At any rate, this Sommertheater was continued with the reply from the Left Party:

But this Wednesday, Erwin Huber upped the ante:

If Huber wants to equate these, he should point to examples of Left Party people hanging capitalists on lampposts or calling for the deportation of all brokers.

I don't like this talk at all. I know and am disgusted by the rhetoric of equating hard-left and far-right from two decades ago, when I was a foreigner in Germany in the Kohl era, at a time the Red Army Faction (known in English under the misnomer "Baader-Meinhof Gang") was fading away but skinheads and minor far-right parties were ever more active in attacking immigrants.

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The Bavarian campaign connects to events in other German states.

In Hessen, more than half a year after the elections, local SPD leader Andrea Ypsilanti seems on the verge of achieving her goal, an SPD-Greens miority government with Left Party outside support: the Hessen Left Party voted to support the constellation, and so did the Hessen SPD party basis yesterday.

These developments resurrected the strong criticisms towards the SPD from the right (and its own right wing), including Merkel in her first let's-help-the-CSU campaign speech in Bavaria. I should not keep undisclosed that in recent polls, a majority of Germans still reject Ypsilanti's move, and both the Hessen SPD and Ypsilanti suffered in polls after the months-long SPD tearing-itself-apart.

Meanwhile in the small state of Saarland (a coal-mining region which used to be contested by France, and which was a rock-solid SPD base until the recent takeover by the CDU), where elections will be held in one year, the latest poll showed the Left Party overtaking the SPD:

Those are numbers like in East German states - and would force West German politicians to re-think relations with the Left Party much stronger than the Hessen situation. I note the Left Party gained from the Greens, too, pushing them down to the 5% limit - I hope not under.

The backstory is: Saarland was the base of current Left Party co-leader Oskar Lafontaine, when he was still in the SPD (he was party leader when Schröder became chancellor, with whom he couldn't get along and left). With the SPD losing to the CDU since 1999, a significant part of the base and voters went over to Red Oskar's new party.

In turning opinion poll results into actual votes, a problem might be Lafontaine himself. He seems to view himself as a great thinker, has a certain vanity and a tendency to rush into rhetorical exchanges without much thinking, all of which his opponents like to exploit. Say recently, comments about the union of the Soviet Zone Communist and Social Democrat parties after WWII.

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So, where is Germany heading, one year before federal elections? Who knows. The story of the SPD's slow-motion self-destruction was (temporarily?) interrupted by some 'good news': foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier overtook Merkel in opinion polls, Franz "locusts" Müntefering returned from political retirement to broad cheers from the media, and in the latest federal poll (the one by Infratest Dimap), there is slight improvement.