Monday, November 11, 2019
German Christian Democrats call for collaboration with the far-right AfD
By Marianne Arens
9 November 2019
Following the recent election
in the state of Thuringia, there is a growing chorus of voices within Germany’s
conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) calling for collaboration with
the extreme right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Meanwhile the Left Party,
which won the largest vote in the state election and can fill the post of state
premier for the next five years (with its state chief Bodo Ramelow), is seeking
to form an alliance with the CDU. In this way the entire political spectrum is shifting
to the right.
Shortly after the election,
the deputy chair of the CDU parliamentary group in Thuringia, Michael Heym,
demanded that a three-party coalition of the AfD, CDU and neo-liberal Free
Democratic Party, be considered as a feasible alternative government for the
state. Such a coalition would in practice have enough seats to govern. In an
interview with journalist Gabor Steingart, Heym said that, in his opinion, the
AfD was “a conservative party” and were “not all Nazis.” He could well imagine
a situation in the state parliament where the AfD would “tolerate” a CDU
premier.
Meanwhile, 17 other CDU
politicians have issued an “Appeal” demanding their party “actively participate
in discussions with ALL democratically elected parties in the Thuringia state
parliament.” This includes, of course, discussions with the AfD.
In the state election the CDU
lost a total of 36,000 votes to the far right AfD, which gained 23.4 percent of
the vote and came second behind the Left Party. Now 17 leading CDU politicians
are demanding “open-ended” talks with the AfD. According to the appeal, “a
liberal society could not afford to ignore almost a quarter of the votes in
these discussions.”
The CDU functionaries issued a
pro forma acknowledgement that their party should not form a coalition with
either the Left Party or the AfD, but at the same time criticised the “haste to
exclude,” which “led to a very difficult constellation for forming a government
in Thuringia.” Heym had “analysed the situation very correctly. We therefore
expect the state executive to stand by him.”
The Thuringia AfD is headed by
Björn Höcke, the main spokesperson for the party’s openly neo-fascist grouping,
“The Wing” (“Der Flügel”). On Wednesday, Höcke responded to the offer from the
CDU ranks and offered to support a CDU-led minority government.
In a letter to the state
leaders of the CDU and FDP, Höcke proposed “talking together about new forms of
cooperation.” “An expert government sponsored by our parties, or a minority
government supported by my party, would be a viable alternative to “a
continuation of the status quo,” i.e., the state’s former Left Party-Social
Democratic Party (SDP)-Green (so-called Red-Red-Green) administration, the
letter read.
CDU General Secretary Paul
Ziemiak called the proposal by the 17 politicians “crazy” and rejected any
cooperation with the AfD as a “betrayal of our Christian Democratic values.”
This talk, however, is mainly directed at an upcoming CDU party congress, where
intense conflicts are expected to dominate. In fact, the CDU has been preparing
to cooperate with the AfD for some time and has contributed significantly to
boosting the far-right party’s prospects.
In particular, the
ultra-conservative “Union of Values” faction inside the CDU favours political rapprochement
with the AfD. Its most prominent member is the former head of Germany’s
domestic intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maaßen, who personally intervened in
the state elections in both Saxony and Thuringia to the applause of
enthusiastic AfD supporters.
Friedrich Merz, the candidate
of the Union of Values in the current struggle for the CDU leadership, has also
called upon the party to open itself up to the far right. Merz blamed the
“grotesquely bad” policies of the federal government for the CDU defeat in
Thuringia. “We are losing sections of the German army (Bundeswehr) and the
federal police to the AfD,” he told the Bild newspaper. Merz is a
lobbyist for one of the world’s largest asset managers, BlackRock, and heads
the company’s German subsidiary.
It is not only the right wing
in the CDU that promotes the AfD. The German federal government—a coalition of
the CDU and SPD—has largely taken over the far-right AfD program with regard to
immigration policy and military rearmament, entrusting the AfD in turn with the
leadership of the German parliament’s committees for budget, law and tourism.
