A Divided Left: The SPD and the Reformed Communists in Eastern Germany

Abstract

Much has changed on the political scene in Eastern Germany since unification in 1989, when it was difficult to predict which political parties would win the support of East German citizens after the immediate transition years. Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s promise of the good life attracted many to the CDU. Would their enthusiasm endure? Observers predicted that the newly formed SPD would ultimately appeal to those who took for granted an active state role in social provision and were committed to democratic government. The discredited communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS, formerly Socialist Unity Party, SED), still suffering from the stigma of being the ruling party in the German Democratic Republic, seemed likely to remain the choice of only a limited proportion of the population and its survival in 1990 and 1994 a passing fluke (see also Chapter 12). Yet just eight years later the PDS is the third most powerful party in Eastern Germany, after the CDU and the SPD, and in some states and communities it has been more successful than the two major parties.

This chapter is largely based on material first published as a Working Paper of the Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin fuer Sozialforschung (Social Science Center, Berlin, 1995) and on recent research conducted in Eastern Germany in 1996. See my chapter, ‘The Social Democratic Party in Eastern Germany: Political Participation in the Former GDR after Unification’, in Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Marilyn Rueschemeyer and Bjorn Wittrock (eds), Participation and Democracy: East and West, (New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, forthcoming). This chapter was written while at St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1997 and I am grateful to Archie Brown and my other colleagues at St Antony’s for their support and hospitality.