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NEWS & LETTERS, October 2002
OUR LIFE AND TIMES
German elections hold off the Right
Germany's Social Democrat-Green coalition narrowly survived
a challenge from conservatives to win a second term, Sept. 22. This victory by
the reformist Left, along with a more decisive one in Sweden a few weeks before,
surprised pundits who had predicted that the Right would repeat its earlier wins
in France and the Netherlands. This sense of surprise was deepened by the fact that
Germany's Gerhard Schroeder ran to the Left, here taking a different tack from
Tony Blair's Labor Party, or the defeated Lionel Jospin in France. Most
dramatically, Schroeder stood up against the Bush administration's drive to war
in Iraq. This enraged Washington, but as France's leading newspaper commented: "At the end of August, the prime minister seized the
opportunity to put himself forward as the only major European ally to oppose the
U.S. In a country traumatized by Nazi warmongering and the tensions of the Cold
War period, Gerhard Schroeder knew how to tap the support of more than half the
population"(LE MONDE, Sept. 23, 2002). In fact, polls show that the vast majority of the German people oppose war over Iraq. This, despite an unemployment rate of 10%, gave Schroeder and his Green allies a narrow victory. |
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