The AfD is also intertwined
with the state apparatus. There are proportionally more civil servants, police
and soldiers in AfD factions in state governments than in any other party. At
the same time, the AfD is publicly demonstrating its fascist character in
Thuringia.
According to a court ruling,
AfD state spokesman Höcke can be described as a “fascist.” In September 2018 he
marched together with Brandenburg neo-Nazi and AfD member Andreas Kalbitz at
the head of a far-right mob in the city of Chemnitz. The mob harassed foreigners
along the way and a Jewish restaurant was attacked.
Following the election in
Thuringia, Höcke announced his “Deportation Initiative 2020” after being asked
what he would do first in the event of entering the state government. He had
previously demanded a “large-scale emigration project” to “forestall the
impending death of our people [ Volk ] due to population exchange.”
The measure would “involve a policy of tempered cruelty.” For his part
Alexander Gauland, the leader of the AfD, described the period of Nazi rule in
Germany as just a “speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German
history.”
Research has shown that the
AfD was not, as many claim, voted for by the “unemployed, the poor and the
hungry.” Taking into account abstentions, only about 10 percent of voters in
the prefabricated housing districts of Erfurt, where voter turnout was
extremely low, voted for the far-right party, compared to a national average of
15.5 percent.
The Left Party also bears
considerable responsibility for the AfD’s rise to prominence. The politics of
its party leader Ramelow did not differ from those of other state premiers.
Thuringia has been just as brutal in regard to its refugee and deportation
policies as other states and has repeatedly deported young people to war-torn
Afghanistan.
As far as police rearmament is
concerned, the budget already adopted for 2020 allocates more than half a
billion euros for domestic security, including more than 320 million for
improved police equipment. “We want well-motivated police who like to perform
their duties in Thuringia,” asserts the Thuringia Left Party’s website. The
state’s CDU predecessor government had “repeatedly starved the police of
funding.”
The state government has also
taken up the proposal of the federal defence minister Annegret
Kramp-Karrenbauer (CDU) to make public vows to the Bundeswehr “in early
November as a sign of recognition for the soldiers.” In Thuringia, the vow will
take place on November 7. Ramelow had earlier thanked German troops for their
help in “coping with the refugee crisis” of 2015.
As for the secret services,
Ramelow dropped his earlier demand for the dissolution of the country’s
domestic intelligence service (BfV) even prior to taking office, although the
agency had been spying on him for years.
Following the election, the
Left Party has moved further to the right. While it was still celebrating its
“historic victory in Thuringia,” Ramelow had declared his willingness to “speak
with all democrats”: “Let us also explore what common powers exist in
parliament.”
In Thuringia, the party had
repeatedly managed to pull in the same direction on crucial issues “across all
party-political lines” the premier declared. Already before the election,
Ramelow stressed, with an eye to CDU leader Mike Mohring, that he was not
scared “to discuss topics with a CDU party and faction leader.” Ramelow
expressed his pleasure in going hiking with Mohring.
These developments make clear
that it is pointless to rely on so-called “democratic” parties to fight the
danger from the far right. Only an independent movement of the working class
can stop its rise. Such a movement must address the cause of the shift to the
right—the crisis of the capitalist system and the bankruptcy of the “left”
parties—and take up the struggle for a socialist alternative.
Macron warns Economist magazine of world war, collapse of NATO alliance
By Alex Lantier
9 November 2019
Intractable divisions between
the imperialist powers that twice in the 20th century exploded into world war
are again undermining international alliances key to the affairs of world
capitalism. This was the content of a long, deeply pessimistic interview French
President Emmanuel Macron granted to Britain’s Economist, declaring the
NATO alliance between America and Europe to be dead. The interview contained
statements virtually unprecedented for a French president in living memory.
Macron first expressed his
bewilderment at the world situation and his frustration at US policy. “I’m
trying to be lucid, but look at what is happening around the world,” he said.
“It would have been unthinkable five years ago. Exhausting ourselves with
Brexit this way, Europe having so much difficulty advancing, an American ally
that turns its back on us so quickly on strategic issues—no one would have
thought it possible.”
