A week ago Saxony-Anhalt voted! The media prediction – a neck-and-neck race – was cock-eyed! But outside Sachsen-Anhalt (in German), did anyone really give a damn? Yes, some did!

It is sandwiched along the Elbe River between “genuine” Saxony to the southeast, with Dresden and Leipzig, and Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) to the west, which has Volkswagen. And what has it got?

Tons of history, mostly German. Bach spent his happiest years in little Köthen, whose music-loving ruler-prince played in his ensemble. But Bach left the Anhalt town and moved on to Leipzig. George Frederick Handel, born and raised in Halle (Anhalt), also moved on, to Hamburg, Rome, London (and “The Messiah”). Martin Luther was more faithful; he nailed his 95 Theses on a church door in Wittenberg (Anhalt), and was both born and died in the region. That at least is worth noticing!

The state capital, Magdeburg, can claim a little fame as birthplace of Friedrich Wilhelm Gerhard Augustin von Steuben, or “Baron Steuben” – the fantastic phony! A lowly captain when kicked out of the Prussian army (maybe for being gay), he was broke, his “baron” title and noble “von” were invented, his fancy general’s uniform was a creation of Ben Franklin’s Paris tailor. But it all worked, George Washington was glad to have one of Frederick the Great’s officers build up a disciplined army at Valley Forge and help win the Revolution. And Magdeburg boasts a fine statue of Steuben.

As old as Charlemagne, its founder, it is proud of another man, who was mayor but loved to try his hand at other pursuits (quite different from those of New York’s governor). In 1654 he pumped all the air out of two large copper hemispheres, fit together to prove the strength of atmospheric pressure. It proved so powerful that two teams of horses could not defy the vacuum and pull the two apart. Once air was allowed back in they fell apart immediately.

CDU Win Election Easily

Two strong sides were in play again last Sunday. No matter how the other political horses strained, they could not break the double-bind of the two, invulnerable despite their differences. Six parties were in the running, there was hot air in abundance, but those two kept their tight grip.

Unlike 1654, both good and bad news was involved. It was good for Saxony-Anhalt’s premier for ten years, Reiner Haseloff, 67, a serious-looking senior, whose down-to-earth manner resembled that of another East German from the same “Christian” party, Angela Merkel. As with father or mother figures in other states, his personal popularity helped win him a third straight victory.

But the 37% tally for his CDU, a fat 7.3% increase over its result five years ago and amazingly high with six parties in the race, was based on more than fatherliness. Repeated predictions that the rabid, almost openly fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) might win out were simply too frightening for many East Germans. And though Haseloff is as conservative as other Christian Democratic (CDU) leaders, he has steadfastly rejected all attempts inside his party to cuddle up to AfD leaders and consider an agreement or coalition with them. A widespread fear of the far right was decisive.

This victory, even in a lesser East German state, was what you might call (if it were not for Covid sensibilities about tender spots) a “shot in the arm” for the “Christian” CDU, which had grown shaky on the national level. The sigh of relief from Armin Laschet, its less than charismatic chancellor candidate for September 26th, was almost visible…”We won! Hurrah for Saxony-Anhalt!”

AfD Stumbles – but Still Gets Over 20%

And the other good news? The AfD came in 16 points behind the CDU and 3.5% lower than its result five years ago. Despite its boasting predictions and the media warnings, there was no neck-and-neck dash against Haseloff and no cuddly necking with right-wingers in Haseloff’s party. Not now, anyway.

But that’s where the good news sours into bad news.

True, the AfD lost ground with its 20.9% – in national polls it is just half that. It has nothing like the support in the U.S.A. for an increasingly extremist GOP, nor does the AfD possess such a fearsomely unifying Führer figure. But it remains alarming enough; in much of Eastern Germany it is in second place, as in Saxony-Anhalt. Many pundits blame oldsters, “their thinking still twisted by GDR totalitarianism.” This is nonsense; the far right is not strongest with them but with disoriented, often hopeless young males who experienced the GDR only as babies and toddlers, if at all.

Just add them up; the AfD, whose domestic policy hardly conceals its fascist ideas, plus Haseloff’s winning CDU, always on the right of the spectrum, plus the Free Democrats, bare-faced pro-capitalist, who won enough votes (6.4%) to return to the legislature in Saxony-Anhalt. The sum of 64.3% means that nearly two-thirds voted “right-handed”. Is that an omen for the September elections? The three horses pulling against them have proved very lame.

The Left Does Badly

The Social Democrats (SPD) claim to be defenders of working people and world peace were hobbled long ago when they became junior partners of their traditional CDU rivals, both in Saxony-Anhalt and on the national level. They paid dearly for this, getting a pitiful 8.3% on Sunday, so low it caused tears, almost sobs, during post-election TV interviews with their candidates.

The Greens, hoping to break through in the East at last, got 6.1, a tiny 0.7% over 2017. And sad faces!

But faring worst of all was the LINKE! Once proud in the saddle, with hopes of victory in a state with long working-class traditions, they lost over 5% of their supporters in five years and dropped to 11.2%! The fact that most of those they lost switched to the Christians just to keep the fascists out was no consolation. Those voters were lost! The LINKE election slogan, simply “Better – Die Linke!” had been no great inspiration.

General Election News

Can these three parties do any better on the national level where the Social Democrats are down to 15%, pitiful enough for a party whose leader, Willy Brandt, once ruled the roost. Their current chancellor candidate, Olaf Scholz, 62, now Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister, puts up a brave front but is facing two smelly scandals. A big financial services provider, Wirecard, high in the German charts, with ties to countless enterprises, proved phonier than “Baron von Steuben”! A London journalist let some air in; its debts were huge, its assets at the vacuum level of Magdeburg’s hemispheres. Some board members got arrested but the biggest fish disappeared. So did 1.9 billion euros. The Scholz office, the main watchdog to prevent such shenanigans, was somehow dozing.

Scholz seems to have memory problems as well. When the super-wealthy Warburg bank got caught defrauding the government in a billion-level tax rip-off, it called for help from the mayor of Hamburg, site of its main office. The mayor denied any connection – until the banker testified in court. Then he had to admit, looking very innocent, that if there was indeed such a call he had “no concrete memory of the content” and had never “exercised any influence in the tax matter.” But after more beans were spilled he finally recalled: yes, he had indeed met three times with the banker and given him tips per telephone. In the end the debt to the taxpayers went unpaid, Warburg remained unscathed. And Olaf Scholz, then Hamburg’s mayor, is now the Social Democratic candidate for the job of chancellor.

Who else wants the job? A major contender is the candidate of the “ecology” party, the Greens. Annalena Baerbock, young -looking at 40, vivacious, still displaying, like her party, a whiff of its left-leaning, untraditional, feminist past, in contrast with elderly establishment gentlemen. The Greens had soared amazingly in national polls, even overtaking the Christians on some days. Baerbock was given a fighting chance to replace the retiring Angela Merkel, that other daughter of East Germany.

Then her opponents found flies in the ointment. Stupid remarks by a few misogynists hardly registered, but even small blots in the squeaky-clean background expected of a Green candidate hit hard. Her official vita included more credits, academic and organizational, than fitted the facts. “In my brief, compressed resumé I unintentionally offered impressions I had not wished to create. That was crappy.“ In her income report to the Bundestag she had neglected to mention 25,000 euros paid her by her own party. “There should have been a more careful checkup… we have learned a lesson,” she noted ruefully. Minor matters, but they weakened her odds, already hit by the poor showing in Saxony-Anhalt. But more crucial matters intruded.

Cold War Campaigning

For reasons possibly affected by big, lucrative trade deals, some German leaders have not joined so fervently in the growing denunciations aimed belligerently at Russia and China. At times even Merkel dared to defy the commanding voices from the Pentagon, NATO-HQ in Brussels and all the media marionettes.

Now the CDU candidate Armin Laschet has dared to call “demonizing Vladimir Putin not a political policy but rather an alibi for the absence of one”. He criticized “marketable anti-Putin populism” and, while disapproving Russian policies, said it was necessary to “imagine oneself in the thinking of one’s conversation partner if one wishes to engage in foreign policy relations.”

Even Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, never a leftist peace activist, opposed attacks, verbal or otherwise, against Russia: “We can have no interest in joining in this confrontation. We want dialogue and good neighborliness with Russia,” he said and warned against “the many smart Alecs who always demand tougher and tougher measures.“

Such unusual remarks were balanced enough to anger, even enrage the bellicose elements known as the “Atlanticists”. And among the angriest “smart Alecs” were leaders of the Greens like Annalena Baerbock. Aside from ecology demands such as higher gas prices and lower speed limits, which angered those forced to drive to work, and tainted by agreements with big business, who should not be “too heavily over-taxed”, a main line of Greens like Baerbock has long been that “a tougher German stance toward Russia and China … should be a priority.” While demanding an “increase in pressure on Russia” to counteract tanks it deployed on its own territory, she finds nary a word about NATO maneuvers along Russian coasts and frontiers far distant from German or American borders.

Is one CDU-Christian wing, feeling pressure from the voters, doing some re-thinking and leaning further toward detente while the other goes all-out to build up and train aggressive modern military forces? The question also goes to the SPD, with some realistic voices now audible. Even in the Greens, pressure from their “old guard” is pushing against modern killers like armed drones. At their latest conference the pro-drone leadership won – but only by a very slim margin of 347 to 343 delegates. At times it almost seems like a subtle tug of war.

Die LINKE is Losing Ground

But what about the LINKE (Left)? Despite arguments within its ranks about Putin, about using the Bundeswehr abroad, on allying with the SPD or Greens or rejecting any such ties (now out of reach anyway), its anti-war stand was never influenced by pressures from auto-makers, agricultural monopolies, banks or greedy investors, and most certainly not from armament giants like Krupp or Rheinmetall. Unlike the others, it gets not a cent from any of them. All its policies, even those debated among its members, were related to the interests of working people, children, pensioners, and to opposing every activity by neo-Nazis. Sometimes Greens, Social Democrats, even CDUers joined in. But the LINKE were certainly the most consistent .

With post-Corona threats to peace internationally and to freedom domestically demanding militant fights on many issues, their voices, votes and actions will be urgently needed. But despite very promising signs at their February congress they have largely failed to meet the challenge.

Some members are indeed waging a courageous battle against soaring rents in the city-state of Berlin, working to collect 225,000 signatures (175,000 approved ones) for a “confiscation” referendum which is truly scaring the rent-scrouging fat cats. But on the national political scene they have largely disappeared. A hostile media plays its part. But the LINKE have consumed themselves in inner controversy: disputes about imaginary future coalitions, refugees and immigration, about a loss of contact with working people as opposed to higher-educated minorities. Most recently about “identity groups” and friction with two of its best-known party personalities and most forceful orators, Sahra Wagenknecht and her husband Oskar LaFontaine. Are they to blame for splitting and weakening the party? Or are they still a force for militancy? Would Sahra win or lose votes in her state of North-Rhine-Westphalia. Should she be expelled because of damaging criticism? These questions have distracted far too many in the party from all the fights which need to be fought.

Such quarrels have already gained life and death proportions! The LINKE has not only lost calamitously in Saxony-Anhalt, in the national polls it has dropped from a year-long position of about 9-11% down to its current 6-7% level. If it drops further, below the 5% needed to maintain its presence in the Bundestag, it will have basically carved itself into political impotence! I hope my next Berlin Bulletin can report a change for the better! It is so necessary!

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Remembering Joseph Almudéver

Here’s a note on a very different – sad but more natural loss!

On May 23 old Joseph Almudéver, 101 years old, passed away, ending one of the most heroic, dramatic and tragic episodes in all history. He was the last survivor of the International Brigades, which included about 40,000 brave, devoted men and women from some fifty countries who fought fascism in Spain. They fought a vain battle to stop Hitler, Mussolini and their vassal Francisco Franco from destroying a democratic, progressive republic and testing weapons and tactics for the World War they were preparing for.

Five years ago I was privileged to get to know Joseph, a jolly old fellow, friendly, alert and clear, when our various “remembrance ”groups toured sites of the Brigade story. He stressed to the end that the war was not a civil war but an international conflict, in which Spain was defeated because of the betrayal by governments, especially those of Britain, France and even the USA. Roosevelt, despite his sympathies, bowed to the pressures of the racist south and the pro-fascist cardinals and archbishops of the Catholic Church and let American corporations ship trucks and fuel – only to the fascists. The only two countries which came to the aid of Spain, saving Madrid in 1936 and enabling it to hold out for two and a half brutal years, were distant Mexico and the Soviet Union.

To the end of his days, Joseph remained a convinced Communist. He is survived by his older brother, now 103, who also fought for the Republic but not in the International Brigades (which included many Spanish soldiers like Joseph). That great tradition embodied by the two brothers – internationalism, battling fascism, personal commitment – remains as relevant and urgently necessary today as ever. It was his message!

His hair – they were all talking about his hair. After his electoral coalition Unidas Podemos (UP) became the weakest force in the next Madrid parliament after last May’s elections, Pablo Iglesias announced his retirement from politics. A couple of days later, his mane was chopped off. Now in the smallest Spanish village, where – in danger of dying out because of migration and an ageing population – the new haircut of the figurehead of the Spanish Left was the topic of conversation of the Spanish Left. Pablo Iglesias’s pony tale had long become a thing in its own right. It was the symbol of a new political understanding in Spain, and from the beginning a subject of public discussion. Even in “serious” television debates, Iglesias was time and time again “the one with the ponytail”.

The haircut should have gone a long time ago, admitted Iglesias after numerous inquiries. It was an annoyance, not least because his own children kept pulling it. What would votes think if he entered an electoral coalition with the Social Democrats of PSOE and shortly afterwards got rid of his trademark? A prophetic symbolic act of future good conduct? In a way, he must have felt himself trapped in his own picture. And his opponents? They would have happily and maliciously mocked him, inventing new lies about him without any legal consequences. Just as they had again and again in the previous seven years, since he was first elected as a Member of the European Parliament and later as the vice-president of the first coalition government since the end of the Franco dictatorship.

Alberto Rodriguez, Podemos’s outgoing organisation secretary and MP for Unidas Podemos also changed the picture from the Congresso de los Diputados with his dreadlocks. Others provided diversity: with his wheelchair, the speaker of the UP fraction, the scientist Pablo Echenique, demonstrated that the plenary hall in which decisions are taken is not accessible for the disabled. Isolated from his fraction, he had to sit in his wheelchair at the foot of the MPs’ benches. This image was shown often in the evening news. In addition, the Podemos MP Pilar Lima communicated solely using sign language, thus turning proceedings on their head in the senate hall dominated by grey-heads. A baby was also allowed to attend the parliamentary debates, carried by his mother, the Podemos MP and professor at Complutense University, Carolina Bescansa. This diverse group represented a new age.

This now seems to be a thing of the past. Symbolically, several media outlets have buried Podemos and their former chief with eloquent headlines: “Pablo Iglesias announces the end of a cycle” (he has never made this announcement) or “Anniversary of the protest movement 15 May: 10 years for nothing”. The headlines reflect the fact that, on ist formation on 11 March 2014, Podemos presented itself as the heiress of the protest movement. The outrage at the forced evictions during the housing crisis, the dictatorship of austerity, the unprecedented robbery of public funds to save the banks, and the generally devastating social effects of the crisis, brought hundreds of thousands onto to the streets in 2011. And Podemos reaped the rewards. In May 2014, the party stood for election for the first time. In the elections for the European parliament, they captured in one for 1.2 million votes and 5 MEPs.

10 years later, or 7 years later depending on what counts, and now with a grey beard, José Mansilla from the anthropological research centre Into urban conflict, declared the protest movement was “a mile stone in the repoliticization of society”. Depending on region, milieu or generation, the effects were sometimes more, sometimes less, “but without a doubt, that was an awakening following a period of political inertia, in which class struggle, neighbourhood initiatives and feminist or ecological movements stagnated”. What was achieved then was the break up of a social consensus that capitalism was capable of providing “liveable” conditions, that an intergenerational contract existed, that enabled the fulfilment of a certain social growth. According to Mansilla, “this hegemony is now broken.”

Even if the result is that the leading figure of the Spanish Left has disappeared along with his pony tail: “the milieu from which he came still exists” declared the experts. The social infrastructure, “the substance out of which society is made” have changed profoundly, and “that is also reflected in the superstructure and is reflected in politics, culture and justice.”

Concerning the economic structure of the country, the problems of Spaniards have got worse since 2019, although this is largely due to the contribution of the pandemic. The original plan of Universal Basic Income, which was originally planned by Podemos, and the programme for guaranteed work from the United Left (IU) has – as part of the coalition government with the PSOE – turned into a pension: much too low, much too bureaucratic, and until now only available to a fraction of those who need it. 850,000 families were supposed to benefit. According the Ministry for Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, only 210,000 have actually received this help.

Hair-raising figures prophesy poverty in Spain. There is a generation of middle aged people who have now lived through their second large economic crisis, and there are the younger people with even less hope. Nearly 40 per cent of Spanish youth have no paid employment. This is the highest rate in the whole Euro zone. In 2020, 1.5 million people were dependent on food aid. Spain’s GDP sank during the pandemic by ten per cent. No country in the EU has had to cope with higher losses. The major reason is the structural dependency on tourism.

