Unity

From Unity, 15 October 2005

The return of a spectre

by Hermann Glaser-Baur

The bourgeois media in Europe are facing a problem. For ten years or more the bare fact that communist parties still exist was given little or no mention—never mind their participation and performance in elections. The blanket of silence seemed to do the job; there was no room for images of old spectres in the glittering picture of the “post-communist period.” They ignored the first cracks on the surface when they appeared, and now, as the whole picture is crumbling, the commentators seem to be left without explanations.
     Let’s look at just a few places in Europe.
     The Communist Party of the Basque Country—refounded less than a year ago—marched into the regional parliament with a splendid 12½ per cent of the overall vote. “Supporters of ETA” got the blame. It is interesting to find that the Basque separatist organisation has so many of them: for years we were given the impression of a tiny terrorist gang with no backing amongst the people.
     In Portugal, one of the “good” EU countries, things got more difficult to explain when the Socialists won the recent parliamentary elections and the Communist-led left alliance gained hugely at the same time. They are now the third-strongest force in the country.
     In Germany the propaganda machine tried to change tactics during the run-up to the elections. They pulled every old anti-communist trick out of their hats: the main line was the “undermining” of the left alliance by the Communist Party. The country’s largest daily paper, Bild—the spearhead of reactionary journalism for many years—put the cream on the cake just two weeks before the elections. Its 12 million readers were presented with a two-page special called “The true face of the left.” It showed twelve candidates only (out of several hundred), photograph and all. They were the Communist Party members standing on the left list. We organised a celebration in the party headquarters in Essen that night. All our recent efforts to raise the public profile of the party had been small compared with this huge display we got given free!
     The result of the elections is common knowledge. Almost 9 per cent of the overall vote for the left alliance made it the fourth-strongest political force in the country; the fifty-four left MPs have knocked the old balance of power on the head, and the country is left without a functioning government so far. We will probably end up with the shambles of a Labour-Conservative (SPD-CDU) coalition—anything at all to keep an old spectre out.
     It shouldn’t go unmentioned that the DKP (German Communist Party) emerged from the election campaign with a large number of new members and hundreds of new readers of Unsere Zeit, our weekly paper.
     We always learnt that the capitalist media are flexible and capable of adapting to new situations. In the case of Germany’s neighbouring country Austria they certainly showed neither of these qualities. Coming up to last week’s elections in the state of Steiermark, the papers almost simultaneously published huge warnings of the “red danger.” The best one of them was a one-page ad saying, “If you vote KPO [Communist Party of Austria] you vote for the loss of private ownership of our means of production”—the first time they told the truth in many years!
     The voters liked the idea. From the traditionally very spread-out field of competing parties the KPO emerged third-strongest and returned to the parliament after almost forty years of absence with the best result in the party’s history.
     Marxists all over Europe will analyse this new situation carefully. We know, of course, that real progress will not be made inside the capitalist parliaments. But we are also aware that the possibilities of using the parliament as a stage and to enhance working-class demands are now much better in many parts of Europe, including Germany, the heartland of European imperialism.
     Those communist parties that kept their own Marxist-Leninist profile overcame the depression of the 1990s; those who regained a high level of confidence in communist ideas amongst their members and supporters deserve the credit for breaking through the blanket of silence. They have started to shift the political axis. We have to strengthen the network now: the spectre has to return to every corner of Europe.

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