Stressing the danger of world
war, Macron indicated that he sees US policy on a broad range of topics from
the Middle East, to Russia, China, and global finance as threats to vital
French interests. He attacked Trump’s pull-out of US troops from Syria,
green-lighting a Turkish attack on Kurdish militias that were serving as
proxies for the NATO war in Syria.
“What we are seeing, I think,
is that NATO is brain dead,” Macron said. He indicated his concern that Article
5 on collective NATO self-defense could drag France into a war launched by its
nominal NATO ally, Turkey, against Syria and Syria’s main ally, Russia: “What
does Article 5 mean tomorrow? If (Syrian President) Bashar al-Assad’s regime
decides to counterattack against Turkey, will we commit ourselves militarily? …
From a strategic and political standpoint, what has happened is an enormous
problem for NATO.”
Macron also attacked US policy
towards Russia, a major nuclear-armed power: “When the United States is very
harsh with Russia, it is a form of governmental, political and historical
hysteria.”
Macron stressed that US policy
could provoke all-out war with Russia, calling instead to develop an alliance
with Moscow: “If we want to build peace in Europe and rebuild European
strategic autonomy, we must reconsider our position towards Russia.” He added
that France can “talk to everyone and so build relations to prevent the world
from going up in a conflagration.”
Macron also warned of “the
emergence, in the last 15 years, of a Chinese power that raises a danger of
bipolarization and clearly marginalizes Europe. The danger of a US-China ‘G2’
is added to that of the return of authoritarian powers near Europe,” such as
Russia and Turkey. Just back from a trip to China, where he signed $15 billion
in contracts and denounced US trade war tariffs against China and Europe,
Macron said he was “neutral” on Huawei, a company Washington has tried to keep
from setting up European and global internet architecture.
Macron highlighted the bitter
struggles over markets among the leading capitalist states. Pointing to fears
of a US financial collapse dragging Europe down with it, he attacked US trade
war policies, declaring: “Europe is a continent with a lot of savings. Much of
these savings goes to buy US debt. So our savings finance the future of the
United States, and we are exposed to its fragility. This is absurd.”
Stressing that he views US
trade war policies as unacceptable, Macron added: “Trump … poses the question
of NATO as a trade issue. For him, it’s a plan where the United States provides
a kind of geopolitical coverage, but in exchange, there is an exclusive commercial
relationship. It is a reason to buy American. But France did not sign up for
such an alliance.”
Macron repeatedly stressed
that he and other European heads of state are drawing far-reaching conclusions
on the viability not only of ties to Trump, but the 70-year-old NATO alliance
with America.
Citing Trump’s dismissals of
his concerns over the Middle East with private remarks that “This is your
neighborhood, not mine,” Macron added: “When the President of the United States
says that, to act responsibly we cannot fail to draw conclusions from it, or in
any case to start to reflect, even if we do not want to... Some alliances or
the reliability of certain ties are in question. I believe many of our partners
have seen this, and that things are starting to move on this issue.”
Though the Economist hid
its English translation of Macron’s interview behind a pay wall, it caused
consternation among NATO officials. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in
Europe for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, replied to
Macron, “I think NATO remains an important, critical, perhaps historically one
of the most critical, strategic partnerships in all of recorded history.”
German Chancellor Angela
Merkel called Macron’s remarks “drastic words,” adding, “I don’t think such
sweeping judgments are necessary, even if we have problems and need to pull
together.”
In fact, however, broad
sections of the European bourgeoisie agree with Macron. In a column titled
“Macron is right,” Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine wrote, “The French
president has declared NATO brain dead, and there is much outrage. But
essentially, Macron’s analysis is correct.”
It continued, “The body of a
brain-dead person seems to live, but in fact he is dead and any form of therapy
is meaningless. This is what France’s president thinks of NATO.” Dismissing
Merkel’s criticism of Macron’s “sweeping judgment” on NATO, Der Spiegel declared:
“In reality, this is a quite tepid defense of NATO. It is clear also to Merkel
that the patient really does find himself in such a situation.”
Discussion in ruling circles
of the collapse of a 70-year alliance between imperialist powers that twice in
the 20th century plunged into world war points to a very dangerous crisis. The
capitalist system is again threatening humanity with a global conflagration,
this time fought with nuclear arms.
