Democratic Left (1967)

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Poster for the state elections in 1968

The Democratic Left (DL) was an electoral party founded in 1967 , in which former members of the KPD, which had been banned since 1956 , and left critics of the grand coalition , which had ruled since 1966, came together. The party, which is almost exclusively active in Baden-Württemberg, failed in the state election in 1968 with 2.3 percent of the five percent hurdle and dissolved in 1970.

history

Initiatives for a collection movement by non-social democratic leftists came from a joint conference of the Socialist Federation and the Socialist German Student Union (SDS) held at the end of 1966 . The goals were partly to found a new party, partly to simply participate in elections. An organizational summary of the extra-parliamentary opposition to the emergency legislation was also sought. In the run-up to the state elections in 1968, the illegal KPD proposed a broader alliance to the German Peace Union (DFU), which it supported , in order to increase the chances of success in the election. The Association for Peace and Social Security (VFS) ran for the state elections in 1960 , and several former KPD members ran for it. The VFS received 0.5% of the vote; the 1964 candidate DFU had achieved 1.4%.

The founding of the Democratic Left was initiated by “workers' committees” that had formed in Stuttgart and Mannheim and consisted mainly of trade unionists who were dissatisfied with the SPD . Heinz Seeger , DFU state chairman in Baden-Württemberg, explained before the founding congress that they wanted to offer broad sections of the electorate "from Protestant pastors to communist works councils" an alternative to the grand coalition. 1100 people took part in the founding congress of the Democratic Left on November 22, 1967 in Stuttgart, 650 of whom joined the party. The party chairman was Eugen Eberle , who was elected to the municipal council of Stuttgart for the KPD in 1947 and was re-elected as a non-party after the party was banned. August Locherer , who had worked for the KPD since 1947 and later for the DFU in the Mannheim municipal council, and Heinz Laufer , a multiple German athletics champion who had previously resigned from the SPD , were deputy chairmen .

Programmatically, the Democratic Left was more focused on the interests of wage earners than the DFU. Concrete economic and socio-political measures were requested from the state government. In addition, the Democratic Left advocated a new Ostpolitik as well as the recognition of the GDR and opposed the draft emergency laws and the NPD, which was assessed as neo-Nazi .

In the run-up to the state elections, the party put up two applicants in all 70 constituencies, almost half of whom were former KPD members. The influence of the KPD led to controversies within the DFU, as a result of which the deputy chairman of the DFU resigned; In other left-wing groups, too, this was taken as an indication that the KPD did not want to join an alliance of all lefts without claiming leadership. The Democratic Left clearly rejected a delegates' conference of the SDS at the end of March 1968 and decided to establish the association outside the parliament. The Stuttgart left- wing socialist Fritz Lamm , who was involved in preparatory meetings, considered the establishment of a party to be hopeless, since large parts of the workforce in Baden-Württemberg were relatively saturated and largely depoliticized. For Lamm, the typical SPD voter was comparable to a church member, "who stays with it, even if he no longer believes in God - and often scolds the priests."

The Democratic Left came up against sharp criticism in the SPD: Herbert Wehner called the founding of the party the "somewhat remote-controlled attempt" to weaken the SPD, which was approved by the SED Politburo . Eugen Loderer , DGB chairman in Baden-Württemberg and deputy state chairman of the SPD, accused the Democratic Left that it was dividing the labor movement and that it could create a situation similar to that before the National Socialist “ seizure of power ” in 1933.

The state elections on April 28, 1968 were disappointing for the Democratic Left: With 2.3 percent, the party failed at the five percent hurdle. Only in a total of five Stuttgart and Mannheim constituencies did more than five percent of voters vote for the Democratic Left. At the same time, the SPD lost 8.3% of the vote; the NPD achieved its best result in a state election to date with 9.8%.

After the election, the Democratic Left decided to run in the local elections in Baden-Württemberg in autumn 1968 . There were only candidacies in individual parishes; Common lists from the Democratic Left, the German Peace Union and non-party members were more common. In the local elections in Hesse in October 1968 , a democratic left ran in one municipality and two districts without winning seats.

For the 1969 Bundestag election, the Democratic Progress Campaign, an electoral alliance comparable to the Democratic Left, in which the German Communist Party (DKP), founded in September 1968, participated. A majority of the board of the Democratic Left decided in June 1970 to dissolve the party.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Heimann, German Communist Party , p. 945.
  2. ↑ a b Quoted in: Election alliance even before the party was founded. DFU and Democratic Left form “Popular Front Against Grand Coalition.” ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.medienarchiv68.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 799 kB) In: Die Welt , 272/1967 (November 21, 1967), p. 6.
  3. ↑ Walter Kuppel: "Throw the coalition government car against." "Democratic Left" held founding congress in Stuttgart. In: Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung , November 23, 1967. Printed in: Peter Grohmann (Ed.): Eugen Eberle, Wort und Tat. Speeches, essays and initiatives by Eugen Eberle from 1948–84. Grohmann, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-927340-01-4 , p. 28.
  4. ↑ Herbert Lazar: You can choose left again. In: Die Zeit 47/1967 (November 22, 1967)
  5. ^ A b Heimann, German Communist Party , p. 946.
  6. ↑ Michael Benz: The uncomfortable warrior Fritz Lamm. Jew, left-wing socialist, emigrant 1911–1977. A political biography. Klartext, Essen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89861-660-7 , p. 297.
  7. ↑ Benz, Fritz Lamm , p. 296 f.
  8. ↑ Wehner's interview on Swiss television, quoted in Heimann, German Communist Party , p. 946.
  9. ^ Heimann: German Communist Party , p. 947.
  10. ↑ Grohmann, Eberle , p. 30.