Norman Brewer, Berlin
On August 30, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of eastern Germany's cities for the fourth Monday in a row to protest the plans of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic-Greens coalition government to cut unemployment benefits and pensions and to impose additional fees for health care.
The Monday demonstrations have been growing in size since they began on August 2, when 10,000 people protested. On August 16, more than 100,000 people marched in more than 100 cities, predominantly in eastern Germany, with 25,000 rallying in Leipzig and 30,000 in Berlin.
On August 23 and again on August 30, up to 180,000 people participated in the Montagsdemonstrationen. In Leipzig, 60,000 people turned out to hear and cheer Oskar Lafontaine denounce the Schroeder government's plans to dismantle the social welfare system. A former chairperson of the Social-democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and a former finance minister, Lafontaine quit both posts in 1999, after he opposed Schroeder's austerity policies.
According to the September 1 radical-left daily junge Welt, many of the protesters in Leipzig carried home-made placards carrying messages such as "We demand the resignation of the Schroeder government because of deceiving voters and harming the constitution" or "Schroeder into production — but for cheap wages" (which rhymes in German).
Many of those protesting note that they participated in similar protests in 1989, protests that brought down East Germany's Stalinist regime and paved the way for the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) to annex of the post-capitalist German Democratic Republic (DDR). Now they say that instead of the "dictatorship of the politburo" they got the "dictatorship of big money".
One speaker at the rally, a hairdresser in her late 40s, said: "We citizens of the DDR did not come as beggars into the BRD, but now we are... An employer now can pay up to 30% under union agreement... I will have to work for 3.07 euro [A$5.30] per hour." She finished her speech with the words, "Millions are stronger than millionaires", to which the crowd responded with thunderous "We are the people" chants.
After the rally, the Leipzig protesters marched through the narrow streets of the city's central area chanting "Schroeder has got to go, Hartz is crud" or "Join us, or it's your turn tomorrow".
When Lafontaine mounted the speaking platform at the end of the march, he was greeted with repeated chants of "We are the people" and prolonged applause. "You can't promise not to reduce unemployment benefits before the election and do the opposite after you're in office", he told the protesters. He said it made no sense to increase working hours and develop job incentives when there were no jobs available.
Government politicians have shot back at Lafontaine, pointing out that he had supported similar measures while in office. "In 1998, he was the first Social Democrat to say that payments to the long-term unemployed should be based on need", foreign minister and Greens leader Joschka Fischer told Der Spiegel news magazine. "He said it in an interview with Spiegel and at the SPD party convention. Today, this procedure is called Hartz IV, and Lafontaine is against it."
"I have been unemployed for three years", one of the marchers, a 44-year-old skilled construction worker, told junge Welt. "The money won't last at all, and with Hartz IV my family will go down the drain. Anything Berlin tells us, creating jobs and such, is nothing but empty demagogy. There is no work."
On September 2, Germany's federal labour agency reported that after seasonal adjustments, unemployment in the European Union's largest national economy had risen by 24,000 in August to 4.414 million, 10.5% of the labour force. In eastern Germany, the number of jobless at the end of August was 1,582,200, 18.2% of the labour force.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, September 8, 2004.
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