GERMANY | The 2025 Federal  Elections

No matter who will govern – opposition against those at the top is necessary

On 23 February, early elections to the Bundestag (parliament) will take place. The fact that the ‘traffic light’ government (a coalition of social democrats, Greens and Liberals) failed is an expression of the state of the country: instability and crisis at all possible levels – economic, social, political, climatic. The existing conditions cry out for far-reaching change, but the politically and economically dominant forces are not nearly ready for the necessary changes. Therefore, it is already clear: No matter who will govern – it will not get better! Improvements are not to be expected from those in government, but must be fought for by the masses of working people.

The Federal Republic of Germany is one of the richest countries in the world. But this wealth does not benefit everyone, but is concentrated in a few hands. Inequality of income and wealth, as well as unfair distribution, are particularly high here. Social injustices are constantly increasing. Price increases and the lack of wage increases have lowered the standard of living of most people in recent years. Rents have become almost unaffordable in many cities, and many can no longer find suitable accommodation. Healthcare is inadequate, yet health insurance contributions are still rising. In schools, more and more lessons are being cancelled due to a lack of teachers. Municipalities are cutting back on important services in the areas of culture, youth development, popular sports, etc. And while tens of thousands of jobs in industry are being destroyed and unemployment is rising again, the work pressure for those with jobs is increasing all the time – burnout and other mental illnesses are increasing accordingly. These conditions cry out for change.

The cause: capitalism

Similar problems exist in every European country (not to mention the rest of the world), regardless of which parties are in government. The reason for this is that these grievances are the result of the crisis-ridden capitalist system that exists in all countries. Under capitalism, the profit interests of banks and corporations determine what happens. Competition for the best conditions for profit – that is, for access to markets, labour, raw materials, transport routes, etc. – is intensifying massively and is accompanied by major changes in the global balance of forces. The USA is a weakening giant that is tending to lose power, while Chinese state capitalism is growing stronger – Europe and the Federal Republic within it are being increasingly crushed in between. This is leading to increased international conflicts, sharper competition in markets and greater pressure on wages and working conditions – the people currently feeling the brunt of this most are industrial workers, with many thousands of jobs being destroyed due to the recession (i.e. the decline in economic output).

Wars and militarisation

International developments have direct effects on Germany. Capitalism is a global system of mutual dependencies, worldwide markets and production chains, and a global climate catastrophe. Germany’s economy is particularly geared towards the sale of goods in other countries, i.e. exports, and is particularly affected by crises in the world economy.

The increase in wars and conflicts, some of them military, around the world is also a consequence of crises and competition and the shifts in the international balance of power described above, and thus a direct consequence of capitalism. The German government has proven that it is able to spend enormous sums of money when it considers it necessary to defend its system. Within a very short time, Olaf Scholz declared a ‘turning point’ after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and approved the one hundred billion special fund for the Bundeswehr (the German military) – thus confirming that armaments and war have priority under capitalism.

Since then, there has also been an increasing militarisation of society, a new military service is to be introduced and the Bundeswehr is to play a growing role. We should not forget: every euro spent on the military and armaments is not spent on better health care, housing or the fight against climate change.

The German government’s support for the nationalist and undemocratic Zelensky regime in Ukraine and the partly far-right Netanyahu government in Israel, as well as the repression in Germany of demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinians, are an expression of the fact that foreign policy is guided by power and economic motives, not by democratic values or human rights.

Why the end of the ‘traffic light’ coalition?

The break-up of the ‘traffic light’ coalition between the SPD, the Greens and the FDP reflects the different ideas of different representatives of capitalism about how their system can best be maintained. No part of this government represented the interests of the working people. There was agreement on many issues: improving the conditions for profit for banks and corporations, supporting the Ukrainian war effort and Israel’s war against the Palestinians, arming the Bundeswehr and militarising society, restricting migration and deporting refugees. There is disagreement about the best way to achieve these goals.

