Improbable Survivor: Germany's Left Party has Thrown a Spanner into German Politics

In 1998, The Times of London dubbed Oskar Lafontaine “the most dangerous man in Europe.” At the time, Lafontaine was Germany’s left-wing finance minister and was locked in battle with the Western world’s top financial institutions. Today, the 67- year-old firebrand is still battling the forces of global capitalism, but not as leader of Germany’s storied Social Democrats. Lafontaine incensed his long-time colleagues by suddenly jumping ship—abandoning the party of Willy Brandt in favor of the Left Party, a hodgepodge of western radicals and former East German communists. He may no longer be, by any account, Europe’s most dangerous man, but in this election year he is the flagging Social Democrats’ worst nightmare come true.

Oskar Lafontaine wouldn’t be dangerous at all if it weren’t for his counterpart, the East German-born and bred lawyer Gregor Gysi. This unlikely tandem is the one-two punch of the republic’s newest party, the Left Party, which has fundamentally altered Germany’s political landscape and, by extension, that of Europe. Both are short, compact men with famously oversized egos. Yet they come from utterly different worlds: Gysi stems from one of East Germany’s most prominent Jewish families. Although a card-carrying communist, the young attorney made his reputation defending anti-communist dissidents put on trial by the state. Today, the always dapper, silver-tongued, talk-show star has the status of a folk hero in eastern Germany, where he draws crowds of thousands in cities like Schwerin, Cottbus, and Frankfurt am Oder. In places like these, former East German market towns, the Left Party rules the roost. The two men’s adversaries—and they are many—label them demagogues, spoilers, and rabble-rousers. They also insist that Gysi worked for the East German secret police, the Stasi, which he emphatically denies.

Now, twenty years after the Berlin Wall came crashing down, Lafontaine, Gysi, and the Left Party are an obstinate legacy of Germany’s deeply flawed unification process— and the Social Democrats’ abandonment of their own core ideals. Back in 1990, few imagined that the thoroughly disgraced communist party would be around in any form once democracy gelled. Even its stalwarts didn’t dream it would attract a following in western Germany.

Yet the Left Party has upended Germany’s electoral calculus by fragmenting the left wing of the German electorate. Ironically, the leftist party has dashed the hopes of any left-of-center alliance coming to power, even though there is a leftist majority in Germany. Although the party thrives in economically hard-hit regions in the east, where there is fertile ground for illiberal protest politics, it has entered legislatures across the west now, too. Moreover, the Left Party has closed ranks with similar forces elsewhere in Europe, such as the Greek communists and Sinn Fein, to help block the European Union constitution. Its staying power is attributable to the acumen of Oskar Lafontaine and Gregor Gysi, arguably the two most talented politicos in the country—and certainly the most divisive.

Turn Left at the Divide

The Left Party is the in-your-face product of the failures of western Germany’s political elite to connect with the people of eastern Germany. A bit of history is required to understand how the party’s genealogy is integral to the ill will it provokes today. The dominant strain of the party’s parentage is the East German communist party, known as the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Created at the Kremlin’s behest in occupied Germany’s Soviet-run zone, it was the result of the forced merger of the Communist and Social Democratic parties, Germany’s two great, left-wing parties before World War II. During the early years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the party tightened its grip on power and purged all opposition. For the next 40 years, the ruling party in East Germany remained strictly Leninist in style, secure in power under the political patronage of Moscow and the terror of its own secret police.

Unlike some of the more reform-minded communist leaders of Central Europe during the 1980s, East Germany’s geriatric hardliners, such as Erich Honecker, held out stubbornly against all pressure from below—and even from above, including Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Yet to its credit, when mass demonstrations broke out in the autumn of 1989, the regime didn’t clamp down with all its might, as did the Chinese government that same year in Tiananmen Square. On November 9, 1989, the hapless East Germans opened the borders and the “peaceful revolution” swept across the country. As the regime dissolved, the SED hemorrhaged the lion’s share of its members. New parties sprang up in liberated East Germany, including a genuine social democratic party, greens, and conservative and liberal parties. After 40 long years in power, unloved and ideologically bankrupt, the SED seemed to be limping off history’s stage. Indeed, this is what probably would have happened had unification taken a different course.

