OCTOBER 2005

The newly-formed Left Party made a grand debut into German politics by capturing 8.7 percent of the vote. Although they attracted many disgruntled and unemployed in the former East Germany, they also reeled in many in former western states. How did they do it? And what's next?

It's been 15 years since German reunification, and thanks to the efforts of maverick former Social Democrat Oskar Lafontaine, the PDS (Party of German Socialism) has now gained a foothold in the states of the former West Germany. For those who don't recognize the name, the PDS is the successor to the East German Communist Party (SED). And only recently it and its charismatic leader, Gregor Gysi, joined up with Lafontaine's breakaway Election Alternative for Work and Social Justice party (WASG) to form Germany's first national leftist party. For now, at least, the sweet taste of success is still drowning out the many inconsistencies the party encapsulates.

Election night reactions offer a clear indication of how far the party has come since its summer kick-off. The party's astonishing election night success had just been announced and most supporters were popping corks on Berlin's Schlossplatz square. But its main leaders, Lafontaine and Gysi were still sitting behind the stage, staring at the TV monitors, unable to tear themselves away from images of the election's losers. Then he asked the technician to turn up the volume, to turn it up loud enough so that everyone could hear how many votes the Left Party had received -- even in the western part of Germany. And in case there was anyone who still hadn't grasped the historical significance of this election, Lafontaine was more than happy to sum it up: "We are the new political force to the left of the SPD" -- Chancellor Schröder's Social Democratic Party -- "in Germany," he crowed.

On Sunday evening, it became clear that a long and at times torturous trek westward had achieved its goal; the Left Party had captured close to 5 percent of the vote in the former West German states. It was an outcome that Ulrich Maurer, the party's top candidate from the state of Baden-Württemberg and a committee member of the SPD for years, celebrated as "historic." Gysi was equally enthusiastic: "For the first time since the early 1950s, Germans have voted a leftist force into office that can finally be taken seriously, even in the western states."

Tremendous opportunity in the West

The PDS has spent 15 years struggling to win support in the West, but never managing to get more than 2.9 percent of the vote there. Indeed, on average, PDS results in western Germany (excluding Berlin) were a mere 1.4 percent. In state elections in North-Rhine Westphalia, the WASG pulled in a paltry 2.2 percent of the vote.

But now, 15 years after a reunification that few mistrusted more than Gysi in the East and Lafontaine in the West, these two men have managed to put together the kind of East-West alliance many had seen as impossible. The Left Party captured 8.7 percent of the vote nationwide. In the East, it raked in 25.4 percent of the vote, making it the likely winner in three states (with final results not yet available from Dresden due to the death of a candidate there just before the vote). But even more important is the party's astonishing performance in the West, where it won 4.9 percent of votes and can finally shrug off the stigma of being an "eastern German regional party."

The Left Party won 5.2 percent of the vote in North Rhine Westphalia, 5.3 percent in Hessen, 5.6 percent in Rheinland-Pfalz and a whopping 18.5 percent in Lafontaine's home state, Saarland. Although the Left Party only managed to improve its performance to about 3.8 percent in Baden-Württemberg and 3.4 percent in Bavaria, its overall success in the West has elevated it to the status of a fifth important player in a German political system that only welcomed its fourth party -- the Greens -- in 1983. If the leftist alliance also performs well in upcoming state parliamentary elections in the West, the balance of power will undergo fundamental change. Indeed, this is one of the objectives of a plan Left Party head Lothar Bisky announced on election night.

Petra Sitte, the party's leading candidate in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, is ecstatic at what she calls "a tremendous opportunity to gain a foothold in the West," adding that this was something her party would never have imagined possible in the years after reunification. Wolfgang Gehrcke, the party's state leader in the western state of Hessen, is already fantasizing about voting current governor Roland Koch out of office in 2008 with an alliance of his Left Party, the Social Democrats and the Green Party.

A German legend lives

The party's successful showing in Sunday's general election has had a liberating effect on the PDS. Until now, the party had been struggling to emerge from the shadow of its communist origins and the fact that many of its members had been members of the East German SED communist party.

It also spells a political rebirth of sorts for Lafontaine, who had found himself relegated to the sidelines in the SPD after resigning in 1999 as finance minister in Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's first administration. Indeed, the election outcome must be deeply satisfying for Lafontaine, who is credited with having turned the Left Party into a recognizable and electable party among Western voters. Although Lafontaine may not have captured a direct mandate in his own election district, he did manage a respectable 20.9 percent of votes, a success for which he can thank the less fortunate of his constituents -- about 25 percent of the unemployed voted for his party. Most of all, he can thank his old friend turned nemesis, Gerhard Schröder -- the "bosses' chancellor" Lafontaine calls him. The Left Party's message that Schröder no longer has a workable plan nor a compassionate heart for the army of the unemployed, appears to have gotten through.

