Die Linke which is the most Left-Wing party and is currently below 5% in the polls. Especially after the split with BSW which is very socially Right-Wing and Conservative. (Also Die Linke is also very Pro-Israel.) In France the Left coalition got the most seats (They did not get the majority or got in power but they still did very well in the elections.) And in most other European countries the Communist Party (Despite many of them being eurocom/revisionist (KKE/PCE/PCF being specifically)) has done major success in their [insert] country but in Germany the DKP is just a fringe minor party.
Yeah, it basically is.
DKP is fringe and minor in because they were oppressed by the West German state. After the KPD was banned, the DKP was built years later from whoever was left and has been kept under close watch from German state intelligence ever since. Another part is the rampant anti-communism West Germany has implemented since 1949.
Die Linke should be a strong left party, as they were created from the remnants of the SED which didn’t immediately leap right into reactionary opportunism (cough Merkel). But instead it’s been coopted and made irrelevant.
Smaller left parties are oppressed even more. The SGP was declared anti-constitutional by a judge because they don’t support liberal property rights, which are enshrined in the constitution.
Even the labour unions (including the largest industrial workers union in the west, maybe even the world) choose to cooperate more with corporate executives than with the workers they ostensibly represent.
This is a very important point that a lot of people who are unfamiliar with Germany and how its unions work may not even be aware of. Unions in Germany are highly regulated by German law to be effectively neutered as tools of class struggle. They are at best glorified intermediaries for negotiation between workers and employers, and the vast majority of the time they act primarily in the interests of the employers (hiding behind such flimsy justifications as “if we demand too much it will harm employers and workers will lose their jobs”).
They are there to stamp down any independent dissent by workers, forcing workers to go through the reactionary, collaborationist union structure where any complaints or demands they have can disappear into a bureaucratic swamp.
I have some personal experience with this whole system as my partner, who works in a unionized field, at one point was part of their workplace’s employee representation for a few years and there was effectively nothing they were legally allowed to actually do except get together and talk every once in a while. To even dare utter the word “strike” would have been unthinkable, maybe even illegal (as i said, labor representation is highly regulated in Germany). At best they could complain if they thought that some workers’ contracts were being violated.
To me it all just looked like a way to keep the more socially conscious workers busy and create the illusion that they were actually helping other workers lest they think of doing something that would actually threaten the profits of the employer… sort of like letting your infant sit in the passenger’s seat and play with a toy steering wheel thinking they are actually driving the car so they keep quiet while you drive.
For someone who is class consciouss the whole thing is just humiliating, pathetic and demotivating to see how many people in Germany fall for this scam, how they think this means they really have some power. And more than that, how convinced they are that this is the best you can do. And when you try and criticize this system that you can see is actively victimizing them and making them miserable, they react very aggressively in defense of it and they get angry at you for pointing it out, telling you that you don’t know how the world works…