Former Communists Resurgent in Berlin =========================== Party Tries to Widen Appeal on National Stage Berlin mayoral nominee Gregor Gysi, a former Communist Party member, addresses a meeting of its successor, the Party of Democratic Socialism. (Wolfgang Kumm - AFP) By Peter Finn Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, August 1, 2001 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12387-2001Jul31.html BERLIN, July 31 -- For more than a decade, the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to East Germany's Communist Party, has been shunned by the German establishment as an eastern pariah with a suspect pedigree and Stalinist supporters. But the party that some Germans still blame for the Berlin Wall may now be about to enter the government of this once-divided city. The immediate cause is the recent collapse of the "grand coalition" of the country's two main parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, that governed Berlin for a decade. With them no longer willing to cooperate, the PDS sees a chance to form a coalition with the Social Democrats after October elections and enter the government of the Berlin city-state. But media savvy and a charismatic candidate for mayor have also helped the party's new standing. And the party is laying plans to become a force in national politics after the October vote. In Berlin, it could get at least 20 percent of the vote, some forecasts show. Its candidate for mayor, Gregor Gysi, a witty and telegenic former member of the old Communist Party, could even top the balloting, some analysts say. Buoyed by hip advertising and Gysi's splendid oratory, the PDS plans to capitalize on its hard-core support in the old East Berlin, where it commands up to 40 percent of the vote. But to widen its appeal, the party is also addressing its legacy. It recently condemned the construction of the Berlin Wall, which went up 40 years ago this month. An "injustice," the party called the Wall, taking another uncertain step toward the kind of democratic respectability that its young, modernizing leadership craves and its rank and file of former functionaries frowns upon. The western-dominated political establishment harrumphed that the party hadn't apologized for the division of Germany and still contends it is an untrustworthy interloper from the east -- "plain old communists with nothing but secret-police style scorn for an open society," as a writer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper put it. But analysts tend to agree the PDS can no longer be dismissed. Gysi is its increasingly visible spokesman. "It is important for the former West Berliners to be confronted not with an anonymous PDS, but instead with a face that they know," he said in an interview. "They can say that there is no reason for their fears, he will not do anything undemocratic, nothing intolerant, nothing non-liberal," he said, referring to himself. "He is not at all a person who stands for dictatorships." Not everyone is convinced. Gysi "is the only man I know who could open a flourishing fruit stand with a single rotten apple," said Arnulf Bahring, a historian, in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, adding that Gysi may also be Germany's "greatest natural political talent." With Berlin as a base, the party wants to expand. "We made the clear decision that we do not want to remain a regional party," Gabriele Zimmer, the party leader, said in an interview. "We want to be a socialist party, left of the [Social Democrats], in the entire Federal Republic." That would be a contrast with other former Communist parties of Eastern Europe, which have tended to take more moderate positions. Since the country's reunification in 1990, the party has proved remarkably resilient as a regional force in the east, practicing masterful ward politics and stoking the resentments of easterners who feel their country was taken over by West Germany, not reunited with it. But as the PDS looks west, it is struggling to define itself in a way that satisfies its core eastern constituency and placates those western voters who think it might "rebuild the Wall," as Zimmer put it. "The more the Social Democrats move into the middle, the more space is created for the reforming PDS to succeed," said Gert-Joachim Glaessner, a professor at Berlin's Humboldt University. The party leadership wants to take a place in the mainstream of European socialism, combining anti- corporate rhetoric, strong state control and pacifism. Alone among parties in the national parliament, for instance, the PDS opposed the NATO intervention in Kosovo. Glaessner noted that 10 years ago it was verboten among all the major parties to countenance power-sharing with the PDS. But it was accepted first at a municipal level, then in eastern states, and now, probably, in Berlin. Currently, the Social Democrats rule it out at the national level, but Glaessner described that position as "never, ever, ever -- in the next 10 years." The Greens, he noted, were once regarded as extremists but now, dominated by pragmatists, comfortably govern in a national coalition with the Social Democrats. The PDS still faces a struggle between its realists and ideologues. Of the 84,000 members, at least 60 percent are former members of the Socialist Unity Party -- as the communist organization was formally known -- that ruled East Germany in the Soviet era. And they are deeply skeptical of the leadership's comments on the Wall, its acceptance of a mixed economy in the last party platform and its desire to share power with the Social Democrats. "It's very clear that [the PDS should be] an anti- capitalist party and separate itself from capitalist ideology," Sahra Wagenknecht, leader of the Communist Platform, a party faction, said in an interview. "If the PDS becomes less socialist, then we will no longer be necessary as a party," said Wagenknecht, the only member of the executive committee to vote against the declaration condemning the Wall. Many Germans continue to question the party's democratic credentials because of the existence of Communist Platform. The party, like Germany's neo-Nazis, is monitored by the federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which contends that hard-line Marxists riddle all the party's internal organs. "All in all," said the federal agency in its most recent report on the PDS, the party's "relationship with the free democratic order remains ambivalent." "I consider it to be rubbish," Gysi said of the report. But other members of the party acknowledge that there is an enduring, unreconstructed Marxist strain within the PDS. "The PDS is a party with many faces," said Benjamin Hoff, the PDS spokesman on science and technology in the Berlin Senate. "Inside the PDS, I fight against traditional Stalinist members. For me, it is the task of the political left to provide people with opportunities to become involved in the market. We don't eat little children; we have very good positions." And an exasperated Zimmer said the party executive had been struggling to rein in some student radicals "who think that at every local election, for example, the revolution needs to break out." The prospect of the PDS governing in Berlin has galvanized the right. Former chancellor Helmut Kohl said he would campaign "massively" to warn residents of the capital of the "appalling scandal" that would result from the descendants of an authoritarian regime sharing in political power. Kohl's party, the Christian Democrats, quietly told him to cool his heels, fearing that an attack by the former chancellor, who has been tarnished by a party funding scandal, would only be a boon for the PDS. "Helmut Kohl in Berlin is a wonderful gift from the Christian Democratic Union to the PDS and we say 'Thank you,' " Hoff said. Indeed, Hoff senses that the party's ghosts have already been exorcised for many in Berlin. At almost exactly the moment his party executive committee was discussing the Berlin Wall, Hoff was meeting with Peter Gaehtgens, president of the Free University, one of the great symbols of West Berlin. Gaehtgens confirmed that he had invited Hoff to his office. The two amiably discussed PDS policies and how they would affect the university, Hoff said, and "we never discussed the past." Special correspondent Shannon Smiley contributed to this report. __________________________________________________