One pivotal moment was the Social Democrats’ quandary as to how to handle the 2.3 million former communist loyalists in East Germany. The Social Democrats’ western leaders saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvigorate their party with several hundred thousand new members. With a 140-year history, the German Social Democrats (SPD) are the great-grandfather of all social democratic parties across the world, the liberal-minded standard bearers of social solidarity, the welfare state, and workers’ rights. But (West) German Social Democrats had fallen on hard times, as the party’s traditional working class base shriveled and New Age pretenders like the Green Party emerged. By opening its arms to the eastern Germans, many observers assumed that the party, behind its leader Oskar Lafontaine, could catapult itself to the front of the republic.

Red Oskar of the Saarland

The 46-year-old Lafontaine was the Social Democrats’ shooting star who, before the East bloc regimes began to teeter, was picked to lead the party to victory in the 1990 national elections. He had been christened as one of “Willy Brandt’s grandchildren,” an elite group of postwar Social Democrats considered the great statesman’s heirs. Oskar Lafontaine was born in 1943 in the industrial Saarland along the French border (hence his fabled last name) into a poor, working class family. He never knew his father who perished on the eastern front. Oskar studied physics and joined the party in 1966, the same year the Social Democrats, under Brandt, entered the post-war West German government for the first time.

The bass-voiced populist with the pointy nose brimmed with self-confidence. Unlike so many of the party’s bland technocrats, he excelled as an orator. Watching him at a campaign rally, though often the shortest one on stage, he became larger than life. With a red tie and rolled up sleeves, he had a fiery style that recalled an era when left-wing politicians didn’t shy from shaking clenched fists and revving up halls of trade unionists. Today, in mid-harangue, Lafontaine’s pink complexion turns crimson and veins bulge from his thick neck as he rails against the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the neo-liberal European Union. His rhetorical gifts combined with his expertise in economic and financial policy propelled him up the political ladder: first as the youngest ever mayor of Saarbrücken, then as the youngest ever premier of Saarland, and then onto West Germany’s national stage.

Early on, Lafontaine, known as “Red Oskar,” established himself as an original (comma?) leftist thinker. While passionately committed to European social democracy, he showed himself open to the peace and ecology campaigns of the 1970s, even though they ridiculed the SPD’s traditional policies. At the time, the clean-shaven Lafontaine could be seen on West German television in a collared shirt and crew-neck sweater, pitching in at anti-nuclear power rallies with bearded activists. A self-declared pacifist, he even questioned the Atlantic Alliance at the height of the Cold War. These maverick positions gained him a following across Europe and beyond; his books were translated into dozens of languages.

Lafontaine’s eclectics made him the perfect partner for the party born of those movements, the Greens. He acknowledged early on that the Social Democrats could no longer rack up majorities, and that in order to come to power in a still-divided Germany they needed the environmentalists. As the 1980s ebbed, the Social Democrats and their new partners, the Greens, with Oskar Lafontaine as the frontman, were preparing to turn the conservatives out of office.

But Gorbachev’s reforms and the revolutions of 1989 quashed those pipe dreams—and blindsided the West German left. Younger Social Democrats struggled to respond. They knew Germany only as divided, and had come to accept the partition as proper: the price for the horrors of Auschwitz. In what turned out to be a tremendous political gaffe, Lafontaine and others initially balked at unification, arguing instead for an independent, democratic East Germany that charted some vague “third way” between capitalism and socialism. In stark contrast, Helmut Kohl and his conservatives charged ahead with unification and, in a very un-West German way, exploited the nationalist euphoria for all it was worth.

