Preliminary investigations in the capital: No fire wall through Berlin

When the Greens entered the Bundestag in 1983, they narrowly avoided tie gate. The then CSU Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann wanted to prevent “these guys” (the women too?) from sitting in parliament without a tie; Franz Josef Strauss saw a “Trojan Soviet cavalry”. The concern was not completely groundless: the young party included former cadres of Maoist K groups who had previously wanted to overcome bourgeois democracy.

But it was wrong to draw conclusions from the extremist baggage that the entire party was affected. The younger Greens also know the mechanism. Springer turned a necessary building energy law that could be criticized in detail into “Habeck’s heating hammer” – until many believed that the Greens would replace functioning heating systems and “de-industrialize” Germany. Doomsday scenarios sell well.

is a professor of political didactics at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, a member of the Green Party and does not wear a tie. He researches democratic identity formation through action-oriented methods. His playing field is schools, teacher training, associations and political education providers.

Now the Berlin Left is the new citizens' terror - and not entirely without reason. Their Russia and security policy appears naive at best, some demands to dismantle the police and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution are counterproductive, and parts of their Israel policy are unbearably one-sided. There are also anti-Semitic milieus, problematic contacts and Elif Eralp's former membership in the Red Aid.

But naive, counterproductive and one-sided does not mean anti-democratic. Marcel Fratzscher from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) considers socialization in the Berlin case to be a “serious mistake”; However, Article 15 GG expressly allows it. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution does not monitor the entire party, but rather extremist sub-structures at the state level.

The taz is an independent, left-wing and opinionated daily newspaper. We have been arguing in our comments, essays and debate texts since the taz was founded in 1979. We often cannot and do not want to agree on an opinion. That's why you'll find some completely opposing positions here - all part of the very broad left-wing spectrum of opinions.

It becomes pseudo-radical where concrete democratic redistribution measures are replaced by revolutionary self-assurance. Your own side is then called “resistance” and enjoys moral credit, while the other side is called “domination” and is therefore delegitimised across the board. Police become the enemy, military defense becomes “rearmament,” Israel becomes the exclusive perpetrator.

Left-wing criticism is only credible if it universalizes its standards: Anyone who rightly measures capitalism within democracies in terms of human rights and social justice must not trivialize Hamas' tyranny as “resistance”. The same applies to Red Aid: legal protection against police arbitrariness is necessary. It becomes problematic when legal assistance for left-wing criminals turns into political solidarity with them.

Does that justify the smear campaign against the left? Economics Minister Reiche mixes socialization, anti-Semitism and organized crime, Alexander Dobrindt makes Eralp an anti-Semitic in a talk show, Springer sees the SPD and the Greens leaving the “democratic sector”. The right-wing populist online portal Nius sees a “Jew-hating party” moving into the Red Town Hall; Bild columnist Harald Martenstein makes a helpless effort to promote the erotic attractiveness of authoritarian “gangster types”. Mistakes by individuals become general suspicion, criticism becomes condemnation - and a democratic party that as a whole is no more flawed than others, the downfall of the West.

The CDU in particular is sitting in a glass house: Jens Spahn, who resigned as parliamentary group leader for other reasons and then also from his seat on the budget committee, frequented Peter Thiel's “Dialogue” network several times, the Union adopts the AfD's interpretation of migration - yet no one declares the CDU to be an anti-democratic party.

The horseshoe view bends reality until left and right appear to touch. The new report from the Society for Civil Rights alone documents the unconstitutionality of the AfD with more than 2,500 documents. There are no comparable findings for the Left Party as a whole. There is not a single anti-democratic demand in their programs.

Government practice also contradicts the horror story: where the Left co-governed, it acted pragmatically and in a compromise-oriented manner - under Ramelow in Thuringia to the point where the party complained that his policies were “social democratic at best”. However, where right-wing extremists gained government power, democratic dismantling took place - as Orbán in Hungary, the PiS in Poland and Trump in the USA have shown.

As I argued here on August 13, the left firewall is not between democratic parties, but against anti-Semitism, political violence, alliances with Islamists and Putin apologies.

Michel Friedman warns the Greens and the SPD against a coalition with a left that tolerates anti-Semitic left-wing extremists and Islamists. At the same time, he calls social injustice “more brutal than ever before” and warns of its consequences for democracy. Both belong together. That's exactly why we need red-green-red in Berlin - with a left that makes Friedman's concern its own.

The SPD and the Greens benefit from a left that poses the social question more radically than they do and gives migrant milieus a political home. The left, in turn, could become more politically mature through the coalition. To do this, it does not have to give up its anti-capitalist radicalism, but rather its revolutionary behavior and its double standards.

Governmental responsibility forces demands to be measured against their means and consequences. The Greens have long since succeeded in this transformation. They have shed their anti-democratic baggage, but have remained the party of fundamental ecological restructuring - and that is precisely why they are so hated. Especially since when it comes to it (Corona, Ukraine), they reliably act in a state-supporting manner.

In this way, the Left Party, in conjunction with the Green-Red Party, could become the avant-garde of its own de-revolution: radical on the social issue, uncompromising against anti-Semites, Islamists and supporters of political violence, and therefore supportive of the state when it matters. To save their radicalism from their own revolutionary romanticism. Don't wear a tie. abandon revolutionary behavior.