Put simply, two strategies are clashing: a frontal assault on the working class or an attempt to involve the trade union leaderships and carry out attacks in a somewhat less harsh or piecemeal fashion. The conflict over the “debt brake” (a constitutional rule introduced in 2009 limiting the amount of debt the government can incur each year) expresses this in a distorted form – distorted because some capitalists also favours a reform of the debt brake in order to gain more leeway for state investments that serve their profit interests (but not to enable socially useful and necessary investments in education, health, the environment, social services, etc.).

‘Economic turnaround’

The background to the collapse of the coalition, provoked mainly by the liberal FDP, is also the daily growing demands of capital representatives for a so-called ‘economic turnaround’. By this they mean drastic attacks on the rights and living standards of the working people, tax breaks for capitalists, etc. – something we have been warning against for months and why Sol members launched the campaign ‘Wir schlagen Alarm’ (We sound the alarm) together with other militant trade unionists. The representatives of capital are concerned with increasing their profit rates in view of the recession in the German economy, which has now lasted for two years, and the lack of prospects for a significant improvement in the situation. Germany is now once again, as at the beginning of the century, considered the ‘sick man of Europe’, bringing up the rear in terms of growth rates. In 2003, this situation led the then SPD-Green government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to carry out the biggest attack on the social security system in the history of the Federal Republic with the Agenda 2010 and the so-called Hartz laws. Many pro-capitalist politicians and business representatives are now calling for an ‘Agenda 2030’.

This is what the capitalists expect of a future government, which will in all likelihood be led by the former Blackrock manager and economic lobbyist Friedrich Merz, who will be more than willing to fulfil these demands. This can only be prevented by mass resistance on the streets and in the workplaces.

Migration debate

For months, these plans for massive attacks on the living standards and rights of the working population have been accompanied by the so-called migration debate, through which the far right AfD, other bourgeois politicians and the media are spreading the myth that migration and migrants are responsible for the social ills described above. This is a large-scale diversionary tactic designed to distract from the real causes and the real perpetrators of the problems – the banks and corporations, bourgeois governments and their capitalist system. In fact, no migrant increases rents, no refugee closes hospitals and no asylum seeker eliminates tens of thousands of jobs in the automotive industry. If anything, the opposite is the case: without the many hard-working migrant workers, the health service and public infrastructure would collapse. For every news item about a terrorist attack or violent crime carried out by a migrant, there could be dozens of news items about the lives saved by migrant paramedics, nurses and doctors – but there aren’t, because the aim of news is to create sentiment.

Sol (Socialist Organisation Solidarity, CWI in Germany) rejects this policy of ‘divide and rule’, which aims to divide the working population along national and religious lines in order to prevent the masses of people from collectively resisting those at the top. We stand for equal rights for all people living here.

Prospects for the election

In the election campaign, the established parties will once again promise the moon. In particular, the CDU/CSU and SPD will act as if they had not held government responsibility in recent decades and as if they had not had the opportunity to implement their promises. The SPD will once again make left-wing noises and make demands for a higher minimum wage, a law to ensure that collective agreements are honoured, more housing construction, etc. – and after the election, in the event of them joining a coalition government, they will forget about them again. All the established parties will agree on continuing the rearmament and supporting Zelensky and the wars of Israel.

According to the current state of opinion polls, it would be clear that the next chancellor is called Friedrich Merz – although he and the CDU do not have particularly strong support among the population – and there is much to suggest that there will be a government made up of the CDU/CSU and SPD, which used to be called a ‘grand coalition’. It is to be assumed that the SPD – as so often in the past – will accept the ministerial posts offered to it in order to support the government and will also be able to come to terms with Chancellor Merz. At the same time, the Greens and CDU/CSU are again moving closer to one another and the possibility cannot be ruled out that they will form a ‘black-green’ coalition at the federal level for the first time, even though the hurdles for this are significantly higher. Such ‘black-green’ coalitions currently exist in three German regions, including the largest North-Rhine-Westphalia.

