Lëtzebuerger Sozialistesch Aarbechterpartei

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Lëtzebuerger Sozialistesch Aarbechterpartei
Parti ouvrier socialiste luxembourgeois
Luxembourg Socialist Workers' Party
Party leader Yves Cruchten
Secretary General Tom boys
vice-chairman Dan Biancalana ,
Paulette Lenert
Group President Georges Engel
Treasurer Christine Schweich
founding January 1902
Headquarters 68, rue de Gasperich
1617 Luxembourg
Youth organization JSL
Alignment Social democracy
Colours) red
Parliament seats
10/60
International connections Progressive Alliance
Socialist International
MEPs
1/6
European party SPE
EP Group S&D
Website www.lsap.lu

The Lëtzebuerger Sozialistesch Aarbechterpartei ( German  Luxemburger Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei , French Parti ouvrier socialiste luxembourgeois ), LSAP for short , is a social democratic party in Luxembourg . Since the 2013 chamber elections, it has formed a three-party coalition with the Democratic Party (DP) and the Greens . Etienne Schneider is Vice Prime Minister, Minister of Health and Economics, Foreign Minister the former party president and Vice Prime Minister Jean Asselborn. The post of party chairman has been held by Member of Parliament Georges Engel since March 2020.

organization structure

The statutes of the party, as resolved on March 26, 2017, form the legal basis. They replace the previous version from 1991, which has been modified several times. The highest body is the state congress, which is convened at least once a year in the first quarter.

Sections and Districts

The lower organizational level is made up of the sections which, as local associations, include party members from one or more parishes and which are grouped into four districts (north, east, south and center).

  • District North with 6 sections, President is Tina Koch.
  • East district with 7 sections, President is Mike Hagen.
  • South district with 21 sections, President is Simone Asselborn-Bintz .
  • District center with 15 sections, President is Cécile Hemmen .

Sub-organizations

There are three sub-organizations within the LSAP:

  • The Socialist Women (FS) of the female party members; The president is Sylvie Jansa.
  • The Socialist Youth (JSL). President is Georges Sold.
  • The Gemengeforum (GF) for municipal officials and elected officials; The president is Tom Junge, the mayor of Roeser .

Party executive

The party leadership consists of a 21-member board with 15 elected at a party congress (last on January 22, 2019) and 6 other members ex officio :

  • The five-person Presidium, consisting of President Franz Fayot , Vice President Paulette Lenert , Vice President Dan Biancalana , General Secretary Tom Junge and General Treasurer Christine Schweich.
  • Ten other board members, half women and half men: Claudia Dall'Agnol , Sandie Lahure, Danielle Becker-Bauer, Nathalie Schmit and Aurore Rössler as well as Marc Angel , Régis Moes , Carlo Feiereisen, Jean-François Wirtz and Max Leners.
  • The chairman of the four districts.
  • The chairman of the Socialist Women and the Socialist Youth

Other bodies

The five-member advisory board is made up of former officials and mandate holders and acts as an upper disciplinary body, which deals with violations by members of the statutes and principles and can decide on penalties up to and including exclusion from the party. Members are Ginette Jones, Jean-Pierre Klein , Roger Negri , Jacqueline Reiter and Camille Weiler .

The eleven-member control commission monitors the activities of all party bodies. It includes seven members elected by the state congress, plus one from each of the districts who have to be board members there. It also forms the electoral commission for the election of the top candidates for the chamber and European elections .