This was the SPD’s dilemma in the immediate aftermath of the wall’s fall. For Lafontaine, the enormous infusion of ex-SED members from the east presented a quick fix to reverse its sinking fortunes. Yet he was overruled. The West Germans like Lafontaine “were naïve about the intentions of those so recently loyal to a dictatorship,” charged Stefan Hilsberg, a regime critic from East Germany who was a newcomer to the Social Democrats. “Their sheer volume would have overrun the party,” he argued, as did others who had endured persecution in East Germany. There was no alternative but to shut them out of membership in the Social Democrats, Hilsberg argued.

The price for the West German left’s unification missteps came in December 1990 with unified Germany’s first, free elections. The Christian Democrats trounced the Lafontaine-led Social Democrats, handing them their worst electoral defeat since 1957. It was the last time that Oskar Lafontaine would head up a Social Democratic ticket in a national election.

Default Socialism

The ban on membership in the Social Democratic Party was a predicament for thousands of former East German communists, many—though not all—of whom might have felt at home with the Social Democrats. Their default solution was the precursor to the Left Party, the newly founded Party for Democratic Socialism, (PDS). The PDS was the creation of East Germany’s second tier and mid-level cadre who set about refashioning the party of Erich Honecker. Their goal, they claimed, was to turn the old SED into a genuine socialist party. One of their motivations was certainly to maintain a powerbase in the GDR, which they figured would survive communism’s collapse in one form or another. Also, the former communist functionaries didn’t want to cut themselves off from their party’s largesse, estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars. But perhaps most importantly, the regime loyalists had identified deeply with communism’s ends—though not necessarily with its often vicious means. It was their life’s work and the PDS would be the vehicle to fight a rearguard action against the assault in progress on their defective but, in their minds, nobly intentioned creation. Indeed, the new party didn’t waste much time with self-critiques or sincere probing into the crimes of the dictatorship its members had served.

East Bloc Royalty

At the helm of the PDS were individuals little known even in the east, and completely unfamiliar in the west. Some were former functionaries who had managed cautious criticism during the Soviet years. But none of them was more perfectly suited to resurrect socialism from the ashes of the ancien regime than 41-year-old lawyer Gregor Gysi.

In East Germany, the Gysi family was as close to royalty as was possible in the East bloc. Gregor’s father, Klaus Gysi, was a Sorbonne–educated Communist agitator who had fled Nazi Germany. Together with his young wife, Irene (née Lessing, niece of writer Doris Lessing), Gysi returned to Germany to organize underground resistance to Hitler. The Jewish couple miraculously survived, and stayed on to rebuild Germany—in the Soviet zone, joined by thousands of returning Communist and Social Democratic exiles. If the likes of the Gysis had anything to say about it, this new Germany was going to be socialist and resolutely antifascist, a country that would never again threaten its neighbors. Klaus joined the SED when it was founded, and went on to hold one post after another in East Germany. The state showered the Gysis with every distinction it bestowed on its luminaries.

Gregor was born in 1948 just as the Cold War broke over Europe. In a leafy Berlin suburb, he grew up in a home unlike most others in the Soviet zone. The walls of the turn-of-the-century house were lined with books, and literati from all over the world passed through the Gysi residence. The family lived and breathed the real-life socialist experiment called the German Democratic Republic. At the dinner table, where discussions ranged freely, Gregor developed his remarkable gift for dialogue and debate. By the age of 22, the precocious wunderkind had earned a law degree at East Berlin’s Humboldt University—the GDR’s youngest attorney ever.

Although Gregor Gysi believed emphatically in the socialist ideal, he clashed with his father over the state’s paternalistic and repressive ways. When Klaus justified the Soviets’ 1968 march into Prague, Gregor objected vigorously—but broke neither with his father nor the party. Snapshots from the 1970s show a young father of two with a thick shock of brown hair and a full goatee, unusual images for those who have known him only since 1989, when he’d morphed into a middle-aged man with shiny pate and round, gold-rimmed spectacles. Gregor went on to make a name for himself as defense counsel for the highest profile dissident cases, unable to save the critics from prison but winning them reduced sentences.