The FDP, BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) and Die Linke (Left Party) are having to fear whether they will get back into the next Bundestag (parliament). But today’s opinion polls are not the result of the new elections and a lot can happen in the remaining weeks. It cannot be ruled out that the current parliament with seven parliamentary groups will become a parliament with four parliamentary groups and that after the first three-party coalition, a government consisting of two parties will be formed again (counting the CDU and the Bavarian CSU as one party). On the one hand, this would mean that probably up to twenty percent of the electorate would not be represented in the Bundestag, which highlights the undemocratic character of the five-percent hurdle. On the other hand, it means that the situation in parliament and government could be temporarily more stable – temporarily, because social instability and crisis will nevertheless increase and sooner or later this will also lead to mass resistance. Something which could also successfully force a Merz government to make concessions.

AfD

The AfD will in all likelihood be the main winner of the election. It continues to profit from the justified dissatisfaction and frustration with the established parties and both exploits and deepens hostility to migrants. The AfD also benefits from the fact that the Left Party has not succeeded in building a credible and strong alternative because, instead of taking a clear oppositional anti-establishment stance, it has been and still is responsible for ‘perfectly normal’ capitalist policies in the various state governments where it sat in coalitions together with the SPD and the Greens.

The AfD has managed to brand itself as the party of the ‘ordinary people’, although it largely represents a liberal economic programme that would benefit the rich and harm the poor and the working class. It is anti-worker and racist.

Even if the election results in a shift to the right in parliament, it would be too simple to attribute this simply to a shift to the right in the majority of the population or even to support for neoliberal policies. However, support for more social policies or the hundreds of thousands of new trade union members as a result of the 2023 strike wave are hardly reflected at the election level.

The large mass demonstrations against racism and the AfD a year ago showed that a majority rejects the right-wing populists. However, it also showed that these sort of protests against the AfD, in which the left and anti-fascists form an alliance with the established parties, cannot push back the right-wing populists. This would only be possible if the fight against the racism of the AfD were linked to the fight against the social causes of its strengthening, which would necessarily also have to be directed against the policies of the CDU/CSU, FDP, SPD and Greens. The Sol therefore takes a class standpoint in the fight against the right and says that right-wing populism and racism must be deprived of their support instead of limiting itself to a moral condemnation.

BSW

The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) claims to be an alternative to the established parties, to AfD and to the Left Party. It made a sensational start last year and achieved successes in the European elections and the state elections in Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia. At the turn of the year, the poll numbers declined, probably because some voters realised that the BSW is not fundamentally different from the other parties – after all, it has already entered state governments in Brandenburg and Thuringia, and in Thuringia even with the CDU!

While the BSW does argue for a number of sensible positive individual peace and social policy demands, overall it is a right-wing split from the Left Party. This means that the BSW expresses the interests of workers less than Die Linke, mainly because it has thrown any hint of anti-capitalism overboard and promotes the illusion of a reconciliation of interests between capital and labour. It is not a party that has set itself the task of mobilising and organising workers to fight back, but rather the BSW stands for proxy politics and is itself an exclusive club that is almost impossible to join. Above all, however, Sahra Wagenknecht and her fellow campaigners contribute to the division of the working class with their anti-immigration propaganda and promote the diversionary manoeuvre of the migration debate described above.

We understand that some will vote for the BSW to strike a blow against the establishment without voting for the AfD and because the BSW is currently the most prominent anti-war party, but it is not an alternative for enforcing the interests of workers and young people.

Trade unions

The new situation is a challenge for the trade unions and Die Linke. The trade union bureaucracy, which is oriented towards social democracy, will more or less openly campaign for the SPD. Trade union activists at the grassroots level should not go along with this and should criticise this policy. Above all, the unions must now fight to preserve the jobs that are under threat in many companies and prepare resistance against the attacks on the rights and living standards of the working class that can be expected from the next federal government. This would mean intervening in the election campaign with clear demands and using the politicisation to organise colleagues.

Where cuts are already being made at the expense of the working class, the trade unions and union activists, as well as those affected and left-wing and social organisations, should take the initiative to resist and form protest alliances.

Unfortunately, the trade union leadership is taking a different path, as the IG Metall (metalworkers) leadership’s recent approval of the loss of 35,000 jobs and wage cuts at VW shows. While the capitalists are terminating the social partnership and intensifying a class struggle from above, the union bureaucrats are desperately clinging to it because they have no political alternative to it. What is needed is to counter the class struggle from above just as resolutely with resistance from below.

