THE GERMAN Social Democratic Party (SPD) at special congress on 21 January voted by the narrowest of margins for a repeat of the Grand Coalition (GroKo). With 362 votes in favour and 279 against, the Executive Board has a green light to negotiate a deal with Chancellor Angela Merkel’ s Christian Democratic/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), aka the Union parties.
This decision is a break from SPD leader Martin Schulz’s election night pledge not to go into coalition again. A series of grand coalitions which lasted from 1998 to 2009 and again from 2013 to 2017 saw the party’s percentage of the vote and the seats in the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, almost halved. A large part of the party including its leaders realises that a period in opposition might be vital to the party’s very survival.
Yet the leaders and most of the trade union leaders who support the SPD easily fell victim to the old siren song – “first the country, then the party”. In fact, this means: first compromise with the Union parties, based on the interests of big business and safeguard the social partnership deals of the big industrial trade unions, then go through the pragmatic drift rightwards in government, and finally the dazzling prospect of a great reform to create a stronger European Union imperialism.
The latter call came from French President Emanuel Macron who apparently called Schulz “on behalf of millions of people” –who are awaiting his EU reform plans. These are impossible without a stable government in Germany to help defeat the troublemakers like Hungary and Poland. Even more mendacious was the argument that, given the rise of the far right populists like the Alternative for Germany (AfD), plus the recent rightwards swing within the CSU, the SPD is urgently needed in government as an “anti-fascist protective wall”.
But as the closeness of the vote shows, the movement against a GroKo is powerful, and with a referendum of the entire SPD membership necessary for ratification of the final deal, the internal struggle will go on. The SPD’s youth organisation, the Young Socialists (Jusos), and their dynamic new leader 28 year old Kevin Kühnert, are set on waging a vigorous campaign, including stepping up recruitment to the party, in order to vote down any deal with the Union parties. They have even referred to Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum as a model for their campaign.
Contradictions
The outbreak of this struggle also reveals the contradictory nature of the SPD as a bourgeois workers’ party. While it has firmly defended the existing order for over a century – unlike the Union parties – it retains its organic base in the working class via historical bonds such as the class composition of its members, voters and above all through the trade unions. Undoubtedly, the policies of the SPD governments since Gerhard Schröder (like Tony Blair in the UK Labour Party) led to an increasing weakening of this bond – and in recent years, unfortunately, losing voters to the right and the AfD.
Despite the political limitations of their reformism, the Jusos’ “no” campaign can become a means of fundamentally shaking up the SPD, if it is linked to defence of a whole series of working class demands on health service, wages, social gains, refugees rights, etc.
It holds the potential, if revolutionaries intervene in it, for the development of a break with the SPD’s bourgeois politics and leadership on the one hand, and a remobilisation of its working class social basis on the other.
