News » February 23, 2005

Germany’s Red-Green Romeo

By Paul Hockenos

Minu and Joschka: What makes him so sexy?

Germany’s media world tittered with delight when the country’s popular foreign minister and Green Party leader, Joschka Fischer, brought his new romantic interest, 28-year-old German-born Persian beauty Minu Barati, to the annual Press Ball. Though Fischer rarely cracks a smile, he must have grinned at the right-wing Bild newspaper’s gushing banner headline the next day: “What Makes Joschka So Sexy?”

For nearly six years, since shortly after the Social Democrat and Green “red-green” coalition came to power, Fischer has topped Germany’s popularity polls. The source of Fischer’s unusually high approval ratings is anything but self-evident; his unorthodox biography and radical political past wouldn’t seem to endear him to the average German burgher.

Fischer’s parents were ethnic Germans expelled from Hungary in 1946, the bottom of the barrel in an occupied and destitute postwar Germany. He never earned a university degree and made his early living as a book thief.

His excesses as a street-fighting Frankfurt anarchist during the ’70s came to public light in 2000, and conservatives called upon him to resign. One stark photo dug up by journalists caught Fischer at a 1973 demonstration doling out a gratuitous beating to a solitary police officer with the help of a few comrades. But, remarkably, the scandals passed over without denting Fischer’s credibility, even among conservative voters.

In the late ’70s, Fischer gave up on revolutionary socialism and forswore violence as a political tool. Disillusioned, for years he drove a taxi nights in Frankfurt, pondering the enigma of a flawed but unreformable democracy. During the day, he worked in the Karl Marx Bookshop, a co-op that included many of his future political allies in the Greens, like Dany Cohn-Bendit, the hero of the Paris May 1968 uprising, and Tom Koenigs, today Germany’s top human rights coordinator. Perhaps this is his secret: Fischer and several fellow cabinet ministers, including Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, belong to a postwar generation that many Germans identify with.

When the Green Party formed in 1980 as an electoral platform for an amalgam of groups from the peace, anti-nuke, ecological and women’s movements, Fischer was intensely skeptical. Parliamentary democracy and feminism weren’t his thing any more than knitted wool sweaters or muesli. During the wild Frankfurt years the left’s women often found Fischer unbearably macho and authoritarian. But when the new party began putting its people into regional legislatures across West Germany, Fischer joined its ranks and began a bruising climb to its top.

Fischer and his all-male “Frankfurt Gang” established themselves as the party’s hard-nosed pragmatists, or “realos,” the wing dedicated to an electoral strategy in contrast to the idealistic Green fundamentalists, or “fundis.” An inner party war between the two factions raged throughout the ’80s until the realos finally prevailed. Since then, under Fischer’s firm stewardship, the former “anti-party party” has become part of the mainstream. Now the republic’s third largest party, the Greens are a safe, liberal option.

The taming of the once anti-establishment Greens may be another source of Fischer’s appeal across the political spectrum. But along the way, the compromises pushed through by the pragmatists were too much for many of the Greens’ original supporters, some of whom today count among Fischer’s most trenchant adversaries.

As foreign minister, Fischer has endorsed an interventionist foreign policy that can hardly be described as Green. But he’s an internationally respected statesman, and many Germans applaud the country’s engagement worldwide in the name of humanitarian goals. Even before the full extent of the South Asian tsunami’s devastation was known, Fischer recognized it as a crisis of enormous proportions and began to act; Germany offered the tsunami-hit countries more aid than any other.

Fischer and Schröder are pushing for a German seat on the U.N. Security Council. “Germans are sensitive about their image and they like the fact that Fischer has stature and is respected abroad,” says Ute Zapf, a Social Democratic parliamentarian.

It has long been rumored that Fischer is tired of the foreign ministry job and covets the posts of European Union foreign minister or U.N. secretary-general. But Fischer’s public appeal and campaigning prowess are critical for red-green reelection chances in 2006. Fischer has promised Chancellor Schröder that he plans to stay on board, at least for awhile.

Until then, he may have to content himself with a spiced-up private life. Miss Barati and her six-year-old daughter have moved into Fischer’s Berlin Mitte apartment near the gold-capped synagogue.

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• Reader Comments

  Mr. Fischer personifies the rightward shift of the left over the past three decades, proving that this is not a uniquely Democratic Party phenomenon.  These are people who have made their peace with capitalism and have given up on the ideas of their youth.  The death of the left i.e. reformism, is an international phenomenon, and its causes are deeply rooted in the bankruptcy of reformism itself and the irretrievable crisis of global capitalism.  Leftists today still have many illusions, about saving social security, or any other of the “gains” of the welfare state.  When they are in positions of power they realize they are not the masters, and that the state is the property of the bankers and industrialists.  This doesn’t stop them from using increasingly innocuous versions of the old leftist rhetoric. 

  The rulers’ strategy is the same in every country on earth regardless of who is in power: abroad, gain as much economic/military/strategic power as possible; at home, dismantle the welfare state.  The differences that might exists are of a purely tactical nature. The red-green government in Germany has done more to weaken the welfare state than anything the conservatives could have dreamed of.  This is the same for New Labour in the U.K, the DLC of Clinton, and the Jospin socialists in France, just to give a few examples.

