The election results confirm the trend of the Social Democrats and their coalition partner, the Greens, losing ground in every election since the federal elections last October, when they ousted Helmut Kohl's CDU coalition government after 16 years in office.
In Saarland, where the SDP has governed for the last 14 years, the party's vote dropped from 49.4 percent in the last elections to 44 percent, while the CDU gained from 38.6 percent to 45 percent.
In Brandenburg, another social democratic stronghold, the SDP's losses were even bigger — down to 39.5 percent from 54.1 percent in the last elections. The ultrarightist German Peoples Union (DVU) got more than 5 percent of the votes in Brandenburg, giving it five seats in the state parliament. The DVU waged an extremely nationalistic campaign centered on the high unemployment in Brandenburg — currently 20 percent — with the call: "German jobs for German workers."
The CDU and the PDS also gained in the Brandenburg elections, going from close to 19 percent each in the last elections to 26 and 25 percent respectively. Neither the Greens nor the Free Democratic Party (FDP) were able to surpass the 5 percent required to be seated in the state parliament. The SPD suffered more blows September 12. The CDU won an outright majority in the state government of Thuringia in the east, where it had shared power with the Social Democrats. And the SPD vote dropped sharply in municipal elections across the industrial state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The government headed by Chancellor Gerard Schröder suffered an earlier setback last February in the Hesse state elections, where the Social Democrats and the Greens lost to the CDU after eight years in the government of that state. In those elections the CDU and its sister Christian Social Union (CSU) campaigned nationwide with a petition against a proposed new citizenship law that was supposed to make it possible for up to 7 million immigrants in Germany to get German citizenship while keeping their original citizenship. The ultraright party, the Republicans, also gained in the Hesse elections.
A central debate in the election campaigns in Brandenburg and Saarland was over the $16 billion austerity package and $4.3 billion in corporate tax breaks that the Schröder government is presenting to parliament this fall. The package includes lowering unemployment benefits and adjusting pensions only for inflation, not to incorporate wage increases, which has been the rule. So while this year metalworkers in Germany negotiated wage increases of 3.6 percent, pensions would go up less than 1 percent. The proposed budget also includes cuts in agricultural subsidies, housing assistance, and funding for the shipyards.
The Social Democratic heads of government in Brandenburg and Saarland, Manfred Stolpe and Reinhard Klimmt respectively, campaigned against Schröder's austerity package in the state elections and promised to block it in the Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament, where representatives of the state governments are seated. Nevertheless, they lost heavily in the elections.
Schröder has charted a more openly procapitalist course than is traditional for the SDP. He is often compared to Labour Party prime minister Anthony Blair of Britain. Schröder and Blair recently published a joint paper mapping out the essence of what they term the "Third Way." In it they state, "The weaknesses of markets have been overstated and their strength underestimated" by social democrats. "Achieving social justice became identified by ever-higher levels of public spending regardless of what they achieved or the impact on taxes required to fund it on competitiveness and employment."
Gerhard Schröder won the federal elections last year with some vague promises of reversing some of the attacks on working people carried out during CDU Chancellor Kohl's last years in government, such as reduced sick leave payments and laws that made it easier to sack workers. Schröder's government initially took steps to meet some of these promises. Now the federal social democratic coalition government is promoting an even harsher austerity policy than the ones that made Kohl's government so unpopular.
Protests are beginning again among public sector workers in Germany. Kohl's government had its base among farmers, so the CDU chancellor was reluctant to attack agricultural subsidies to the same extent Schröder has begun to.
The reunification of Germany, a process in which the imperialist state that was West Germany is trying to swallow the workers state in the former East, has considerably weakened the German imperialist rulers. They have to a large degree financed reunification by borrowing on the international capital markets. The German government's debt in 1998 was $798 billion, up from $319 billion at the start of reunification in 1990. The interest on this debt totals $43.6 billion a year, making it the biggest budget item after social security.
The German economy isn't projected to grow by more than 1.5 percent this year. Some 10.5 percent of workers throughout Germany are jobless. In the east, the rate rose for the sixth month in a row in August, to 18 percent. This weakness of the German economy, which accounts for more than a third of the economic output in the Euro zone, is one major factor in the decline of the euro (the European common currency) since its introduction January 1. The European imperialist powers' military weakness and dependence on Washington is the other major factor. Political polarization is increasingly characterizing politics in Germany, as the German imperialist rulers try to deal with their economic, military, and political weakness, and workers and farmers resist the harsh measures the rulers have in store for them.
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