Significantly, Macron himself
stressed that what is emerging is not a passing spat inside NATO, but a
deep-going breakdown of international relations prepared over decades of
imperialist wars since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The International Committee of
the Fourth International (ICFI) explained that the liquidation of the Soviet
Union was not the product of the bankruptcy of Marxism, but of the nationalist,
autarkic and anti-Trotskyist economic program of Stalinism. The Stalinist
regimes were overtaken by capitalist states able to directly engage with the
world market’s resources, thanks to capitalist globalization. Faced with
growing working class militancy in the 1980s, the Stalinist bureaucracy
restored capitalist property and established close ties with imperialism.
After the dissolution of the
Soviet Union in 1991, the ICFI opposed bourgeois propagandists like Francis
Fukuyama who claimed this spelled the “End of History,” the death of Marxism
and the final triumph of capitalist democracy. In fact, the dissolution of the
Soviet Union was one reflection of an intensifying crisis of the nation-state
system in which capitalism is rooted. This crisis was also undermining the
capitalist states, particularly amid the wave of NATO imperialist wars across
the Middle East and Africa.
Macron, the banker-president,
is undoubtedly a ferocious opponent of socialism, but this analysis is clearly
discussed inside his government. He told the Economist: “There was a
pervasive conception that developed in the 1990s and 2000s around the idea of
the End of History, an endless expansion of democracy, that the Western camp
had won and would universalize itself. It was the history we were living in
until the 2000s, when a series of crises showed that it was not true.”
Macron admitted, “Sometimes we
committed mistakes by trying to impose our values and change regimes without
getting popular support. It is what we saw in Iraq and Libya… and maybe what
was planned for Syria, but that failed. It is an element of the Western
approach, I would say in generic terms, that has been an error since the
beginning of this century, perhaps a fateful one, due to the convergence of two
tendencies: the right of foreign intervention and neo-conservatism. The two
meshed, with dramatic results.”
Macron is admitting that the
policies of the major NATO governments over the last 30 years were all
politically criminal. Macron did not recall it, but Trump stated in a tweet
that America alone spent “8 trillion dollars” on wars in which “millions have
died,” wars that were “based on a false and disproven premise.” As for Macron,
he himself is deeply implicated as a former minister in the French government
that pushed to bomb Syria in 2013.
Macron’s statements are an
indication of the urgent necessity of building an anti-war movement in the
international working class based on a revolutionary socialist perspective. The
capitalist system is not only bankrupt and criminal. Its escalating conflicts
over markets and strategic advantage are, by the admission of leading
capitalist officials themselves, placing the world on the brink of an all-out
conflagration.
The reactionary perspective
Macron outlined to address this situation—namely, stepped-up international
collaboration between the spy agencies against Islamist terrorism—will not
resolve the underlying inter-imperialist conflicts over markets and strategic
advantage. Indeed, it is quite obvious that the solution that Macron proposes
on a capitalist basis will only intensify the conflicts.
“We must clearly re-think the
strategic relation… how to reconstruct what I have called an architecture of
confidence and security,” Macron said, adding, “We will make our intelligence
agencies work together, share a vision of the threat, intervene maybe in a more
coordinated manner against Islamist terrorism in our entire neighborhood.”
Contrasting Islamism with “our
model built in the 18th century with the European Enlightenment,” Macron called
Islamism the “worst enemy of European humanist values that rest on free and
reasoning individuals, equality between women and men, and emancipation.”
This is absurd. Macron is not
a defender of the Enlightenment, but a right-wing banker and politician who, as
part of his police crackdown on mounting opposition to his policies of
austerity and social inequality, has bemoaned the French Revolution and
declared that France needs a king. As for his canned invocation of “humanist
values,” they are belied by his constant appeals to neo-fascistic hatred of
Islam, which is rife and growing in the French security forces.
What Macron is proposing is a
policy not to halt the drive to war, but to further build up the agencies of
state repression that would be mobilized against an anti-war movement.
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