Lafontaine and Gysi spent the three months leading up to the election doing what they do best: drumming up support. Lafontaine, who has a unique talent for turning speeches into tirades, has called the German republic a "madhouse" and dubbed Schröder's program of reforms, Agenda 2010, "idiotic." Gysi, a native of East Berlin, has a way of sneaking up on voters with a mixture of mischievousness, wit, and humor,

But Lafontaine has been the drug of choice for his pals in the West. "That's what victory looks like," sang his supporters at the Left Party's victory celebration on Sunday night in Saarbrücken, and the general consensus was that Lafontaine deserves the lion's share of the credit for his party's historic success. "He could get away with just about anything, and people here in Saarland would still be proud of him," said one local commentator in a state that doesn't appear to have been troubled by Lafontaine's image as a drawing-room socialist.

Lafontaine's return, however, also brings back what Germans call the "Dolchstosslegende," or stab-in-the-back legend (the belief that it was not the army that was beaten in World War I but that the army had been betrayed by left-wing politicians), as a tool of political debate. Schröder, say the leftists, betrayed the German people and his own just cause. The chancellor, they claim, is guilty of stabbing both his socialist foot soldiers and, more importantly, Lafontaine in the back, ultimately forcing Lafontaine to figuratively lay down his arms and resign as finance minister in March 1999.

Now, the the wounded Lafontaine and his disappointed troops are marching back to Berlin, to the seat of Germany's parliament, intent on visiting their terrible wrath on the administration. This will be particularly true if it is an administration that ends up with Schröder at the helm.

Will Their Egos Crucify or Save Them?

Legends aside, the team made up of these two egomaniacs, Gysi and Lafontaine, clearly did something right during the election. Andreas Pinkwart, a member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and deputy governor in North Rhine Westphalia, is perplexed by their success, but says they managed to become a "melting pot for protest votes from every direction on the map." Jochen Dieckmann, the SPD leader in North Rhine Westphalia, remains almost alone in his insistence that the Left Party held no magic for voters in his state.

As long as the leftists are able to continue in opposition to everyone else in parliament, they will face few external challenges. The PDS has provided the party with a functioning organization that political professionals like Ulrich Maurer, for many years the SPD leader in the regional parliament in Baden-Württemberg, and Klaus Ernst, head of the WASG, can utilize. In Lafontaine and Gysi, the party has two seasoned, media-savvy politicians who will certainly offer lively performances for German talk shows.

The party's real danger lurks within. Election day hadn't even come to an end before Lafontaine's newest comrades began asking themselves whether he's more concerned about himself -- his resurrection from the political dead and the legacy he hopes to leave behind in post-war Germany -- than the party. They also wonder whether he will be able to make concessions to the party's other minor potentate, Gysi.

Lafontaine is the first to calm his supporters' fears, saying that he and Gysi get along famously. But the two men both have the same weakness, as their resignations as federal finance minister (Lafontaine) and senator for the economy in Berlin (Gysi) have demonstrated. They have trouble swallowing insults, and even more trouble reversing their positions. Matthias Machnig, a former Social Democratic executive secretary and business manager, shudders when he thinks about Lafontaine's strict rules as finance minister: "He demands unconditional loyalty."

Where is Oskar headed?

And then there is the question of where Oskar plans to take the party. Is he planning a merger with a post-Schröder SPD that could, at some point in its future, veer off-course and turn to the left? Oskar, the savior of social democracy -- that would be his greatest triumph. Two days after the election, however, Lafontaine insists he will not even consider a coalition with the SPD. Schröder has been just as icy.

So perhaps Lafontaine will be content to keep up his strategy of sharply attacking the establishment and insist that the New Left preserve its independence? If that is the case, says Baden-Württemberg party leader Maurer, the left wing of the SPD will break ranks and desert to the Left Party, making it even more powerful. In the longer term, the Left Party could even form a coalition with the SPD and the Green Party.

As inscrutable as Lafontaine's plans are, his own base is all the more unpredictable. A few WASG members feel steamrolled by the party machine from the East and misused as a channel to the West. Only about one in four Left Party members in parliament will stem from the WASG. Although Sunday's election outcome could help WASG party chairman Klaus Ernst discipline the disgruntled in his party, not everyone will be willing to accept a lesser role so soon after the founding of the unified party. On Sunday, a group of WASG members who strongly oppose a merger with the PDS announced the formation of a new party they call "Freedom and Social Justice" (FSG) in the city of Leverkusen, near Cologne. The renegade party's raison d'être, according to spokesman Matthias Fiege, is that "the western German left has sold out to the party in the east."

But even members who choose to stay in the party could become a problem. The WASG's branch in North Rhine-Westphalia, said its press secretary George Fürböck on the evening of the election, is a self-confident and "highly pluralist bunch -- a little like the Greens when that party came into being." Fürböck is against any overly hasty mergers. "Otherwise the party will fall apart."

The true significance of Sunday's election results will only become apparent at state parliamentary elections in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz next March. In other words, Germans won't be waiting long to find out a few things about themselves and their politicians. Just how left-leaning is the West? How long will the Oskar factor last? How deep does the SPD's left-leaning supporters' disappointment in their own leadership run? And, perhaps most important for the Left Party, how long will Lafontaine and Gysi be able to coexist as the new party's kingpins?

ANDREA BRANDT, JÜRGEN DAHLKAMP, MARKUS DEGGERICH, GERALD DRIßNER, GUIDO KLEINHUBBERT, FELIX KURZ

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH