Post-communists exploit eastern resentment

By Simon Burnett

SCHWERIN, Germany (DPA): The neglect at the former East German collective farm told the story: unruly clumps of shoulder-high bushes and long grass encroached on the long, crumbling concrete buildings.

Hundreds of pigs had once been fed and bred on this 3,000- hectare farm on the northern plains of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania state. But the livestock had long since gone.

The farm was part of the state agriculture system but, like the system itself, did not survive the change to the market economy in 1990. Almost half of East Germany's 870,000 farms workers were thrown out of work in the following years.

Now, the only sign of life was a farmhand, a stocky man in his 40s with a chubby, sun-tanned face. He was unemployed, he was resentful, and he was economical with words. He said mournfully: "The PDS is the only party that cares for eastern Germany."

The PDS, the Party of Democratic Socialism, is referred to as the reformed communists. But this is a misnomer. Party members are a diverse collection of competing factions -- the reformers, the Communist Platform, the Marxist Forum, the Alliance of West German Communists, Trotskyists, ecologists, anarchists.

The party officially cut its links with Stalinism in 1995, but the hardline Communist Platform grouped around an attractive 31- year-old brunette with a pompadour hairstyle, Sahra Wagenknecht, does not believe that.

Wagenknecht longs for the heady days of Stalin, who died in 1953, and believes the peaceful revolution which toppled East Germany 1989 was the work of dark, counter-revolutionary forces. She the closest thing the old guard has to a pin-up girl.

But the unemployed farmhand is not concerned with this. He sees the PDS as a party offering hope. He is far from being an oddity. In 1998, 24 percent of voters in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania voted for it in a state election.

The PDS now rules the state as junior partner in a coalition with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats. In another eastern state, Saxony-Anhalt, the PDS serves in a de facto coalition with the SPD.

It was a remarkable comeback. The PDS emerged in late 1989 from the wreckage of the party that ruled East Germany with an iron fist for 40 years, the Socialist Unity Party (SED).

It jettisoned the hatchet-faced functionaries, changed its name to the Party of Democratic Socialism, emphasized its new "democratic" credentials -- and pushed to the front its only asset, a young, clever East German lawyer with metal-rimmed spectacles and a holiday sun-tan: Gregor Gysi. His credentials were impeccable: his father had been a minister under the communists but he had made a name for himself as a lawyer defending East German dissidents.

The renewed party at first staggered from disaster to calamity. It was hit by a financial scandal. In the first all- German general election in December 1990 the only people who voted for it were aging diehard party hacks, ideological dinosaurs and servants of the communist system -- it polled just 11.1 percent of the eastern vote. The party appeared to be on the way to becoming a museum piece.

But a political sea change was taking place. Increasingly resentful easterners, hit by unemployment, debt and a host of less definable uncertainties, and seeing westerners as arrogant intruders -- and other political parties as western interlopers -- were attracted by the reassurance offered by the PDS links with the past and its promises to help in the present.

The chemistry began to work. In the 1994 general election, it polled one percent in the west. But in the east, it won almost 20 percent. In his Hellersdorf/Marzahn constituency in eastern Berlin, Gysi won a huge 49 percent of the vote.

Anti-westernism is a visceral element of the PDS appeal. The east is being kept alive by massive cash transfers. The western attitude has been perceived to be: we pay the piper so we call the tune. The west donates. The east receives. It is a recipe for resentment.

But to understand the fissure between eastern and western Germany one has to go back before unification in 1990.

Then West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised easterners "a blossoming landscape" and said no one would be worse off. But the promises could not be fulfilled. Kohl did not go back to the east to reassure people. Neither did he deliver a rousing blood, sweat and tears speech of encouragement.

He met East Germany's new prime minister, Hans Modrow, in Dresden in December 1989. It was a friendly meeting. In February 1990, Modrow met Kohl again, this time in Bonn. By now, Westerners were regarding the easterners as a nuisance. Kohl knew this. He was distant and patronizing and Modrow was publicly insulted.

This act of disdain probably did as much as any single event to forge a separate eastern identity. Modrow was a communist but he was also an easterner and many people in the region held him in almost folk-hero esteem.

Resentment towards the west touched boiling point in the election in Saxony-Anhalt in April, 1998, when two extreme parties, the PDS and the neo Nazi German People's Union (DVU) collected a combined third of the vote.

The PDS, detested in the West, won almost 20 percent while the DVU polled nearly 13 percent. Some easterners voted for both under the two-vote proportional-representation system.

The PDS reformers knew that the party's appeal needed to become wider, that it needed to be accepted in the west if it were to survive as anything but a Cold War fossil.

In 1999, the PDS chose the western German city of Muenster for its conference. Reformers tabled a motion proposing that NATO peace-keeping operations backed by a United Nations mandate should not automatically be rejected. It was a mild proposal intended to signal the party's commitment to entering the political mainstream.

But it was rejected at a turbulent meeting.

The normally unflappable Gysi lost his temper and talked about a minority "terrorizing" the party. He also dropped a bombshell by saying he was quitting as parliamentary leader.

Party chairman Lothar Bisky is also stepping down. His designated successor, Gabriele Zimmer, said in September this year that the party had no intention of retreating to become a regional group. But with Gysi and Bisky playing backseat roles, the party again has a serious question mark over its long-term survival.