Well, what I meant by that was in the regional elections earlier this spring, large groups (by no means a majority, but 10-25 percent) of trade unionists and workers more generally voted for the AfD, citing general political dissatisfaction and migration as their main reasons for doing so. It’s worth noting that the party has performed significantly worse in elections since then. While Die Linke’s returns vary from state to state and some areas show more promise than others, in general the party appears to be losing ground among sections of the working class and dissatisfied protest voters more generally, particularly in less urban and economically marginalized regions. The process is not a foregone conclusion, and to what extent the AfD can duplicate the success of its European counterparts remains to be seen (Germany is still not, or at least not yet, France or Hungary), but I think it’s fair to say that the honeymoon years of 2005–2010 when Die Linke was the paramount opposition in parliament and able to attract the politically disenfranchised by default has ended. [...]
Firstly, the German left is divided over what exactly the problem is. For some parts of the radical left, Germany is a uniquely racist society that ostracizes and threatens all “Others” by its very nature. This sentiment leads to pretty stupid slogans at antiracist demonstrations like “The problem is called Germany,” which, similar to American anarcho-liberals blaming Trump’s hollow presidential victory exclusively on racist whites, might make sense as a gut reaction, but is simply not true and thus not very helpful for developing effective strategy. We need to understand that racism doesn’t grow in a vacuum, but rather within a complicated and dynamic socio-economic context that must be addressed equally as vigorously as racism itself if we want to drain the social swamp on which it thrives. [...]
Although there are individual immigrant personalities in the party and the Left, as a whole the movements remain painfully white for a country with so many millions of immigrants, large and established Turkish and Arab communities, etc. The same can be said of German society more generally, whose public image remains overwhelmingly white despite four decades of mass migration. I think a left that figured out how to overcome this — not overnight but through a long process, of course — would be better able to address the rise of the far right by combining real, organic antiracist organizing with an economically populist program to improve living standards for the broad majority, black and white alike. [...]
The party’s claim to improve social justice just by existing may even be true — it has certainly forced the political establishment to the left on several issues — but voters’ memory spans are short. They don’t see the introduction of a minimum wage in 2015 as a byproduct of Die Linke’s emergence in the mid-2000s, nor will most people be thinking about the strategic long game when they go to the ballot box. They will vote for Die Linke if they think they can shake things up in a political system they see as corrupt and out of touch, and they will punish the party if it throws away their vote by participating in a neoliberal government.
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