Party presidents since 1945

Logo of the youth organization JSL

Affiliate foundations

Two foundations are close to the LSAP , both of which are named after previous chairmen:

  • The Robert-Krieps-Stiftung promotes civic and political education and supports research and debates on political, social and cultural topics.
  • The Lydie Schmit Foundation preserves the memory of the co-founder of the Socialist Women . It awards scholarships to students from socially disadvantaged families.

history

prehistory

As early as the 19th century, various approaches had led to the improvement of the living and working conditions of the working population. But these came from outside Parliament. The reason for this was the census voting system that existed at the time , which restricted eligibility to financially well-off people. The first politician who made these concerns heard in the Chamber and thus also represented socialist ideas was the industrialist Caspar Mathias Spoo , who was elected there in 1896 . The doctor Michel Welter was added in 1897 and the lawyer Xavier Brasseur in 1901 . In 1902 the group, who called themselves Democrats , grew to five MPs with the lawyers Jean-Jacques Diderich and Léon Metzler . They were all elected in the canton of Esch and benefited on the one hand from a lowering of the census, on the other hand from the discovery of new minette deposits that triggered the development of the area into an industrial core region and the associated increase in population.

Founding of the predecessor party and first successes

The party regards 26 January 1902 as the founding date of the LSAP, when the Social Democratic Association for Luxembourg and the surrounding area was founded in the capital, according to the Escher Journal . Among the initiators, around half a dozen, were, according to the cutler and later MP Jacques Thilmany , himself, Welter, a tailor, two shoemakers and two glove makers . Thilmany in particular stood out as secretary by inspiring the workforce for both union and political involvement. As a result, further social democratic associations emerged, still in 1902 in Petingen , Tetingen and Schifflingen , in 1903 in Esch and Rodingen . In 1903 the Social Democratic Party was founded , which a large part of the existing clubs joined as a local group. She joined the Second International without becoming very active there. After a short time, at the latest in 1905, the Marxist left wing, critical of parliamentary representation and more interested in grassroots work , split up and formed the Social Democratic Workers' Party , but rejoined the parent party in 1912. With Jean Schortgen , a worker was elected to the chamber for the first time in 1915.

There the Democrats formed a left bloc with the Liberal League to support Prime Minister Paul Eyschen's policy against the Catholic-Conservative representatives. Common goals were to reduce the influence of the Catholic Church , nationalize the school system, abolish school fees, introduce teaching of children in Luxembourgish and finally reform the electoral system. During the First World War there were first government participations, first from March 1915 with Ernest Leclère under Eyschen and with Welter and later again with Leclère under Victor Thorn . A motion tabled by the Social Democrats in July 1917 to introduce universal suffrage was successful, even if it took until 1919 to implement it.

The results achieved brought few tangible advantages for the workers, and the left bloc disintegrated after the common goals had been achieved. Party life had largely fallen asleep since the beginning of the war. In this situation, there were attempts at revitalization and restructuring in the second half of 1917, and the parliamentary group became more closely linked to the now renamed Socialist Party .

Interwar period

Immediately after the withdrawal of the German troops in November 1918, a council was formed , but it was unable to establish itself. The country got into trouble because the economic ties with the German Empire had to be broken, which also meant that an important sales market collapsed. On January 19, 1919, workers from the Minette area stormed the chamber. A committee consisting of liberals and socialists proclaimed the republic, but was disbanded by the French occupation forces. Efforts arose to join the Grand Duchy to France or Belgium. At the double referendum of September 1919 , no unified position had emerged within the party. In this mood, the first parliamentary elections under the new law took place on October 26, 1919. The conservative right-wing party of Émile Reuter was able to secure an absolute majority, among the nine socialist MPs, Marguerite Thomas-Clement, was the first woman to be elected to the chamber.

Political developments in the rest of Europe also had an impact on the party. A vote in early January 1921 to join the Third International turned out to be negative , despite the courtship of Clara Zetkin who was present , as this would have meant the subordination of the independent unions to the party. The defeated wing immediately split off as the Communist Party of Luxembourg (KPL).

