Oh, so that is when a a former mister of finance and party leader of the SPD does form a party and gets some 8.5% of the popular vote - protesters and radicals.
The Linkspartei does not block anything for the SPD. If the SPD wants things done in their way, they will just have to compromise - that is what the voters did ask for. Welcome to politics. Moon of Alabama
No more backing of the:
Hartz IV reform was essentially to put the former splitted long term unemployment benefit and social welfare together into one administrative basket. That is arguable a good step if it is not used at the same time to lower benfits as it has happened. I am sure The Left can live with administrative shift and the discussion is about benefit level. So what is bad with that?
"Agenda 2010" - well Schröder did lose a lot of votes to the left so the electorate will has been expressed and should to some degree be followed. I am sure Schröders own party will see this and that big basket of Agenda 2010 will be opened anyway to scrutinize what is inside. Some items may get tossed out, others in.
Altogether this IS about compromising. What do you expect The Left to do? Demand nothing? They have to put up some points and more important are probably the points they didn´t make.
Did they demand:
That is arguable a good step if it is not used at the same time to lower benfits as it has happened. I am sure The Left can live with administrative shift and the discussion is about benefit level. So what is bad with that?
Compared to the US the Germans get benefits that an American can only dream of. If I hear on my visits home about what kind of small sacrifices, the Germans have to make after Hartz IV, and what tiny losses in benefits or increases in fees gets them all up in arms, my jaws just drop down. In the overall picture the sacrifices the Germans are asked to make to pay for their social safety net are peanuts. They are certainly not worth to put up with creating political instability. It's certainly the Linkspartei who has some compromising to offer, I guess. But I am not sure.
As for soldiers in Afghanistan. I guess in the long run Germans will be expected to pay their share of sacrifices too.
I don't know what is behind Agenda 2010. All I know is that the Germans are very spoiled with their social safety net and small reforms and sacrifices should rather be made to be able to pay for keeping the whole net working, even if in general the benefits might be slightly less. I bet they will be still much higher than the US levels or the ones of most other European countries.
Germans are known in the US to be pompous, whining, spoiled and rude and rather lazy. Although I don't buy too much into that kind of thinking, there is a grain of truth in it. Most Germans might have a boring, but very safe life and are very well off.
Now of course that's not true for the Neue Laender. How many people voted for the Linkspartei in the Neue Laender? In how far is the Linkspartei and the PDS really the same?
This whining about paying some tuition (a couple of hundred dollars per year) for example is getting on my nerves. One can pay such a thing to keep the overall goal of free and inexpensive higher education costs in the long run. As long you don't end up making it more or less impossible for larger parts of the population at all to pay for their education, which is not the case if you just increase tuition from 0.00 Euro per year to may be 500.00 Euro per year. These are all very tiny amounts of money to jeopardize political stability for. I would always want the further left to compromise towards the center. Are they doing that?
On the other hand I am upset if the Green Party starts to compromise and accepts a coalition with the CDU. There was nothing in the agenda of the Green Party that could remotely be interpreted as being compromisable with the CDU. That would be an outright betrayal. Schily is right in warning the Green Party to do that.
Egon Bahr suggested that the SPD/Green should govern in a minority government. I haven't understood how that would work yet.
The level of benefits in the US is your problem, not ours.
Why do Germans need to accept a reduction in benefits? Why should they compromise with corporate capitalists?
why should the poor accept lower benefits?
why should students agree to pay tution at all?
why should soldiers agree to get killed in Afganistan?
why should Germans accept a US level of manipulation, tax reductions for a few already rich folks and benefit reductions for a lot already poor folk?
Just because your country is fucked up we do not need to screw our fellow citizens
(I am a quite rich, well off guy now who did even get some lower taxes through Schroeders rule - I also did get a free University education before I was able to make some money, an Army stint NOT fighting an irrelevant, hopeless war in Afganistan - and my current girlfriend did have to live on a borderline social benefit level quite some years raising her kids before we knew each other.)
So WTF are you arguing for? You may be screwed in your system, but to argue that Germans should be screwed too because you are is an extension I can not credit in any way. Moon of Alabama
Because the German higher education system is massively underfunded. Also I see no reason why the state should provide subsidies to the wealthy and upper middle class. That's why I think their should means-tested tuition in Germany.
Because fighting in a UN approved war of self-defense after an attack on an ally is the right thing to do.
The Germans are deciding how to distribute the money generated by their economy. The US does the same.
The US prefers to concentrate the proceeds in the hands of a few lucky people. Germany prefers to spread it around. It's not a present being given to the German people, it's the German people deciding how to spend their own fucking money.
Enough propaganda.
Others already replied strongly enough to this especially the comparison part, I'll add one thing.
On late Sunday evening, before the final results came in, on the (private) RTL television channel, there was the SPIEGEL TV report. Most of the show was the TV crew strolling around in Berlin in the last 24 hours before election, asking all kinds of people about the election. Some was grotesque, some was laughable (like some disco kids), but one was sobering and depressing.
That one was with a jobless and (I didn't catch the beginning, but apparently) incapacitated father, who was directly hit by the Harz IV cuts. He explained, falling into tears in the process, that it is really bad, but not as bad as it will be in a few years: because now, he and the other people hit like him still can get on with their daily lifes by selling off their properties - TV, furniture etc. But when they sold off everything, it's over.
You seem new(ly active) on Eurotrib so you may not know me, so hereby I tell you that I am a Hungarian who lived for two years in Germany, but due to several factors (among them: apatriotism, environmentalism, complete disenchantment with each of the two small and two large parties in the Hungarian parliament - where the formation of a two-party system centrists seem to desire is far progressed -, strong affinity to some policies/parties/persons in German politics, intention to one day move there or to Austria), continued to keep a very close eye on German politics. In the German political landscape, I am most close to the Greens but second closest to the Left Party, but not until this clip did I realise what these 'reforms' mean in practice. (Even tough we already had that stuff here in Hungary and I can see the results.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
