Germany’s Left Party moves into third position ahead of Greens

With 10 days to the federal election, Germany's Linke (Left Party) has nosed ahead of the Green Party as the country's third-strongest party. A poll for this morning's Stern magazine, putting the Left on 10 per cent, is good news for the party a decade after it was formed by reformed eastern communists joining forces with disillusioned western Social Democrats (SPD).

On paper it leaves
Germany's three centre-left opposition parties (SPD, Green and Left) neck and neck with German chancellor Angela Merkel's outgoing coalition. But in the final days of the campaign, the SPD and Greens have renewed their determination not to co-operate with the Left Party.

For years, their main argument was that the Left Party offered a political home to unreformable members of East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED).

Then, the main stumbling block was Left Party leader Oskar Lafontaine: SPD leaders said they would
rather sit in opposition than co-operate with the man who once headed their own party, then walked out as finance minister shortly after
Gerhard Schröder's 1998 election victory.

For Katja Kipping (35), Left Party leader for just over a year, the SPD is running out of excuses. Her party has worked through its difficult history, apologising for the Berlin Wall and the resulting deaths, while Lafontaine has stood down as party leader.

“I’m from the East but was 12 when the Berlin Wall fell,” she said.

Her west German co-leader Bernd Riexinger (57) was, she said, a "progressive union man". "Now the reason the SPD say they don't want to work with us is that we are a quarrelsome lot," she said.

Stabilising the party
Since taking over the leadership, the Kipping-Riexinger duo have worked to stabilise the party. Though still characterised by emotional and personalised public debate, Kipping says her party has matured and embraced core political principles that form the basis of its election campaign.

Cheeky posters proclaim “It’s fun to share”, flagging its so-called “millionaire tax” of a 75 per cent levy on income over €1 million. Corporate tax should be increased to 25 per cent from 15 per cent and more effort should be put into fighting tax evasion, the party says. Its pacifist foreign policy opposes German military action and wants a Nato exit and end to arms exports.

Unlike the SPD and Greens, the Left Party has consistently voted against the euro bailout policies, arguing that troika loans go to prop up banks while austerity measures hit the general population and strangle growth.

Social policy
While all of this highlights the differences with the SPD and Greens, there are more similarities than differences on social policy. All want a minimum wage – the Left Party wants €10, the SPD/Greens €8.50. The Left wants an additional minimum pension of €1,050 and an end to sanctions measures that can result in drastic cuts to welfare payments.

“There are differences but also a large overlap in our programmes,” said Kipping. “It seems SPD or Greens are more willing to be vice-chancellor under Merkel than embrace a real political shift with us.”

Riexinger agrees, suggesting the SPD-Greens’s cold shoulder to his party is “Merkel’s best life insurance policy” to stay in office.

Even if a three-way SPD-Green-Left coalition is out of the question, there has been talk in Berlin of the Left Party tolerating a minority SPD-Green government – at least for a time until new elections were called.

“It’s an option that no one really wants, though we know the SPD has looked at it,” said one leading Left Party official.

For Merkel, that gives her opponents more coalition options than is comfortable. In the past week, she has stepped up her election rhetoric by reminding voters at rallies how, at state level, the SPD has twice broken its pre-election vow not to work with the Left Party. “You could easily wake up with an SPD-Green-Left government,” she said in Düsseldorf.

Her remarks are aimed at shaking up CDU supporters into voting, many of whom assume a Merkel victory is a done deal. But she has forced the SPD on the defensive, too.

"We have made clear that we will neither work with, nor allow ourselves be supported by, the Left Party," Hannelore Kraft, state premier in North Rhine-Westphalia, told Der Spiegel last week.

When the magazine noted she had done just that for two years in Düsseldorf – and might be asked to do the same in Berlin – she bristled at the idea. “I simply cannot imagine how it would work,” she said.