Why the failure of Die Linke in Germany should put Podemos on guard for 2023

It is always difficult to evaluate vote transfers from one party to another, but nobody is aware that the CDU / CSU debacle, together with the 2.29% of votes lost by the extreme right, is equivalent to millions of votes that have gone from conservative or directly neo-Nazi positions to more or less progressive forces .

Socialists and Greens recover practically the total of the votes that these two parties lose. In that sense, the twist is evident. Now, to be a full-fledged “left turn” we need something more.

To begin with, we need an SPD candidate who is not Olaf ScholzIn other words, other than Angela Merkel’s vice chancellor and minister of the first governments of the ‘Grand Coalition’ with the CDU of 2005. Next, we need a markedly left-wing Green Party, which is not so clear in Germany. Although your candidate, Annalena Baerbock, does not hide its activism, it is not convenient to transfer without more what is the environmental movement in Germany with what it is in Spain. There, environmentalism is much more transversal. A concern that does not necessarily understand ideologies, with decades and decades of political relevance and even with governmental experience together with Schroeder’s SPD in the late nineties and early 2000s.

What has succeeded in Germany, more than one political orientation or another -which too, that is obvious and cannot be denied- is constitutional and democratic stability. Those who have hit a cake without palliative, beyond the CDU, are the extremes: the AfD and, above all, Die Linke, that is, ‘The Left’, without adjectives, pure and without sin. The very existence of this party speaks to us clearly that, in their eyes, the rest are under suspicion: they are not socialist enough, they flirt with neoliberalism, they have sold themselves to American capital and that long thread of hot topics.

Communists and Lafontaine

The left of communist origin this Sunday has lost practically half of its votes, which, in principle, have not gone to abstention – the participation this year is almost identical to that of four ago – but to other more moderate options. In that, I insist, the presence of Baerbock as an environmental candidate may have influenced, but there has to be something else because the coup is impressive. It is not that before they had many options to enter a coalition government, but now, directly, they do not have any. How did you get here and what exactly is that ‘Left’ that boasts so much about itself?

‘Die Linke’ as such is a relatively new match. The objective was to get out of the catacombs of the PDS, direct heir to the Communist Party, whose fishing ground for votes, of course, was in the former East Germany and was increasingly empty. In the last elections in which it ran as a separate candidacy (2002), the PDS won 4% of the votes and two seats in the Bundestag. The change came in the next electoral call, that of 2005, when Oskar Lafontaine he got on the boat with his newly created WASG (Labor and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative).

Lafontaine had been a key man in the German Social Democracy: chairman of the SPD for much of the first German government. Gerhard Schröder and, before, electoral rival of Helmut Kohl In the years of absolute domination of the Christian democracy, Lafontaine left the party that he helped to set up between controversies and personal enmities. His alliance with the Communist Party invited us to think of two possibilities: either the Communists were approaching Social Democracy … or a good group of Social Democrats joined the recently defeated Communism. In the end, there has been a bit of everything.

The years of the ‘sorpasso’ in sight

The union of both parties in the so-called ‘Party of the Left’ gave immediate electoral results: in 2005, that 4% became 8.7% … and the two seats became fifty-four. Renamed as ‘The Left’, without further ado, in 2007, their apogee would come in the following elections (2009), when more than five million Germans gave them their confidence and the party exceeded 11% of the total number of votes. Spectacular results that invited us to think about a reformulation of progressive critical thinking and, why not, even a ‘surprise’ to the SPD, whose coalition with Merkel had disenchanted many sectors of the German left.

So what was Die Linke in 2009? Basically, what would be Podemos after the first Vistalegre Congress. A party with origins in the Communist Party but at the same time full of reformists who wanted to bring the movement to the center … in the face of opposition from a hard core that was still anchored in the classic slogans of the pure and virginal left. A little eggplant that worked best with a name that didn’t remind you of the past but was clear enough at the same time. There was something in Die Linke of Izquierda Unida, of course, but with Oskar Lafontaine, a differential nuance that brought him closer to a leadership of the type Pablo Iglesias or, even, Íñigo Errejón.

The problem for Die Linke was that Lafontaine retired too soon, because of a cancer that forced him to leave politics. The new sap of the WASG disappeared and, thus, Die Linke was little more than the PDS but without such a clear link to the worst of the GDR. In 2013, the results were bad. In the CDU’s great victory, Die Linke fell to 8.6% to rise four years later to 9.7%. Let’s forget the ‘sorpasso’, let’s look for opposition coalitions, let’s agree in municipalities and Länder, let’s survive as we can. Thus, until the debacle of 2021.

How to lose half the votes

Gregor Gysi He can be remembered as the candidate with the worst results since 2002, which meant the end of the PDS as an electoral brand … but it would not be fair either. After all, Gysi has supported the coalition almost since Lafontaine’s march, through thick and thin. His militant anti-Europeanism and repetitive discourse may have ended up draining his voters, lured by other, more up-to-date proposals. We do not know. The fact is that what could have been Podemos has once again been the Communist Party, without more, with the same support and almost the same percentage of votes … although, yes, with thirty-seven more seats in the Bundestag, courtesy of the strange German electoral law and the importance it gives to direct victories in constituencies (Die Linke got three: two in Berlin and one in Leipzig, again former East German territories).

If Germany has turned to the left – which it has done – it must be made clear that it has not turned to just any left but to the more pragmatic left. That of Merkel’s vice chancellor, I insist. In a Spanish key, the PSOE may have reasons to celebrate, especially if the arithmetic ends up allowing a Scholz government with greens and liberals, something that has yet to be specified. However, We can have nothing to celebrate here. Podemos should tremble at these results and the possibility that its seven years of electoral glory will end in 2023 with a return to what was once the United Left.

In this sense, it should be remembered that the last time the United Left stood alone in a general election, those of 2015, in full hangover from the biggest economic crisis in decades, it got 3.68% of the votes and two deputies. To put it in perspective, it won fewer votes across the country than those won by the En Comú and Podemos coalition in Catalonia. Instead of resigning, Alberto Garzón decided to join the ‘enemy’ and try to engulf it from within. Looks like she’s getting it: the vice president Yolanda Diaz It is still a historical of Galician communism and affiliated for years with the PCE and Izquierda Unida. She looks like she will be the next candidate.

What worked well at the time for Podemos and to a certain extent for Die Linke – which never dared to do so much – was transversality. Without transversality, this remains. Will Pedro Sánchez’s government partner learn the lesson or will he opt for a new appeal to the universal values ​​of the fetén left? The average of polls right now gives them an expectation of 10.6% for the 2023 elections … if the current legislature holds until then. We are talking about 2.4% less than what they achieved in November 2019, counting all the confluences.

That 10.6%, if confirmed, would be the worst result of United We Can since its first appearance as such in 2016, when they achieved 21.1% of the votes. Losing half of your voters in five years is worrying… and it’s exactly what happened to Die Linke. More worrisome, however, would be to do nothing to prevent it. What is seen in Germany does not respond to a universal law that must be complied with in all countries, but it does send a message: beware of excess. Yolanda Díaz will have to surround herself very well to survive purist temptations that will make her game end as Gysi’s. Let’s see if they let him, that’s another. We’ll find out in two years at the latest.

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