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David F. Patton (Connecticut College, USA) e-Extreme, Vol. 5, No. 2, Summer 2004
 In recent years, scholarship on Germany’s Party of Democratic
Socialism has tended to focus on its place within the German party system. Lang returns to an earlier question: Is the PDS democratic?, which he answers by employing a normative, theoretical approach. He
posits that extremist parties, in contrast to democratic ones, have not unconditionally accepted fundamental democratic principles such as pluralism, representative government and human rights.
Drawing extensively upon party documents, Lang examines the PDS’s ideology, strategy and internal organization in order to assess whether it
has internalized core democratic values. He compares the positions of the party’s dominant reform wing with those of the minority orthodox wing. Although they clashed repeatedly, both wings generally, it is
argued by Lang, viewed individual rights as a means to societal protest rather than as virtues unto themselves; conceived of the party’s role as
primarily one of fundamental opposition; and tolerated political extremists whenever expedient. For Lang, this suggests that the PDS has not unconditionally accepted democratic norms, even if a partial
democratization is currently underway, and therefore it cannot, not be viewed as essentially democratic in nature. His picture of the PDS at
times resembles that of a not yet fully domesticated wolf in sheep’s clothing.
In retrospect, however, the opposite may well have been true: namely,
that the party more closely resembled a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Certainly its carefully cultivated bad boy image, enhanced by its regional
populism, its SED roots, its political isolation and its links to far left groups, attracted protest votes, thereby helping the struggling party
compete in a crowded electoral field. Now as a reliable governing party in Schwerin and Berlin, the PDS is searching for a partisan identity that is both distinctive and credible. zurück |
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