  The left is gone, dead forever; the welfare state is dissapearing forever, reformism is no longer possible, the old transatlantic alliance is history and it is time to face the music.

  What to do about this?  My suggestion is that you ask yourself this question: what exactly does the word SOVIET mean?  Find out.  There’s your answer.

  Posted by Maximillian Al Dakari on Feb 23, 2005 at 10:09 PM

  A few notes here: First, what makes Fischer such a success is primarily that he is committed, he’s got brains (next to him Dubya is like a golf ball to the Matterhorn), he is very articulate and he is tough. I heard Fischer hold a speech and a Q&A session near Frankfurt in 1986, and was fascinated by his grasp of facts and his ability to put them together off the cuff. As for this Fundi and Realo question: The Fundis I respect to this day for their orthodoxy, but the old question was really: Do we get into the skin of the dragon and do as much as possible to change the beast, or will the Greens remain forever outsiders. The Fundis had not a chance: Germany, like the world, was changing in the 80s and 90s, and they refused to actually make any real sense for a highly industrialized nation. The impetus of the 70s was stymied, people were tired of all the demos, etc… Somehow they struck a balance, where the Fundis still had their input, and the party itself remains very democratic, as far as I can tell.

  As for the “dismantling” of the welfare state in Germany (and England, etc… as a matter of fact): The welfare state is a priviledge earned from decades of struggle. But even I, an old lefty, had to admit at one point that it was being abused to the max. It doesn’t do any good to just blame one party for the dismantling. All this came together with enormous pressure from the unions to reduce the work week, increase pay, increase vacation time etc… Plus the rebuilding of East Germany which as of 2002 had sucked up 12 times the entire amount puimped into Europe by the Marshall Plan. Germany could ill afford this, esp. with the world economy shaking. As for the conservatives, they are in fact very much responsible for forcing the Hartz IV program onto Germany. They did what the neocons have been doing in the USA since Reagan: creating debt. And that came together with the Euro 3% rule, which forced the governments to reduce their debt.

  When it all adds up: The Welfare State was no longer feasible as it used to be. I don’t know if this is a general rule, but I knew at least 10 people on unemployment who enjoyed the good life, without making the slightest gesture to find work. Offices on Monday morning were empty because of illness, Friday as well, esp. if the Thursday had been a holiday. There was real abuse, and I saw it with my own eyes, I even got into arguments with people about it. (I myself am a freelancer, so I don’ know what a sick day is, or a paid vacation, but when someone offers me one (it has happened), I am thankful and don’t abuse it).

  If there is any problem with Germany at the current time, it’s because the Socialists have several genuine blockheads in the ministries, foremost Hans Eichel the finance minister. Germany could use some serious tax reduction and some loosening of all the accounting constraints on companies that compel especially the SMEs to keep legions of bookkeepers on hand. But right now, they are kowtowing to the Big Enterprises because unemployment is sky high. These old Industrial Socialists have forgotten, apparently, that Germany’s true economic strength lay in its small and medium enterprises, which were decentralized (i.e. found all over the country), highly flexible, highly innovative and highly productive. They are often family run, by people who are committed to their work for the long term. They feel and act on a sense of responsibility for their communities (I worked in and with several). They can hardly move. And now with the dollar in the cellar, their big market USA has more or less vanished. But the current government is still letting itself be held hostage by the biggies (see Siemens last year threatening to close many of its operations…).

  True the left has pretty much had it. But so has the right. These two energies belonged to an old paradigm, and they are no oonger valid. We have chaos now, which is the first step in reshaping a pattern. Are we as individuals going to take responsibility? Or will we let the Corporation take over by controlling what we eat, drink, wear and telephone with?

  Welcome to the Brave New World. It’s so pleasant to be a slave.

  
  Soviet means council.

  Posted by Talleyrand on Feb 23, 2005 at 11:45 PM

  “The soviets are supporting the Vietcong.”  Does that statement make any sense?  The councils are supporting the Vietcong.  Why was/is that word used in such a senseless manner?

  Yes soviet means council.  They are a particular form of political organization (usually of workers) that have spontaneously developped throughout history.  They were called “rate” during the German revolution in 1919 and the were called “shura” in Iran in 1979 and “shora” during the Kurdistan uprising in 1991.  The name USSR came out because the country was contolled by soviets for about a year or two, before the Bolshevik party (who held a majority of elected positions in the soviets, and who most vigourously called for soviet power) gradually concentrated power in its hands.

  I am convinced that mankind has come to that point: soviets or barbarism.

  B T W   F*CK FISCHER.  He’s a pig like Bush and the rest of those bastards.

  Posted by Maximillian Al Dakari on Feb 24, 2005 at 10:02 AM

  ****CORRECTION***  Actually soviets have only been around since 1905, unless one counts the Paris commune of 1871.

  Posted by Maximillian Al Dakari on Feb 24, 2005 at 10:05 AM

  as a German..I was surpised that you have any interest in the romantic part of Fishers life…one little thing to the author of this article
  Buerger not burgher(translation for citizen)..bad proof reading

  Posted by seahawk1 on Feb 25, 2005 at 2:28 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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