In 1924 there was another restructuring. The prerequisite for membership in the party was now also membership of a free, i.e. non-denominational, union and in the local cooperative . It now saw itself as a class party , which was reflected in the new name of the Labor Party . The party hardly profited from the global economic crisis that began at the end of the 1920s , as the majority of workers who were in the process of commuting or had moved from other countries were laid off. The KPL, on the other hand, benefited from the associated radicalization, which in 1934 was able to send a member of the Chamber, Zénon Bernard, for the first time. Only after Joseph Bech had failed in the referendum of June of that year with the anti-communist “muzzle law” which he had drafted and passed by the Chamber in April 1937 and then resigned, did his successor Pierre Dupong participate in government from November 1937 Workers' party in the form of Pierre Krier and René Blum . After the occupation by troops of the German Reich, on September 1, 1940, all parties in the CDZ area were dissolved and their assets confiscated. Krier and Victor Bodson , who had succeeded Blum as ministers in 1940, were members of the government in exile in Portugal, Canada and London . After their return in September 1944, the socialists also remained involved in the following cabinet of national unity, but left, as did the KPL, due to differences in content in March 1947.

From 1946 as LSAP

The reconstruction of the party was initially dominated by the question of whether they re-class party, as before, be wanted (Pierre and Antoine Krier , Nicolas Biever ) or as michel rasquin advocated following the example of the French and British sister parties to a left people 's party should develop. A compromise found in 1946 was also reflected in a renewed renaming, the name of the Luxembourg Socialist Workers' Party to this day. As part of the Luxembourg consensus democracy , she has since been involved in numerous governments where she formed coalitions with the conservative CSV or the liberal DP . The party has been denied the post of prime minister until today, as the only one of the three. After the chamber election in 1951 , the LSAP returned to the cabinet table, again under Dupong and with Bodson, Biever and Rasquin.

The Social Democratic Party split off in 1971

At the end of the 1960s there were disagreements within the LSAP. The trigger was a shift to the left in the party, which after the 1968 chamber election led to the failure of the coalition talks with the CSV and thus to the exit from the government, as well as the question of how to deal with the KPL at the local level. After the publication of a paper by the previous Minister of Construction and Transport, Albert Bousser, in February 1969, and taking up the historical name, an internal group of socially liberal , partly anti-communist-oriented members, the Social Democratic Convention, emerged . After this was declared illegal at the end of 1970, the six Chamber Members Henry Cravatte , Romain Fandel , Georges Hurt , Antoine Krier, Astrid Lulling and Roger Schleimer formed an independent parliamentary group in early 1971. In March 1971 the Social Democratic Party (SdP) was founded, the LSAP lost around 15 percent of its members as a result of this development. Headed by Cravatte and later by the former LSAP vice-vice president Fernand Georges , the SdP was able to win five mandates in the 1974 chamber election , but was not able to establish itself permanently. It stopped its political activities in 1983 and dissolved in 1984. By then, its members had withdrawn from active politics, had returned to the parent party or had joined the DP or the CSV.

Development after 1972

Although the left wing under Robert Krieps and Jacques Poos had triumphed in the dispute over direction, the LSAP subsequently reoriented. The program passed in Wormeldingen in 1972 is considered the party's “ Bad Godesberg ”. After the 1974 election, the party returned to government, now in a coalition led by Gaston Thorn from the DP. Here, for example, it was able to enforce the reintroduction of the automatic adjustments of collectively agreed wages to the inflation rate, which had been abolished by the previous cabinet. In the opposition from 1979 onwards, in the 1984 chamber elections the LSAP regained the strength of 1968, with 33.6 percent of the votes and 21 mandates it has not reached the levels since then.

Between 1984 and 1999 and between 2004 and 2013 the LSAP sat at the cabinet table as a junior partner of the CSV under Jacques Santer and later Jean-Claude Juncker . A secret service affair broke the coalition in the summer of 2013. The resulting new elections led to the formation of a “ Gambia coalition ” consisting of the LSAP, DP and the Greens . Although the strongest of the three coalition partners in terms of votes, the LSAP left the post of prime minister to Xavier Bettel of the DP. After the 2018 chamber election , the government alliance was renewed.

