“Zeitgeist” is a Germany word. Dr. Martin Luther King used it to explain why the modern U.S. civil rights movement arose when it did. Webster says it means the “taste and outlook of a period: the spirit of the time.” Simply stated, the moment has come. So it was a bold assertion when, in a cavernous hotel ballroom in Berlin, the first speaker declared,: “the neo-liberal zeitgeist is coming apart.” Reading the papers you wouldn’t think so. The picture you get there is of the neo-liberal economic and social policies of the political center-right on a roll. Didn’t the recent elections of Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy in France mean that the parties of social democracy and the left had been put to rout, setting the stage for a new round of neo-liberal “reforms?”

Well, not exactly.

There is a growing left current in Europe and while it would be a mistake to overestimate its power at the moment, its influence and confidence is growing. And it is out of these attempts at “reforms” - and the resistance to them – from which it is drawing its strength.

There could be no question that the decision of two large leftwing parties in Germany to become one carries important implications for the future of politics in that country, and highlights a development potentially altering the shape of European politics. While the major media in the U.S. didn’t think it worthy enough to even note its happening, it was front-page news in Germany, where much of the event was telecast live and it was watched with rapt attention across much of the continent.

The founding of “Die Linke ‘ (The Left) came the day before the parliamentary election in France that said a lot about the political current alive in that country as well.

On June 15, on one side of a huge Berlin hotel ballroom, delegates to the congress of the Electoral Alternative for Jobs and Social Security (WASG) gathered, while one folding partition away delegates from the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) met. The question before both meetings was unity. When the partition was removed the next day, a group of in-line skaters entered the hall holding aloft eight giant white letters and proceeded to the stage where, against a red backdrop, they arranged the words, “Die Linke” – the name of the new Left Party of Germany. A thunderous roar of applause went up.

The WASG delegates were generally younger. (One PDS speaker joked about some of his people having a tendency to fall asleep during meetings). WASG members included a lot of trade unionists and activists, many of whom were once part of the German Social Democratic Party but recently left upset at the Social Democrat’s move rightward on foreign and domestic policies.

The PDS was the successor to the Socialist Unity Party, which once governed the former German Democratic Party or East Germany. In December 1989 the party, under the leadership of an attorney Gregor Gysi, reorganized, rejected ‘Stalinism,” adopted new policies, and changed its name. Over the years the PDS enjoyed relative strength in the eastern part of reunified Germany, garnering 15 to 25 percent of the vote there despite relentless political and legal attack. Today Berlin is governed by a “red-red” coalition of the PDS and the Social Democrats. The electoral alliance of the PDS with the WASG secured 8.7 percent of the vote in federal elections, garnering 50 seats in the German Parliament or Bundestag. Following a recent election in the western city-state of Bremen, the new party alliance surpassed the 5 percent threshold for representation and entered the provincial parliament.

The Left Party-PDS was a co-founder of the European Left alliance of parties and was the largest party in the European United Left/Nordic Green Left in the European Parliament.

Public opinion polls have given the merged group from 9 to 12 percent of the vote countrywide. The higher figure would make it the third largest party in the country, slightly ahead of the Green Party and the pro-business Free Democratic Party. At one time the latter was a powerful group in post-war Germany. A poll released during the Congress indicated that 24 percent of Germans would consider voting for the new party.

With nearly 75, 000 members, the Left Party is now the country’s largest opposition party. When I visited the party’s Berlin office the day after the congress, workers there said they were having difficultly dealing with the nuts and bolts of the merger because of the avalanche of membership applications coming in by email from the party’s website: 2,500 new members in 72 hours.

There were 796 delegates to the convention, divided almost equally between the two former groups. Women were 37.1 percent of those attending.

The co-leaders of Die Linke are Oskar Lafontaine, one-time head of the SDP who served as finance minister in the first government of Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder, and the PDS’ Lothar Bisky, former director of the a Film College in the former East Germany. In the summer of 2005, Lafontaine left the SDP, joined WASG and thereafter stood as a candidate for the PDS-WASG alliance Linkspatei.

The new Left Party “is in the tradition of the German Trade Unionism,” said Lafontaine, “that of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Willie Brandt. We are a party of democratic renewal. Democracy is undergoing a crisis and this is why there must be democratic renewal and we, as the left’ want to be part of that process. Economic power must be controlled by democracy. If you don’t have that you don’t have democracy.”

“We are the only party that can give hope to those who have stopped voting because they say ‘it doesn’t matter whether because they will decide things without us’.”

The head of the Left Party delegation in the German Parliament, Gregor Gysi, called the PDS-WASG merger “the last act of German unification” adding, “and it is we that have realized it” to a round of applause. Gysi, a spellbinding orator, launched an attack on the policies of the Social Democrats, noting that Germany under the SDP was the only western capitalist country to register a decline in income. The object of the country, he said, should not be to have merely a growth economy but “a sustainable economy.”