In the immediate aftermath of the Wall’s fall, but before unification of East and West Germany, Gysi looked like one of the very few regime-friendly figures with no dirt on his hands, in part because he had never held an office of any kind. He was thus the ideal candidate to give a respectable face to the former communist party, to socialism as such and, by association, the failed experiment of the GDR. He defiantly called himself a communist, and extolled Gorbachev as “his hero.” But the witty showman with a twinkle in his eye neither sounded nor looked like the nomenklatura of old. He reeled off irreverent one-liners, mixing irony with political analysis in a way that made him an instant media favorite. And he managed to praise and critique East German communism in the same sentence: “There were members of this party who banned films [critical of the state],” he’d say, “and then there were members of this party who made those films.”

According to Gysi biographer Jens König, Gysi’s ability to re-establish the party in what would soon be a completely new society had everything to do with his background. “Gysi came from a burgher family, even though it was socialist,” says König. “This made him uniquely suited to thrive in a bourgeois system. He had all the qualities that this new system required for success even though he had never lived in it.”

In early March 1990, the GDR held its first, and last, free multiparty vote. The election results were a bracing dose of cold water in the faces of former dissidents, the progenitors of the peaceful revolution, who imagined they had real support in the East German population. The fact that the successor to the communist party managed to poll a full 16 percent, more than anyone had expected, poured salt in their wounds. This was Gysi’s coup.

The victors of the hour, however, were the conservative Christian Democrats who, the first time they were allowed to stand for election in the eastern zones of Germany, routed the rest of the field, setting the stage for unification. The eastern Germans’ chants had shifted from “We are the people” to “We are one people.” They made it plain that the solution to their problems was the Federal Republic, which they wanted to join as soon as possible. Crowds in the east cheered Helmut Kohl wildly when he promised them “blossoming vistas” of economic prosperity. Six months later their wish came true: on October 3, 1990, the territory, property, and 16 million people of eastern Germany were incorporated into the Federal Republic.

Made in West Germany

It didn’t take long, however, for the consequences of a hasty, lop-sided unification process to sour the mood, particularly in the “new eastern states.” There were plenty of voices, even among his own advisors, who had cautioned Chancellor Kohl that his full-throttle strategy, particularly in regard to economic transition, could backfire badly. But neither he nor the lion’s share of Germans wanted to hear it at the time.

The overnight conversion to the deutsche mark thrust eastern industries into head-on competition with profitable, market-tested western companies. The result was a disaster. Few survived, and western firms rushed in to fill the gap. Joblessness soared in the east, reaching 12 percent in 1991, with no end in sight. Soon there would be gaping “black holes”: desperate regions with 35 percent unemployment, galloping depopulation, and plunging birthrates. Instead of an above-board privatization of state enterprises, they were sold off for next to nothing. Most never resumed operation. The buyers’ origins told the story: 85 percent were western Germans, 10 percent were foreigners, and only five percent were easterners. On top of this, the easterners (now taunted as “Ossis”) were blamed for the fiasco, for being too dull-witted to pick up the tricks of the free market. The real cost of unification—an astronomical bill that the West would pay— was only beginning to come into focus, and to generate an East-West tension that persists, as do the West-to-East payments, today.

Less than a year after unification, polls showed that most young eastern Germans felt like “second-class citizens” next to the Germans of the old Federal Republic. They had also begun to reflect more critically on the unification process, which indeed was a barely-disguised takeover by the west. The eastern Germans brought very little of their own into the republic—neither in terms of symbols, values, or experience.

In fact, West Germany’s post-war constitution— then, as now, sorely in need of reform—was only marginally amended to absorb the new citizens. Westerners of middling quality flooded the east’s universities and courts. Gradually the easterners were coming to long for a few perks of their old system. These were the programs that the unified republic could have adopted to its benefit, like the country-wide nursery schools, shortened secondary school terms, liberal access to abortion, among other features. All had been discredited by their association with communism. The arrogant “Wessis” implied that the Ossis’s lives and all of their accomplishments had been for naught. A phenomenon called Ostalgie (East nostalgia) set in, a romanticizing of the GDR years, and with it a waning identification with the Federal Republic.