Although the party was able to implement a number of demands in the many years of its participation in government, mainly in the social-political area, this was honored less and less by the electorate. In the 2018 election, the LSAP reached a temporary low with only 17.6 percent of the vote and ten mandates won. Part of the responsibility for this creeping decline is the successive emergence of new left-wing parties from the 1980s, which also claim to pursue progressive politics . The Greens, Die Linke and, for the first time, the Pirate Party with a total of 13 seats were able to win parliamentary seats in 2018 . A group of ten more or less young politicians, including the newly elected party chairman Franz Fayot in January 2019, as well as Taina Bofferding , Tess Burton and Claudia Dall'Agnol , called for the party's personnel to be repositioned and its profile to be sharpened due to developments.

Election results

Chamber elections (since 1945)

Note: The elections of 1948 and 1951 were partial renewal elections in which only seats in two of the country's four electoral districts were reassigned. The proportion of votes is therefore not comparable with the values ​​of the other years. The total number of seats is given after the election, including the seats that were not available for election.

year Share of votes rank Seats Government division?
1945 23.4% 2. 11 of 51 All party government
1948 37.8% 1. 15 of 51 opposition
1951 33.8% 2. 19 of 52 opposition
1954 35.1% 2. 17 of 52 Bech-Bodson
1959 34.9% 3. 11 of 52 opposition
1964 37.7% 1. 21 of 56 Werner Cravatte
1968 32.3% 2. 18 of 56 opposition
1974 29.2% 2. 17 of 59 Thorn-Vouel-Berg
1979 24.3% 2. 14 of 59 opposition
1984 33.6% 2. 21 of 64 Santer Poos I.
1989 26.2% 2. 18 of 60 Santer-Poos II
1994 25.4% 2. 17 of 60 Santer-Poos III / Juncker-Poos
1999 22.4% 3. 13 of 60 opposition
2004 23.4% 2. 14 of 60 Juncker-Asselborn I.
2009 21.6% 2. 13 of 60 Juncker-Asselborn II
2013 20.2% 2. 13 of 60 Beggar tailor
2018 17.6% 3. 10 of 60 Bettel-Schneider-Braz

European elections

year Share of votes Parliament seats
1979 21.6% 1
1984 29.9% 2
1989 25.4% 2
1994 24.8% 2
1999 23.6% 2
2004 22.1% 1
2009 19.4% 1
2014 11.7% 1
2019 12.2% 1

literature

  • Fayot, Ben: Socialism in Luxembourg. From the beginning to 1940 . Luxembourg 1979. Digitized on the website of the Lydie Schmit Foundation, PDF file, 145 MB
  • Fayot. Ben: Socialism in Luxembourg. From 1940 to the beginning of the eighties . Rsch 1989. Digitized on the Lydie Schmit Foundation website, PDF file, 114 MB
  • 100 Joer socialists at the Gemeng Käl-Téiteng . Publication series of the LSAP local branch Kayl-Taiteng , volume 23, 2003. Detailed description of the history of the entire party with special consideration of the politics in the community on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the local branch. Digital version on the Lydie Schmit Foundation website, PDF file, 29 MB
  • Patrick Dumont, Fernand Fehlen, Philippe Poirier: Party system, political parties and elections. In: Wolfgang H. Lorig, Mario Hirsch (ed.): The Luxembourg political system: An introduction , Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-14182-4 , section on the LSAP, pp. 180-182.

Web links

Commons : Lëtzebuerger Sozialistesch Aarbechterpartei  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tina Koch takes over the helm of LSAP North. Tageblatt , February 3, 2019, accessed on February 7, 2019.
  2. ^ Congress in Remich: LSAP East licks its wounds. Tageblatt, February 27, 2019, accessed on September 17, 2019.
  3. ↑ LSAP relies on cooperation and internal party dialogue - Franz Fayot new party president. LSAP press release of January 23, 2019 on its website, accessed on February 3, 2019.
  4. ↑ "An important day for the LSAP" Lëtzebuerger Journal , January 22, 2019, accessed on February 4, 2019.
  5. ^ "An important day for the LSAP" Lëtzebuerger Journal , January 22, 2019, accessed on September 16, 2019.

Coordinates: 49 ° 35 ′ 35 ″  N , 6 ° 7 ′ 13 ″  E