By Tommy Hansen
COPENHAGEN, Denmark
Around 2,000 people protested outside the Thuringia's parliament in Germany’s Erfurt Friday as a far-left prime minister came to power for the first time in the German state since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Some protesters held banners that said “Communists have already ruled Thuringia” and “Stasi go away.”
Leader of the far-left German socialist party Die Linke in Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow was elected as the first socialist Prime Minister of a German federal state, based on an unprecedented "red-red-green" coalition with the Social Democratic Party, or the SPD and the Greens.
“The reaction is understandable and I am sure there were people among the demonstrators who had lived through the DDR and have a rightful and understandable need to mark their stand. But surely, the crowd also contained people with extreme right-wing views, who tend to use any situation to make themselves heard,” Dr. Diether Dehm, member of the German Bundestag for Die Linke, said.
The DDR refers to the former East Germany.
The recent Thuringian rise of the Die Linke, a democratic descendant of the communist party which ruled old East Germany, has stirred emotions in Germany.
Critics of Die Linke accuse some party members of having former links to the Stasi, East Germany's notoriously cruel secret police, and even German President Joachim Gauck has chosen to break with the normal neutrality of his office and has recently questioned Die Linke's ability to govern.
"People of my age who lived through the DDR find it quite hard to accept this," said Gauck in a November television interview.
A club for nostalgists
But Ramelow himself has repeatedly stressed that his party is not a representative of the East German political thought.
"My party isn't a club of nostalgists who want to resurrect East Germany," Ramelow has been quoted in several European media outlets.
Also, the coalition contract, signed by the three parties in the “red-red-green” arrangement, includes a clear statement that the East German DDR was a "state of injustice."
In his opening speech to the parliament in Erfurt Friday, he said: ”In the latest days I have often been told, that today would be a historic moment, but it's not. The historic moment was exactly 25 years ago, here in Erfurt, as the men and women of the city peacefully occupied important authorities offices and started the procedure that makes me possible to stand here today.”
He was referring to the events of December 1989, when the Erfurt State Security District Headquarters was occupied, as the first of a series of similar occupations during the last weeks of the oppressive DDR regime.
Asking for forgiveness
Also, Ramelow directly addressed the victims of the East German regime and asked for forgiveness.
The fear of the “return of the communists” is an exaggeration, says head of the German Social Democratic Party, or the SPD, Sigmar Gabriel to Frankfurter Allmeneine Zeitung Friday, calling the demonstrations in front of the Thuringian parliament hysteric.
“It is nonsense to act as if Bodo Ramelow, elected on Friday, now intends to reinstall DDR-Socialism”, Gabriel said.
Whether this new left-wing government in Thuringia is a sign of a rise of the radical left, or proof that the left party has gotten its act together and now can cooperate politically, remains open for discussion.
But the reawakening of old grievances in Thuringia seems to be a fact. As is the end of a 24-year reign over Thuringia by Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats party, or the CDU.
Cold War paranoia
"The Cold War paranoia breaking out in Thuringia is bizarre, you get a feeling it's a state bordering Russia and that Soviet tanks now stand ready to roll in," said Gero Neugebauer, political scientist at Berlin's Free University, told Reuters.
"The reality is that Die Linke taking control of a state is a big step toward more German unity," he added.
Former editor-in-chief at the Thuringer Allgemeinen Sergej Lochthofen told German newspaper Taz.de Friday that he expects normal business.
“Come Monday, the people of Thuringia will get back to their normal business and stick with the prime minister that they've got,” he said.
Up till now, Thuringia has been governed by coalitions dominated by the CDU. Die Linke has also been represented in other regional governments in Germany, but has never been in a position to lead one.
Pariah-like status
At a national German level, it is now being discussed whether the Thuringian “red-red-green” coalition model can be seen as “a possible change of politics” within Die Linke, which until now has almost a pariah-like status in the eyes of many mainstream German politicians.
Die Linke is historically rooted in the Marxist–Leninist “Socialist Unity Party of Germany” that ruled former East Germany. But though the party has reorganized and changed its name, it is still fighting to shake its past as successor to East Germany's communist party.
At the last general elections in Germany in 2013, Die Linke got 8.6 per cent of the votes, but in five of the 16 German federal states, mostly in the former East Germany, the support from the voters lies above 20 percent, topping with the recent result in Thuringia of 28.2 percent of the votes.
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