The youth, however, have again taken to the streets. The reason for the protest was the imprisonment of the rapper Pablo Hasel and others for insulting the crown. But there was a general dissatisfaction with the political system in the air. In the centre of the criticism was above all the so-called “muzzle law” that was used against Hasel, although the government has promised to get rid of it. That was an election promise by Unidas Podemos and was also contained in the Coalition Treaty. The protests have ended for the time being, but experts believe that a new wave of mobilisations could be imminent.

Take, for example, the journalist Reiner Wandler, Madrid correspondent for the taz and regular writer for the Austrian Standard, who no longer sports a ponytail, but has accumulated abundant experience and knowledge of Spanish conditions. In 2011 Wandler experienced the protests on the Plaza del Sol up close. “That was a cry of liberation. The silent voice which shook Spanish society.” What remains for him is the self-organisation of people who have learned to mobilise on their own. “That will come again when it is necessary, and that will be sooner or later”. A banner from then will never be forgotten “I don’t know where you were in May 68, but I know where we were in May 2011.”

For the right wing and their hatred for this new type of movement, Pedro Ángel Márquez was also one of those long haired scroungers who slept several nights on the Plaza del Sol during the protests, even though he still had to write university papers. Márquez’s motto of the time was “we were asleep and now we’ve woken up”. He thought “the day has just begun we still have everything to do.” After the protests, he remained an activist in different groups. The streets were occupied and “discussing politics was part of everyday life”, explains Lola Matamala, who because of unemployment had to return to her parents’ house, although she was over 30. She talks of the achievements of the time like the platform which was threatened by mortgage payments but remains till today. But also of the quarrels from which Podemos emerged. “Podemos required the leadership of Iglesias because he was so charismatic.” Even though she finds this can be criticized, it makes sense to her why this decision was made.

In truth, from this movement without leading figures a party developed with a clear leadership – above all Iglesias and his haircut – and a much weaker basis. Many loved Iglesias and his excellent rhetoric. Others, like his friend and Podemos co-founder Iñigo Errejón, turned their backs on him and formed a new party. Mas Madrid confined itself at first to the capital city, and later under the name Mas Pais extended their activities to a national level- In Madrid, Mas Pais is still stronger than Podemos and achieved second place in the recent regional elections. In 2011, Errejón was invited by the SPD to Berlin and met with the then party leader Sigmar Gabriel – before Podemos was even founded. In Spain, however, the press could recognise fewer similarities with the German social democrats and many more with the German Green. A clear left split followed the government coalition with the PSOE: the current “Anticapitalistas” left Podemos in early 2020.

Even with trimmed hair, Iglesias continued as Public Enemy Number 1. Right wing journalists compared him with his new haircut to the young Stalin. Inexcusably, after his withdrawal from the government, Iglesias recommended as his successor as vice-president a Communist woman. And anyway: the once “neither right nor left” party Podemos has turned into a left-wing force, which admittedly addressed increasingly fewer people in recent elections. Sure, the right wing in Madrid have always won the election, but the most recent victory was particularly pronounced. Podemos now must elect a new General Secretary, and the signs are that the United Left must also settle with the party leader.

Podemos, this construct of a group from politics and sociology professors of Complutense University, which was planned on the isolated Campus of Somosaguas (an irony of fate: the Francoist authorities originally deliberately erected the building outside the city, to prevent strong resistance by students), will continue to exist without Iglesias and most of its founders, and will gather a section of the left-wing forces. The United Left containing the Communist Party (PCE) also has a stable clientele. Spaniards can thank the PSOE alone for the lack of a halfway progressive government in Spain. The PSOE waited until Unidas Podemos was weakened by four elections in four years while right-wing media and the deep state had all the time in the world to make all sorts of accusations against UP, for which no-one was prosecuted.

Mario Domingez also doesn’t have too much hair, is a professor at the aforementioned University, took part in the 15 May movement, but not in the formation of the party of his co-worker. He supports the ideas that were put forward then on the Plaza del Sol by the Grupo Analisis. Among them, a central point: “it is important for every movement that wants to effect change that these actions are the fruit of a strong collective thought process and a free debate”- The consensus should be the basis for all actions of the assemblies. “The consensus as alternative to the current system, that is based on the principle of majority rule.” Pablo Iglesias – with or without pony tail – can be understood as a victim of this thought process, as he became the symbol of this movement, and the target of right-wing hate. Alternatively, as his critics say, his charisma stifled this process.

This article first appeared in German in the Austrian magazine Tagebuch. Reproduced with permission. Translation: Phil Butland