You must be very young and/or naive, if you had lived through the Schröder/Fischer governments (or had informed yourself about them) you’d have known that neither the SPD nor the Greens are in any way left leaning.
How the fuck is the green party not left leaning? What kind of no true scotsman shit is this?
To be fair here… They are as left as their third coalition partner allows. And that’s entirely the fault of voters, who -even with the CDU underperforming and proposing a literal clown as chancellor- couldn’t mananage to vote in a not-right majority. So why complain about not enough left policies now?
I won’t vote left and then I complain about missing left policies and decide to vote even more right isn’t a sane thought pattern but just a symptom of brain damage.
They are as left as their third coalition partner allows.
Then, in order to know how left leaning SPD and Greens are when no coalition partner is holding them back, you only need to look at the governments of Schröder/Fischer, as I already pointed out here.
It’s obvious bullshit to use a quarter of a century old reference… Who’s actually left from back then nearly a generation later?
Giving up on all parties based on 25 year old information is a bit pessimistic.
or in case of the SPD you just had to look at most of the Merkel governments
That, too, but if you point at those, people will argue that the SPD couldn’t be more social due to being caught as the smaller partner in a coalition with the CDU.
If you really want to point out the full scale of antisocial policy done by SPD and Greens, you have to point at the governments Schröder/Fischer, because for those, there is no CDU fig leaf to hide behind. And there is plenty to find there, a few highlights for those who don’t want to be bothered with looking it up:
- “liberalisation” of the labour market (allowing temporary employment schemes that spawned an entire, previously illegal low wages sector and reduced the influence of unions)
- “reforms” of the social security system with severe cutbacks to unemployment benefits, forcing lots of people into the newly created low wage sector. On top of that, subsidies to the low wage sector through the employment office (if your employer doesn’t pay you enough to make a living, you can’t quit your job without losing access to benefits, but you’re allowed to claim extra money from the employment office)
- “reforms” of the pension system, which reduced the pension levels, increased the pension age, and introduced subsidies to private pension schemes provided by insurance companies, which by now all have been identified as scams where you pay way more than you get out.
- “liberalisation” of the financial sector, which made previously illegal hedge funds legal, which then promptly created a bunch of financial and subsequent economic crises with their unhinged speculation.
God. I hate Tony Blair’s influence on Schröder back then. Pretty much everything you wrote came originally from Blair…
