From Kommunistisk Politik International
International Bulletin of the Workers’ Communist Party of Denmark (APK)
No. 3, March 2001, Year 2
There are clear signs of panic before closing time in the government of Poul Nyrup Rasmussen. Trying desperately to find a platform which can ensure its re-election, it promises, by using a very optimistic prognosis, that the expendable income of an ordinary family will increase up to 20 percent from now to 2010, even though it only talks about minor tax relief. The coalition government of the Social Democratic Party and Social Liberal Party, which over and over again has been requesting "wage restraint" and intervened in the collective agreements, assumes that wages will increase more than prices during the next eight years. Of course, this is pure and simple hocus-pocus, promissory policy of the most banal kind.
The real wages of the majority of the workers and people living from transfer payment has decreased during the period with Nyrup Rasmussen. The unequal pay between men and women has increased. The total working hours of a family with dependent children has increased as well, and Danish women have the longest total working hours in all Europe.
The neo-liberal EU policy of the government has laid the foundations for greater reductions of real wages in the years to come and for higher rate of work with new competitive biddings of the public sector.
Nyrup Rasmussen and Jelved (national leader of the Social Liberal Party) are talking about "better care of the elderly" and "improvements of the health and educational system". Up until now, they have been acting in the opposite direction.
The biggest problem will be getting enough labour power. And therefore even more people must be prevented from retiring early. This is shamelessly being said at the present moment where both the Danish and international business conditions are pointing to an economic decline.
The panic has spread to the Social Liberal Party, too. In this party, there is no confidence in the government’s possibility of surviving the elections, and the now former Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen is manoeuvring to get Marianne Jelved replaced with the Minister of Education Margrehte Vestager as the national leader of the party in order to get maximum influence on a coming government under the leadership of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the national leader of the Liberal Party.
It is harsh to be a party leader of the capitalist parties; the night of the long knifes is always on its way, murders of party kings and queens are a life style to political parties to whom the life nerve is vote-catching and deception of the voters.
A generation of parliamentarians is worn down more and more quickly – and especially among the worn-out parties in power, the generational change is a refuge.
Nyrup Rasmussen’s government is being weakened still more by the unrest in the Social Liberal Party. An election defeat after the defeat in the euro referendum on September 28 of last year will mean the end to Nyrup Rasmussen. The present generation of Social Democratic top politicians will face a total replacement.
How is the coming generation of bourgeois politicians? They have all, from the Liberal Party and the Conservative People’s Party to the Social Democratic Party and the Youth of the Socialist People’s Party, been systematically trained to subscribe to the European Union and neo-liberalism. They are even educated for the struggle of generations; they will settle with the spoiled generation of 1968, which is now approaching the pensionable age. They are the most reactionary generation of young politicians for a long time. All the youth organizations are more rightist than their mother parties.
With this, we are not saying that the youth in general is reactionary, even though it is constantly bombarded with neo-liberal and anti-Communist propaganda. The best elements of the youth are going to the left, and the creation of a new generation of revolutionary young people, including excellent leaders, is well under way. But the young revolutionaries and progressive forces will be confronted with a united reactionary front of young capitalist politicians of all hues.
Schlüter and Co. lasted ten years. Nyrup Rasmussen and his retinues have already been in power for eight years. A change of scene is coming, and this is being amplified by the accession of George Bush as US president. The Social Democratic governments in Scandinavia and the EU are all in difficulty. The disappointment at the unredeemed promises has undermined the confidence in the Social Democrats as an alternative.
The weakness of the real leftist alternative, where strong Communist parties would be a main force, causes that the natural reaction – an increased popular current towards the left, towards the policy of class struggle – is being braked which opens up opportunities for populist rightist parties as Pia Kjaersgaard’s Danish People’s Party and for the return of the right-wing government, even though the scandals of its last reigns have hardly subsided.
It would be wrong to claim that a new right-wing wave is on its way internationally, but reaction is more and more catching the wind and will move forward. The social and political polarization will become still more visible in the years to come.
January 23, 2001
Kommunistisk Politik, No. 2, January 27, 2001
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