“Capitalism cannot be the answer for the future,” said Gysi. “We must remain socialists. We should boldly welcome the new opportunities we have now.”

Noting the variations in history and makeup of the two merging groups, Gysi said, “We can put these two things together. Let us be more passionate together. You know what? We are becoming more important.”

Margret Mönig-Rahne, vice-president of the powerful German union ver.di was on hand for the convention. From the podium, another union spokesperson expressed "respect" for the founders of the new party and wished them "courage and success." Then, referring struggles such as the major strike then underway at the German phone company, the threat posed by private competition to the public postal service, the decision of the "grand coalition" to up the retirement age to 67, and the refusal by the government to institute a minimum wage, he said "We need our (political) partners to realize our objectives."

Bisky said, “We oppose those who favor only one kind of growth – the growth of profits.” The policies being advanced by the ruling parties under the banner of reform are, he said, not really reforms “but in the age of globalization, one of dismantling.”

“Yes, we pose the question of changing social relations, of property relations,” said Bisky. “That’s what makes us different. We pose the question of the system. We don’t want to return to ‘really existing socialism’ of the past. We don’t propose to nationalize everything.”

Lashing out at what he called ‘the logic of war,’ Bisky noted the new party’s staunch opposition to German troops in Afghanistan – and the widespread public opposition that agrees with the new Left Party. He called Die Linke “the only peace party in the country.” The comment was a clear reference to the declining fortune of the German Green Party, which has joined the Social Democrats in fostering foreign military intervention, starting with the attack on Yugoslavia and then joining the Bush Administration’s war in Afghanistan. Noting that the Greens’ origins were partly in the peace movement, he said the party had lost its third place status with the public “because they are no longer believable.”

On the eve of the merger convention one prominent Green provincial legislator announced he was decamping for the new party.

Anyone who thought the formation of the Left Party was inconsequential had to be disabused of that notion by the reaction of the other Germany parties. “Germany's main political parties yesterday reacted with bluster and a show of nerves to the birth of a new political force, the Left Party, that could shakeup the country's political architecture,” said the Financial Times June 19. The Social Democratic Party “finds itself in a trap,” columnist Christopher Caldwell wrote in that newspaper June 16. While on one side it faces the Christian Democratic Union, which outpaces in it in the polls, on the other, “the anti-capitalist Left Party continues to lure away many of the most hardline and energetic voters on the SPD's left flank.”

Local observers say the Social Democratic leadership faces a difficult quandary and the probability of sharp internal division because of it. They can opt to put some distance between themselves and Die Linke, they say, move to the left and compete on that terrain with the new party, or they can choose to move toward a future coalition arrangement with it.

As far at the new party is concerned, its eyes are on the immediate future. Four provincial elections are coming up in the western part of the country where a good showing would put it is a strong position for national elections slated for 2009.

“Another kind of politics is necessary and possible,” reads the key program of the Left Party. “The new left has its own answers to the challenges of the day – to greater international integration, chronic mass unemployment, the crisis of the social welfare systems, the limited resources and the ecological resistance capacity of the earth and the change in the age distribution of society. We do not agree that limited economic potentials make it indispensable to call upon the population to do without security, self-determination and a high quality of life.”

Seventy three guests from foreign parties, organizations and movements from 50 countries were on hand for the founding of the new party. The reading of the names of the groups from Latin America evoked the loudest applause, a sign of the political changes in that part of the world. The left surge in Latin America was referred to in speeches a number of times. After the five socialist and communist groups from France were identified, the speaker joked that “we couldn’t find any more people from France.”

The victory of the right in the recent French parliamentary elections wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be in the major U.S. media. The “blue wave” that was predicted to crush the Socialists and obliterate the French Communist Party, didn’t materialize. In fact, the French left, while not victorious overall, scored important gains. Indeed, the balloting results have created a quandary for the French Socialist similar to that facing the German SDP. As one French fraternal delegate put it to me, the French left has always seen itself as the alternative and the idea of the Socialist Party moving right to appeal to the “center” has never been part of the program. If the French Socialist leadership opts to move right it could cause a crisis in their party. In the face of a neo-liberal drive to lower taxes on the corporate rich, cut social services to the poor, weaken social security and make it difficult for the unions to defended the rights and living standards of the workers, it probably would “shakeup the country's political architecture.” The French left – like the German left – is determined to draw the line against such neo-liberal reforms.

“Something is happening in Germany, and Die Linke has arrived at a good moment,” wrote European Parliament member Francis Wurtz in the newspaper l’Humanite.

Dr. King said he felt caught up in the Zeitgeist; he sensed that “something was getting ready to happen in history.” It felt that way in Berlin.

BC Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Click here to contact Mr. Bloice.