Home > New left strikes chord in disillusioned east
by Luke Harding in Cottbus
Sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Ellen Müller looks back with nostalgia at her life in the then communist East Germany.
"I didn’t have to worry whether we had enough to eat," she says. "Brötchen [bread rolls] cost five pfennigs. People cared more about children. And if you were ill you didn’t have to wait to see a doctor. It was all free."
Far from enjoying the "blooming landscapes" promised by the then chancellor, Helmut Kohl, when the wall fell, Mrs Müller is one of a growing band of east Germans who are fed up with capitalism.
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Billions of euros have been pumped into places such as Mrs Müller’s picturesque hometown, Cottbus, near the Polish border. But there are no jobs: one in five of the workforce is unemployed.
Mrs Müller, a machinist, lost her job when her factory closed in the aftermath of reunification. She hasn’t worked since.
"It’s not that I’m lazy. There is simply no work here. I’ve done numerous training courses. In the DDR [communist East Germany] I had work. It was much better than now."
Since reunification, money has been lavished on eastern Germany - refitting houses, building railway lines, and tidying up parks.
The new Bundesländer - as east Germany’s new provinces are known - look prosperous enough, but behind the facade is a story of economic disaster.
Many youngsters have left, while those who stayed feel like second-class citizens.
The disillusion of many east Germans, including Mrs Müller, has prompted a surge of support for Germany’s newest political party, the Linkspartei or Left party. It could even help determine Germany’s general election in a fortnight.
"All the other parties are interested in strengthening capitalism," says Mrs Müller. "We reject it."
The party is the result of a merger earlier this year between east Germany’s former Communist party and the Work and Social Justice party, a new group founded by disaffected activists from Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats.
After a euphoric start, the Left party has seen its nationwide opinion poll ratings fall from 12% to 8%. But in the former communist east, it is expected to capture up to 30% of the vote. If the party does well enough, it could prevent Angela Merkel’s conservatives from forming a centre-right government with the FDP, her coalition partner.
Germany’s mainstream political parties have all heaped abuse on the Linkspartei, and in particular, the party’s populist star candidate, Oskar Lafontaine.
A former chairman of the social democratic party, the SPD, and finance minister, Mr Lafontaine was instrumental in bringing the Social Democrats back into power after 16 years in the wilderness during the Kohl era.
But he resigned from Mr Schröder’s first government in 1999 in protest at the chancellor’s business-friendly policies. He has been a bitter critic ever since.
This summer he quit the SPD and announced he was joining the Left party, prompting claims of treachery.
The party’s other star candidate is Gregor Gysi, a sharp east German lawyer and the leader of the PDS, the former Communist party.
Speaking before a Linkspartei rally in Cottbus last weekend, Mr Gysi told the Guardian his party was committed to fighting the "neo-liberal zeitgeist".
Mr Gysi told the rally: "We have been through a massive industrial experiment." But it had failed, he said, leading to huge unemployment in east Germany (twice that of the west’s), and "humiliation" for many.
Chancellor Schröder’s reforms - cutting benefits for the unemployed and pensioners - had been a disaster, he said.
In contrast, the Linkspartei’s solutions for getting Germany out of its mess include big tax increases, among them a new 50% tax rate on earnings over €60,000 (£41,000) a year.
In return, the party promises a minimum wage of €1,400 a month and generous benefits for pensioners and families.
"Gysi is right," says Manfred Kloss, 70, an east German pensioner. "What happened here after the wall came down was economic chaos. They should have done it differently."
Critics accuse the Left party of indulging in "Mickey Mouse economics" at a time when Germany’s debt is ballooning out of control.
Meanwhile, Germany’s rightwing Bild tabloid last week attacked Mr Lafontaine, printing pictures of him on holiday at a villa in Majorca. He was a "Luxus-Linke", the paper said, "a luxury-loving leftie".
More damaging, though, is the accusation that neither Mr Lafontaine nor Mr Gysi were effective in office. Both resigned after about six months from the only high-profile jobs they had - Mr Lafontaine as Germany’s finance minister, and Mr Gysi from Berlin’s senate.
But others believe the new party is a sign of Germany’s "normalisation". Writing in Die Tageszeitung, Germany’s leftwing daily, the columnist Jens König said the party’s struggle against the red-green government "marked a caesura in the history of the German left".
But this was no bad thing for German democracy, he added. "People have already decided that this government has failed. They are going to vote Schröder out," König said. "The paradoxical logic is that they know under Ms Merkel things are going to get tougher. But they are going to vote for her anyway. It’s absurd, but it’s the hallmark of this election."
Back in Cottbus, few people have much time for Ms Merkel, Germany’s probable next chancellor. She grew up in the same region of the DDR, but has largely disowned her east German roots.
"I can’t stand her," says Erik Müller, 22, wearing a red hammer and sickle T-shirt. "She’s never said she’s one of us. She’s just a friend of the bosses."