The German People’s Union: One Man, One Party
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kohl's interior ministry spent millions of marks to support "German culture" in Kaliningrad, once the East Prussian crown jewel known as Koenigsberg but Russian territory since 1945. Now both the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats are taking steps to limit the rights of refugees and "foreigners" even further, hoping to co-opt the anti-immigrant vote on September 27. The left exerts little such influence, and only its most militant wing engages the right on its most crucial and surprising battleground: the cultural haunts and political stations of those Germans under 30.
Among the contenders on this battleground, consider first the DVU. It is a party created by one man, 65-year-old Gerhard Frey, a publishing and property magnate said to be worth $290 million. In the sixties Frey controlled a newspaper catering to Wehrmacht and SS veterans. By 1971 he had launched the DVU as a lobby; in 1987 he officially registered it as an electoral party. The party's organizational muscle has always been a weak second to Frey's propaganda operation. His two weekly newspapers have a combined circulation of 60,000, while the DVU itself has a mostly paper membership of only 15,000. Before this spring’s election the party had only 50 members in all of Saxony-Anhalt. DVU candidates were virtually invisible during the campaign. Instead of door-to-door stumping, the party spent an estimated 3 million marks for 20,000 posters, publicity stunts and an unprecedented direct mail campaign aimed at young people. One 22 year-old university student told me that she never saw a DVU candidate out canvassing, yet each of the nine people in her commune of antifascists—“antifa” for short—received a campaign letter.
On election day the two major parties together took 58 percent of the state vote. The Party of Democratic Socialism (the remnant of the East German Socialist Unity Party), which sometimes wins pluralities in eastern Germany, ran third with 20 percent. The surprise was the DVU, which received 192,086 votes in a state where it wasn't even on the ballot in 1994.
Knee-jerk post-election analysis counted the DVU's vote as a protest against unemployment in the east and Kohl's failure to transform the rusted out workers' republic into a middle-class paradise. But the situation is more complicated. Consider that in the early nineties the DVU won statehouse seats in Schleswig-Holstein and Bremen—both in prosperous western Germany. For years, other far right parties have been winning votes in affluent western states. Most notably, in elections to the European Parliament in 1989, five months before the Berlin Wall fell, Franz Schonhuber's Republican party received 1.2 million votes in West Germany on a platform similar to the DVU's. (Schonhuber subsequently lost control of the Republicans and is now running on the DVU's slate, a move that could push the party past the 5 percent threshold in September.) Today, the far right has targeted Meckleburg-West Pomerania, where unemployment is almost 23 percent and social questions are pressing. But nationalism and anti-immigrant racism are still its best calling cards, even among the comfortably bourgeois.
In the Saxony-Anhalt polling, 72 percent of eligible voters participated, up from 55 percent in 1994. The DVU took many of those new voters. The Greens were buried by the DVU's vote. More important, the DVU ran first among young people, with 30 percent of the votes of those between 18 and 30. Voting for the far right is now part of youth culture, Frey crowed. He may be right, but don't expect his one-man outfit to be the flagship for the next generation of German ultranationalists. That honor lies elsewhere.
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