The PDS was the direct beneficiary of this perfect storm of social fallout, ire, and Ostalgie. Rather than fade away, as everyone expected it to do, the party’s vote surged in the east, sometimes even doubling from one election to the next. Although it never scraped together a vote of more than a percentage or two in the west, it soon challenged the Social Democrats in many eastern regions. In parts of eastern Berlin, the party garnered a full 40 percent of the vote. These were places where the Social Democrats had hoped to profit from the conservatives’ turn of fortunes, now that Kohl’s “blossoming vistas” had so spectacularly failed to bloom.

One of the party’s greatest assets was an extensive and highly competent local network, based on organizational structures of the GDR. After all, not so long ago, these very people had run the entire state, including the administration of every municipality. Moreover, Gysi and his associates had embraced a philosophy that at once spoke to pressing problems of the day and tapped familiar socialist themes—the right to work, affordable housing, generous maternity leave, a minimum wage. This program suggested to the easterners, “we hadn’t been all wrong.”

Still, critics called the PDS platform a pie-in-the-sky wish list that would bankrupt the state overnight. “From the very beginning there was a huge gap between what this party said it was and what it actually was,” explains the director of the Stasi Memorial in Berlin, Hubertus Knabe, a staunch critic of the remnants of the old communist empire. “This remains a party of perpetrators from the [East German] regime, even if they push forward some younger faces or a few westerners like Lafontaine.” The party that pretended to be progressive, ecological pacifists, charged critics, was actually a conservative interest group for ex-border guards and GDR sympathizers. In light of the first Gulf War in 1991 and the bloodshed in the Balkans, for example, former leaders of one of the most militarized societies in Cold War Europe refashioned themselves into a “peace party.” They claimed to be the only real pacifists in the republic, now that other parties backed sending German soldiers to far off trouble spots.

Nowhere was the discrepancy between Schein und Sein, illusion and reality, greater than in the processing of the GDR past. On paper, the PDS forbade former Stasi informants to hold office and required everyone in the party to come clean on their previous links to the secret police. But, in practice, Gysi advised colleagues to hush up their pasts. “The rule was never tell more than can be proven at the time,” explains biographer Jens König. The Stasi archives disgorged information that implied that Gysi himself may have passed on information about his dissident clients who he’d defended under the old regime. But no smoking gun was ever produced, and Gysi denied having cooperated with the Stasi.

Red-Green Germany

In autumn 1998, after 15 long years in opposition, the Social Democrats—with the aid of the little Green Party—displaced Kohl’s conservatives from power, ushering in the first-ever “red-green” government. The alpha-male leadership consisted of a triumvirate that included the new chancellor, Gerhard Schröder; the Greens’ Joschka Fischer; and the Social Democrat party boss and new finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine. Despite Lafontaine’s popularity among Social Democrat rank-and-file, he was considered “too far left” to win a national vote.

Schröder, on the other hand, was more flexible, pro-business, and palatable to crossover voters. In the course of the 1990s, he had moved to the middle, embracing the neo-liberal philosophies of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. On the campaign trail, he flew in the face of Social Democratic orthodoxy by advocating a streamlining of the Sozialstaat, cutting taxes for the well-off, and market deregulation. The two men, supposedly linked in a “power-sharing” tandem, were destined to clash once in power—and it didn’t take long to happen.

In the finance ministry, Lafontaine pursued the most explicitly left-wing economic course since the Brandt years. One of his first moves was a tax reform that cut rates for families and low-income earners while slapping new levies on big business and moving toward stricter curbs on financial markets. With the hindsight of the 2008–09 financial crisis, Lafontaine’s critique of unregulated financial markets looks prophetic. At the time, it was pilloried as pure radicalism.

