From Pariah to Prospective Partner? The German Left Party’s Winding Path towards Government

Abstract

All parties have unique histories, but the history of the German Left Party (LP) is more unique than most. One of its predecessors, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), ruled the German Democratic Republic for all but the last few months of its inglorious history (1949–90) before giving up power and watching from the sidelines as German unification steamrollered past it. The new SED leadership quickly realised that unified Germany would have no place for a (post-)communist party that did not make at least some effort to recant for its past failings; hence the SED changed its name to, firstly, the SED/PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) in December 1989 and then simply to the PDS in February 1990 (Barker, 1998; Oswald, 2002). Through the early 1990s the PDS struggled gamely for its political life, and, had the process of German unification gone smoothly, there is a fair chance that it would have lost this struggle and vanished off the political map.