Westward Ho?

On a cold, wet, late-August evening, Klemens Domning and Kaspar Scholemann stand in front of a school smoking and hoping to get a good turn-out for a discussion evening calling on the Germany military to withdraw from Afghanistan.

The event is being held in Wedding, a down-at-the-heels, working-class district in western Berlin. It's the sort of area in which the Left Party -- whose positions range from stringent pacifism to significant restrictions on business and an expansion of the social-welfare state -- is looking to expand its base.

The Left Party originated in the PDS, the successor to Socialist Unity Party in communist East Germany. Earlier this year, it merged with the WASG (Electoral Alternative for Labor and Social Justice) from the western part of the country.

"It's a matter of trying to better anchor ourselves, i.e. recruit more members, in western Germany," Scholemann, a 27-year-old university student says. "Opinions differ about which segments of society we should be trying to address. Some favor the bourgeois, ecologic and civil-rights milieu, and others think we should emphasize social-welfare questions."

Quo vadis?

In the 2005 national elections, the Left Party took 8.7 percent of the vote and became the second most powerful force in three German states -- all in the eastern part of the country. They're part of the governing coalition in the city state of Berlin but have lost support there while in government. That raises the question of whether a party known for its uncompromising leftist views can -- or even should -- enter into the inevitable compromises that go with governing.

"You have to take the path of compromise and pragmatism," says Domning, a freelance journalist in his mid-fifties. "But you also shouldn't sell yourself cheaply. You have to stay true to your principles and learn to say no."

A coalition at the national level with their closest political rivals, the Social Democrats, is not on the cards.

"You don't have to be in the government to give weight to demands," Scholemann says. "My feeling is that a joint government with the SPD, given their policies of drastic cuts in the social-benefits system, would be very difficult. So I think that, for the foreseeable future, the Left Party will and should remain in the opposition."

A new form of serfdom?

In the school auditorium, around 50 people listen as three speakers argue that Germany's participation in the ISAF mission in Afghanistan is futile, indeed counterproductive. That stance runs directly contrary to the policy of the SPD -- as does the Left Party's insistence on reversing the cost-cutting reforms to the social-benefits system begun under ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and continued by the current grand coalition.

Those cuts, say Left Party members, amount to a dismantling of Germany's social-welfare system.

"First and foremost and to put it bluntly, I want to see a return to social fairness in times of globalization when people are being forced to work for scandalous wages," Domning says. "That's a new form of serfdom.

"The state has to re-embrace its pro-active function and stop being so dependent on lobbyists," he continues. "You don't get to know any welfare recipients at the buffet table. We do get to know them, and we want disadvantaged people to be able to take part in society again."

Conservative beneficiaries

For most western Germans, the Left Party remains an organ for easterners disgruntled with the effects of German reunification. But many expect the party's policies to increasingly appeal to have-nots in the western states, siphoning off voters from the left wing of the SPD.

"The party will stay the course and present itself as a leftist alternative in the debate about the social-welfare state," said Oskar Niedermayer, a professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin. "They'll continue to try to depict all the other parties as neo-liberal."

That's bad news for the SPD, whose leftist credibility has suffered badly during its coalition of necessity with the conservatives. The prospect of rapprochement with the Left Party is distant. The policy gap is too wide, and the current SPD leadership is loathe to work with Oskar Lafontaine, the former SPD leader who deserted ranks to become the Left Party's most prominent figure in western Germany.

Ironically, the rise of the Left Party has proved a temporary boon for conservatives.

"The CDU-CSU profits in the short term from the fact that the SPD shuts itself off from a possible coalition partner," Niedermayer said. "That will likely change in the medium term."

Back in the auditorium, the audience nods in approval as one of the speakers ridicules the notion, put forward by former SPD Defense Minister Peter Struck, that military engagement in Afghanistan is crucial to Germany’s national security.

No one here is thinking about burying the hatchet with the Social Democrats. And for the Left Party's grassroots, that situation is just fine.