The Left Party in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania

Abstract

If the Left Party was indeed to set out on its own long march through the institutions, much as the Greens had done a decade ago, then base camp was always likely to be in the flatlands of northern Germany, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. To Left Party watchers in the late 1990s it was therefore not a particularly great surprise that the first ever red-red coalition came into being in 1998 in the otherwise innocuous city of Schwerin. Even if the ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ of the coalition remain contested, the Left Party’s eight-year tenure in government (it left following the September 2006 Landtagswahl) undoubtedly taught Die Linke politicians some invaluable lessons about the challenges and pitfalls of actually shaping political outcomes. This chapter therefore analyses what effect the Left Party’s first experience in Land governments has had on both Die Linke in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and the party as a whole. More specifically, is there evidence of a de-radicalising effect on the Left Party’s programmatic agenda? Has the Left Party successfully maintained its anti-political establishment stance and avoided the institutionalisation processes that have characterised Green Party development? If the party has undergone a process of change, what specific factors have been driving it and what evidence do we have of a ‘normalisation’ of the Left Party?