Not even six months into the term, the German business community began firing off irate letters to Schröder. The international media blamed Lafontaine for causing the euro to tumble. In cabinet meetings, outbursts between Schröder and Lafontaine disrupted the government’s work. Some thought that Schröder would buckle first, since Lafontaine had more backing in the party. But in March 1999, Lafontaine, exasperated with the standoff and deeply opposed to his party’s new course, conceded defeat and in an extraordinary move, quit the government, resigned his Bundestag seat, and left the SPD leadership.

Schröder now had an open field to pursue New Labor-style economic reforms, which he deemed critical to halt Germany’s runaway unemployment. Lafontaine’s classic Social Democratic policies were reversed with free-market solutions: over the next five years, the red-green government presided over a radical overhaul of the welfare state, the slashing of corporate taxes, and a stark austerity package. This sparked cries of outrage from traditional Social Democrats and waves of resignations. Perhaps most damning of all, unemployment continued to balloon, most desperately in the East. The Social Democrats lurched from one electoral defeat to another. In some eastern states, the SPD nose-dived, falling far behind Gysi’s PDS.

By 2004, there were demonstrations across Germany against the red-green government’s gutting of Germany’s vaunted social welfare state. In the East, where they were strongest, the PDS was leading the way. There was also an easily recognizable face in the crowd: Oskar Lafontaine.

New Party on the Block

At Left Party rallies today, it’s immediately clear that Lafontaine has lost none of his passion or self-confidence. In fact, he looks more at home than during his latter years in the Social Democrats. On the campaign trail, he wastes no time lighting into Angela Merkel’s government, which shares power with the Social Democrats. He rails against the growing gap between rich and poor in Germany, the welfare state’s dismantlement, and Germany’s “illegal wars” in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Always in motion, he pounds out point after point peppering his speeches with terms like “class struggle,” “solidarity,” and “exploitation.” “If the definition of terrorism is the taking of innocent lives,” he bellows, “then the foreign policies of the Federal Republic are terrorist and Chancellor Merkel is a terrorist!” Oskar Lafontaine doesn’t explain the world, as Gysi is wont to do, rather he asserts the way things are.

Were it not for Lafontaine, the Left Party would never have broken out of the east—something Gysi tried and failed to do. It came to life in 2007 when the PDS merged with an alliance of western leftists that included disaffected Social Democrats, West German neo-Marxists, trade unionists, and others. Since then it has sailed into legislatures across western Germany. Now, it is impossible for the Social Democrats and the Greens to form governments without the Left Party. But, since Schröder-style Social Democrats will not consider the option of aligning with the Left Party, the irony is that although there is a leftist majority, Gysi and Lafontaine may have opened the door for conservative rule. “We wouldn’t be worried about a conservative government coming to power today [on the national level, in the September 2009 election] if Lafontaine hadn’t split the German left,” says Andrea Nahles, one of the Social Democrats’ leading figures. A left-of-center coalition, she admits, would now have to include the Left Party.

The Left Party’s strongholds still lie in the east, as do the vast majority of its members. Gysi, though no longer chairperson after suffering three heart attacks in 2004, remains its public face, with rock-star appeal. For years now, in the East, the one-time communist party has shared in governance at the local and state level, even in Berlin, where a coalition with the Social Democrats has even been reelected. “A lot of verbal radicalism falls aside when they [Left Party] enter government,” explains Stefan Reinecke, an editor at the daily Die Tageszeitung. “At the end of the day these were people who governed and when it comes to local budgets and building roads there’s not a lot you can do with talk about world revolution.”

Yet the Social Democrats are loath to admit that the Left Party is part of their future. The party is deeply split about how to react: “Do we accept the Left Party as a fait accompli or shun it and hope that it goes away?” asks Social Democrat Niels Annen. Its emergence in the west has severed the SPD’s previously iron-cast link with the trade unions, its most reliable bastion of support for decades.

