An election without real choice

An election without real choice


Germans go to the polls today. A premature one thanks to the slight of hand that Gerhard Schröder played on German democracy -- the betrayal was complete. Yet opinion polls have been predicting that he cannot be written off. Such is the fate of the people who have borne the burden of political mismanagement stoically. They might just end up with both the villians getting together to destroy what is left.
Not much has been told about what has been wrought on the people by misrule of the two main parties in the recent past. The media didn't really project the conditions prevailing in the country. They enhanced the notion that these elections where about personalities. Very little was said about issues.
One party that calls itself the Social Democratic Party (SPD), spent two terms merely reinforcing the right-wing policies of the previous Christian Democratic Union (CDU) led by Helmut Kohl. Now the CDU is lead my a lady, Angela Merkel. She is from the east of the country - an Ossie. That's as much as her a value goes. A personality pitted against Schröeder. In such a state I guess mainstream media are expected to falter. They did! So where is the story of these elections. In purely electoral politics terms it was meant to be on the Left. The charismatic leaders Oskar Lafontaine and Gregor Gysi of the Left Party.PDS where, initially at least, to make a significant impact. But opinion polls have shown a steady slide in their fortunes. The story lies there for sure.
If the people are not moving Left are they then moving to the Right? Alarm bells should be ringing. Or, is there a general apathy. Which means that people are loosing fate in the political process, in democracy. How much of it has to do with the established parties and how much does it have to do with the inability of alternatives to emerge, especially on the Left. The hasty coalition of the Lafontaine and Gysi, on hindsight, looks like a mistake. The differences, if not in the personalities themselves, between the two parties in terms of their idealogies is quite significant.
In fact, Sahra Wagenkneckt, the 36-year-old deputy of the European Parliament and speaker of the Communist platform in the PDS is a bitter critic of this marriage. She said:"[O]ne shoudl not renounce a good name that we have earned ourselves in the 15 years." Of course, her criticism is not merely about the PDS giving up it name but also of Gysi spoke about: the need for the PDS to be the spokeperson for the East. Lafontaine after all is a former SPD bigwig.
If the combination does not make much headway this time, Gysi, at least is done for. But more importantly where do the 5 million unemployed go? Where the thousands of under-employed go? Where do the retirees go? And, of course, where does the East go?