The Globally Unraveling Left
By Bruce Walker (04/11/05)
My last article was on the very real prospect of a Conservative Party victory in the United Kingdom and the return to power of a government committed to getting tough on crime, tightening immigration, lowering taxes and regulations and generally supportive of the United States. While it is easily possible to read more into a Conservative Party victory than it would mean, it is impossible to consider it as anything less than a victory for conservatives around the world.
This would be particularly telling in light of the relatively easy victory that the more conservative government of Australia won last year, much easier than anyone had predicted, and yet another English-speaking democracy moving Right, not Left, in its politics and policies.
Japan, another archipelago nation like the United Kingdom, already has a conservative, pro-American government which has been a stalwart supporter of our war on terror and, after rearmament, which seems inevitable, will be as powerful a counterweight to technologically inferior China and Russia as Japan wishes (or needs) to be.
If China or Russia get in an arms race with Japan, those nations will doubling lose. First, the commitment of resources will slow or stop economic growth - just as the Russian attempt to keep pace with the Reagan buildup put the Soviet economy in reverse - and so prevent either nation from gaining economically on the overwhelming economic strength of America. Second, Japan will be a permanent bulwark - geography allows it no other choice - to aggression or to threats in East Asia.
Quietly and slowly other elections are turning the tide against blase Leftism around the world. Germany, the most powerful nation in Europe, has a Social Democrat Party that has no confidence of the people. Since playing the ‘anti-American card," Schroeder and his Social Democrats have been losing election after election.
Most recently, the SDP lost an absolute majority in the legislature of Schleswig-Holstein to what appeared, after election night, to be a very weak coalition government. That was bad enough: Christian Democrats made major gains at the expense of Social Democrats, and the SDP would have to form a coalition government.
The parliamentary voting after the election returns, however, showed an even worse picture for the Left: even after having persuaded a small, Danish party to support the wobbly government, which should have given the SDP enough votes to form a bare one vote majority government, someone from the SDP voted against his party: the Left could not form a government in what had been long the stronghold of the Left in Germany.
Germany now has a Leftist national government with the tiniest margin of votes in the Bundestag, overwhelmingly negative support when an election is held, a conservative Christian Democrat as Head of Government (President of Germany), dramatic loss of power in the state elections, and now at least one "defection" from the Left at a critical time to throw the SDP into turmoil in a state which it recently held without the help of any other parties.
What will this mean? Much of the support which Schroeder had in the past was based upon he and Chirac "representing" civilized nations, peaceful peoples, etc. The reelection of President Bush, the successful elections in Afghanistan and in Iraq, as well as other democracies like Australia, put all that in doubt.
It is not clear exactly what will happen in Schleswig-Holstein. New elections are a possibility, and the smart money would have to be on the Christian Democrats winning, given the humiliating defection of coalition partners of the SDP; it is more likely that the two major parties will form a coalition government in that state, which could easily mean that the Christian Democrats, already the largest party in the Bundestrat and effectively in control of that upper chamber of the German legislature, could acquire the two seats needed to give it 35 votes, an absolute majority of the 70 votes, in that body.
Only one thing is absolutely clear: the Left, in Europe, is on the run. Governments from Ukraine to the United Kingdom are more in synch with the broad goals of American policy than at any time since the end of the Cold War. The good guys are winning.
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