motivated “locust” debate on “predatory capitalism” (Helmut Schmidt), and by the plebiscites rejecting the EU Constitution (which occurred against nearly the whole political class and its intellectuals in the Netherlands and in France)24 has acquired an astonishing political expression in Germany, namely that even the winners of the 2005 Bundestag elections appeared to be the real losers and had to distance themselves from their political project of Germany’s total radical market capitalization. It is notable that the project of a CDU-FDP coalition, already seen as inevitable in the run-up to the elections, proved fundamentally incapable of rallying majorities not just after entering government and in the ensuing state parliamentary elections, but already before that stage. Radical neoliberalism, i.e. increasing the dosage of the wrong medicine for the “sick patient” (already known from the final phase of the Keynesian welfare state),25 appears in Germany to be off the table once and for all, and the societal discourse is opening itself up to thinking about a post-neoliberal constellation. With this opening of the discourse, a party of the new type, which sees the social movements as more than mere conduits, could convert the parliament into a stage for social protest and thus actually create the social movements that the party needs for socialist politics, in an initial quasi top-down approach.
In all of this, most party-political researchers, albeit begrudgingly, grant Die LINKE a very bright future.