German chancellor’s austerity measures recall the Weimar Republic

[Hannah Bell]

The €80 billion austerity package announced last weekend by the German government, calling for brutal attacks on the poor, has triggered outrage and shock in wide sections of the population.

Many feel that the cuts targeting the unemployed, the ending of the child allowance for those on welfare, the abolition of the heating subsidy for those on housing benefits, and the cancellation of pension insurance contributions for the long-term unemployed are profoundly antisocial, unjust and cowardly. Meanwhile, the banks, speculators and those responsible for the crisis remain unscathed and dictate the cuts in social spending...

These events are reminiscent of the final years of the Weimar Republic. Then, as now, the ruling class exploited the world economic crisis in order to enrich itself beyond measure. And as with Merkel’s austerity measures today, it was claimed that there was no alternative to the emergency decrees of the Brüning government. In the end, popular resistance was suppressed by fascist terror and dictatorship.

Merkel’s austerity measures take up where the SPD-Green Party government under Gerhard Schröder (SPD) and Joschka Fischer (Greens) left off five years ago. The biggest attacks on the welfare state took place under that government. Its Agenda 2010 welfare and labour “reforms” established a huge low-wage sector. Many who had worked for decades and paid into the unemployment insurance scheme were rapidly moved onto welfare and driven into abject poverty. The budget deficit, which is cited as grounds for the cuts, did not fall from the sky. It is, in the first place, the result of the repeated lowering of corporate taxes and the top tax rates by the SPD-Green government...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/pers-j10.shtml