Die Linke (Left Party)

Trade unionists should speak out in favour of voting for the Die Linke in the upcoming elections, because – despite all its limitations, mistakes and adaptation towards the SPD and the Greens – it is the only voice of a left-wing opposition that can make it into the Bundestag. A Bundestag without Die Linke would shift the political balance of power in the Federal Republic to the disadvantage of the working class. That is why Sol will also call for and campaign for the election of Die Linke.

The Party’s campaign for canvassing, which began under the motto ‘Everyone talks, we listen’, must now be turned into an election campaign – and instead of just listening, the spirit should be: ‘We have answers to the crisis of capitalism!’

There must be no anti-Merz election campaign that gives the impression of a left-wing camp together with the SPD and the Greens. The expected ‘left blinking’ of these parties must be named as such. It is necessary to lead a clear opposition election campaign.

The Left Party should wage a combative election campaign with a focus on a few central issues. These should be:

  • Saving threatened jobs through a reduction in working hours with full pay and a democratic plan for the conversion of production to meaningful and sustainable products
  • Repairing the ailing health care system and public transport – financed by the profits of banks and corporations and the wealth of the super-rich
  • Creation of affordable housing by expropriating the real estate companies, introducing a cost-based rent and building public housing
  • Measures against the still far too high prices and too low wages
  • Opposition to capitalist wars and arms deliveries to Ukraine and Israel and against rearmament and militarisation
  • Saving the climate through measures financed by the rich, banks and corporations instead of making the masses of the population pay for it

To solve these grievances, we need to go to the very foundations of the capitalist system, otherwise they will be ineffective: democratic public ownership instead of private ownership of corporations and banks, and massive taxation of the outrageously high levels of accumulated private wealth. Die Linke should run a truly left-wing election campaign and distinguish itself by being the party against capitalist wars and obscene concentrations of wealth, the party that is ready to really take on the rich and powerful.

An integral part of the election campaign must be a message of solidarity with all discriminated minorities – migrants, refugees, LGBTQI* people, disabled people – and  women who are also affected by discrimination, with all groups fighting for their legitimate rights. The topic of migration should not be avoided, as the Communist Party (KPÖ) in Austria is doing, but rather an anti-racist position should be taken up offensively and confidently, propagating solidarity with refugees and declaring that the fight against the causes of flight is the fight against capitalism.

 

Overcome the 5 percent hurdle!

If Die Linke approaches such an election campaign convincingly, if its candidates follow the example of the new chairpersons Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken and declare that they will only accept from the inflated parliamentary allowances an average skilled worker’s wage and donate the rest to the party and trade union or social struggles and movements. The Left Party nationally needs to finally distance itself from the Left Party’s participation in the capitalism-friendly government policy in the Bremen, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Thuringia regional coalitions. On such a basis a mobilisation could be achieved among the Party’s members and supporters that would carry the party over the five-percent hurdle in the federal elections. But it must not just be about votes. Die Linke should run an election campaign that calls on workers and young people to organise and take action, before and after the elections.

That, together with consistent struggles by the trade unions for the interests of workers and against cuts at all levels, would also be the best way to keep the AfD in check.

 

New socialist workers’ party

This would not yet overcome the crisis of the Left Party, but it would at least halt the decline. A necessary debate could then take place on the contribution that Die Linke – together with other forces from trade unions and social movements! – can make to creating a mass party of workers and young people with a socialist programme, which is so urgently needed to represent the interests of the working class and change society. The Left Party should abandon its claim that it alone will develop into such a party and should reopen itself more to cooperation with other left-wing and trade union forces, including in elections – in order to create a real mass party in the future. Such a party will arise out of the struggles of workers, young people and the socially disadvantaged, and will consist primarily of people who are not yet organised anywhere. Sol wants to contribute to this. We are convinced that such a party is necessary on the road to a socialist transformation of society and that the stronger the Marxist forces within it are, the more successfully it can be built.

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January 2025
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