But the real stumbling block is the person of Lafontaine himself: Social Democrats say he abandoned their proud party because he couldn’t be its Number One. Lafontaine, they say, lent crucial respectability to the Left Party, which they portray as a self-help club for unrepentant Stalinists, one that surely would have disappeared as its aging membership passed on. “The animosity between the SPD old guard and Lafontaine?” asks Reinecke rhetorically. “It’s from here to the moon and back. They won’t sit down with him.” According to Brigitte Fehrle of the weekly Berliner Zeitung, “The Left Party is a constant reminder to the SPD of its own mistakes. It’s often said that Lafontaine wants to ruin the Social Democrats, out of revenge. But what he really wants is to push the republic to the left, and for that he needs a stable SPD with whom the Left Party can form coalitions.”

More than just an electoral factor, the Left Party is both a measure of the conditions and a facilitator of opinion in the eastern states. While the economy has picked up in places since the 1990s, the discrepancy between incomes in the two halves of the country has continued to widen. Opinion polls show disturbing trends. One of every four East Germans says the situation in the East is worse than before the Wall came down. Only 22 percent of Easterners consider themselves “full-fledged citizens” of the republic. Two-thirds of all Easterners perceive a fundamental difference between themselves and their fellow citizens from the west. Perhaps most troubling is many Easterners’ persistent skepticism about multiparty democracy, about liberalism, even the legitimacy of the Federal Republic itself.

This disturbing fallout from unification some 20 years later serves as the Left Party’s sustenance. But it is, in part, its product as well. The party’s economic populism and demonizing of the Federal Republic (while soft pedaling the GDR) do nothing to dampen these trends. “Denying that the GDR was a real dictatorship,” says Knabe, “has serious consequences for the development of democratic culture in the East. The Left Party cultivates illiberal sentiments, as well as anti-America and anti-Israel prejudices that are still widespread here.”

On a European level, the Left Party is active in the European Parliament and has found like-minded cohorts in many of the western European communist parties. Over the past two years, these leftist forces and right-wing nationalists have teamed up, along with others, to torpedo the European constitution and its successor, the Lisbon Treaty. Europe’s greens, social democrats, left liberals, and citizens groups say that the aim of the Left Party and its ilk is simply to block and obstruct, not to engage for a progressive, ecological Europe. Lafontaine and Gysi need to walk the walk, as well as talk the talk.

Gysi and Lafontaine’s ability to coexist —even thrive—in the Left Party is one of their remarkable feats. “I never thought two such egomaniacs could get along in one party,” says Egon Bahr, the SPD’s foreign policy guru. In fact, there is a clear division of labor: Lafontaine calls the shots, while Gysi sells them to the party faithful. Lafontaine possesses hard-boiled political instincts (and a thirst for power) that the gentleman Gysi has never had. But it is Gysi who has the trust of the party membership, still overwhelmingly easterners, most older than 60.

With nationwide elections in September, the animosity between the Left Party and the Social Democrats could very well torpedo a left-of-center “red-red-green” alliance from coming to power. On the one hand, the Left Party’s radical stances, like that on the European Union, throws a spanner in efforts to bring the fractured left together in one viable, electable coalition. On the other, the Social Democrats have to swallow their fury at Lafontaine and admit that the Left Party is here to stay, at least in the medium-term future. Across Europe there is a trend away from larger parties, toward a more fragmented political spectrum. The poor showing of social democrats Europe-wide in the recent European Parliament elections underscored that pattern. (The German Social Democrats’ showing was particularly grim: a meager 21 percent of the vote.) Ultimately, all three of Germany’s leftist parties need one another if they hope ever to come to power in a progressive government—and not merely as the conservatives’ junior partner, as is presently the case in Germany.

More than anything, the Left Party’s staying power in the East is testimony to the fact that, 20 years after the fall of the Wall, Germany’s fusion is still a work in progress. The course unification took sowed a bitterness that will take a generation to overcome. Out of patriotism, German politicians tip toe around the acute problems in the former GDR. If it weren’t for Gysi, Lafontaine, and the Left Party, these issues would be nowhere on the republic’s radar screen. Certainly, the Federal Republic’s eastern German chancellor, Angela Merkel, doesn’t go out of her way to address them. Twenty years from now, if the likes of the Left Party is still alive and kicking, Germany’s political elite will have no one to blame but themselves, again.