Germany: WASG national congress – shift to the right

AMID THREATS by part of the national leadership to split away, last
weekend’s national congress of the WASG* (Election Alternative for Work
and Social Justice) agreed to unify with the Linkspartei.PDS (L.PDS, Left
Party/PDS – the former East German ‘Communists’) and to take measures
against the Berlin WASG if it went ahead and ran its own list of
candidates in next September’s regional election.

Robert Bechert, CWI, Berlin

The congress met against a background of increasingly open threats by
leading WASG members to leave the party if they did not get their way.
The leading group around former SPD government minister Oskar Lafontaine
were determined to defeat opposition to their watering down of the WASG’s
founding principles in order to secure a quick fusion with the L.PDS.

The central point of debate came around the question of Berlin. This
is because since 2001 the Berlin city government has been run by a SPD
and L.PDS coalition that has cut living standards.

This city coalition broke away from national wage agreements in order
to cut wages and increase hours, and has carried out widespread
privatisations and many social cuts. In this situation the Berlin WASG
decided that it was impossible to run a joint list with the L.PDS unless
it changed its position.

This decision of the Berlin WASG has been under continuous attack from
the national WASG leadership as threatening its unification plan. Members
of Socialist Alternative (SAV; the CWI in Germany) have played an
important part in the Berlin WASG adopting this principled anti-cuts
position and consequently have themselves been threatened by the WASG
leadership.

Nationally the media has heavily followed the debate that has been
presented as being between Lafontaine, the L.PDS leaders and the
Trotskyist Lucy Redler, the SAV member elected as the top Berlin WASG
candidate for September’s election.

From the congress’s opening the WASG leadership stressed that only a
fusion with the L.PDS could provide a way forward, without any real
political discussion on what a new party should stand for.

Manoeuvres

This actually ignored reality. The 2,200,000 increase in the "left"
vote between the 2002 and 2005 Bundestag elections was overwhelmingly due
to the WASG’s formation and then Lafontaine joining the WASG shortly
before the election.

On its own the L.PDS has drifted between stagnation at best and
decline. But, because Lafontaine played an important part in securing the
left’s 8.7% vote last September, the split threats by his supporters had
a big impact in the WASG congress.

Despite this pressure at least a third of the congress delegates
supported the Berlin WASG’s decision to stand independently. A resolution
moved by the most left-wing members of the WASG executive calling for a
"fundamental change of course in party building" and opposing any
"administrative measures" was only defeated by 156 votes to 143, even
after Lafontaine intervened.

The closeness of this vote clearly alarmed the right wing who, fully
supported by Linksruck (the group linked to the British SWP), then moved
to change the original order of voting to ensure that their resolution
was taken before a "soft left" motion that opposed both the Berlin WASG’s
position and any "administrative measures" against Berlin.

However a number of delegates, frustrated by this defeat, left the
congress and thereby allowed the right wing a bigger margin of victory in
later votes; although they never won an absolute majority of delegates.

The WASG congress’s decisions are a dangerous development. It is clear
that the WASG right wing are not really interested in building a mass
membership party and, in their drive for unity on any basis with the
L.PDS, are prepared to accept participating in governments that carry out
social cuts.

It seems likely that there will now be a drive to unify the parties
earlier than the original 2007 target and that possibly the leadership
will attempt to exclude from the new party at least some of their
opponents. On such a basis the medium term future of such a party is open
to question.

* WASG is the new left-wing political formation formally launched in
January 2005. It was established in opposition to the neo-liberal attacks
of the then social democratic party (SPD) government and the bosses.

It is a broad anti-neo-liberal electoral alternative which contains a
variety of political currents. The Socialist Party’s counterpart in
Germany, Socialist Alternative (SAV), actively participates in WASG.