Front from left to right: Markus Söder (CSU), Friedrich Merz (CDU) and Lars Klingbeil (SPD) present the coalition agreement [AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi]
On Tuesday afternoon, Friedrich Merz (CDU) was elected in the second round of voting and subsequently appointed as the new German Chancellor by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD).
Merz had initially failed in the first ballot—a unique occurrence in German post-war history. With 621 MPs present, Merz was six votes short of the required majority of 316 votes to become Chancellor: 310 MPs voted for him, 307 against him, there were three abstentions, and one vote was invalid. Nine MPs did not take part in the vote.
Merz’s unexpected non-election had caused feverish nervousness in all Bundestag parties. In the end, the Bundestag parties agreed to schedule a second round of voting on the same day.
Shortly before the vote, the notoriously right-wing CDU/CSU parliamentary group leader Jens Spahn announced that a new ballot would be held with the agreement of the CDU/CSU, SPD, Green and Left Party parliamentary groups. The whole of Europe, perhaps even the whole world, was watching this election. He then thanked everyone who had made a second round of voting possible so quickly.
The role of the Left Party and the Greens as essentially right-wing parties of the state could not be clearer: in the face of a looming political crisis in Berlin, they played a key role in installing Merz and paving the way for his extreme right-wing government.
The Merz government heralds a new stage in the rightward evolution of the ruling class. It is undoubtedly the most reactionary and anti-working class government since the fall of the Nazi regime 80 years ago. Its central aim is to remove the last restraints imposed on German militarism as a result of its unprecedented crimes in the Second World War. With the adoption of war credits amounting to €1 trillion on March 18, the Bundestag has already paved the way for a massive military build-up.
The coalition government of the CDU/Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) will not only rearm like Hitler. It will organise a historic onslaught on social spending to finance rearmament and establish a police state to enforce it against the enormous opposition among the population. Domestically, it will also adopt the refugee policy of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) and help the fascists’ nationalistically charged “cultural policy” achieve a breakthrough.
Leading members of the government, such as Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and State Secretary for Culture Wolfram Weimer, are politically far to the right and could easily be members of the AfD. Chancellor Merz himself embodies the interests of the financial oligarchy like no other. For four years, he headed the German branch of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager.
The SPD, which was founded more than 150 years ago under the banner of Marxism, is now the organiser of this shift to the right as a right-wing state party. Yesterday, it announced that Boris Pistorius (SPD) will remain Minister of Defense under Merz. Pistorius personifies the “new era” in foreign policy ushered in by SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who received a farewell at a militaristic spectacle on Monday evening. Pistorius has set himself the goal of making Germany “fit for war” again and preparing it for a direct war against the nuclear-armed power Russia.
Party leader Lars Klingbeil takes over as Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister. In this role, he will ensure that the costs of horrendous military spending and escalating global trade wars are borne by the working population. He will work closely with the new SPD Labor Minister Bärbel Bas, who, as a nominal “party leftist,” will push through the brutal cuts in close cooperation with the trade unions.
The coalition agreement signed yesterday reflects the reactionary personnel of the new government. The focus is on war policy and the comprehensive militarisation of society. The following goals, among others, are mentioned:
Dominance over Europe and a role for German imperialism as a world power
In the coalition agreement, the CDU/CSU and SPD define the entire globe as a zone of influence for German imperialism. According to the agreement, the German government is striving for an Africa policy that “does justice to the strategic importance of Africa,” declares that the “Indo-Pacific region” is “of elementary interest” and announces that it intends to “continue to show a presence in the region.” The “expansion of strategic partnerships with the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean” is also “of particular importance.” Overall, the aim is to “intensify bilateral relations with the countries of the Global South and expand them into a global network.”
As in the past, this global power politics means German support for genocide and war. The coalition declares the “security of Israel” to be a “fundamental German national security interest”—in the midst of the genocide committed by the far-right Netanyahu regime against the Palestinian population. At the same time, it assures the Islamist forces in Syria of support “in the stabilisation and economic reconstruction of the country”—in order to gain geopolitical influence and deport refugees.
With regard to the war against Russia, the coalition agreement announces that “military, civilian and political support for Ukraine will be substantially strengthened and reliably continued together with partners.” Germany must “for the first time since the end of the Second World War … be in a position to guarantee its own security to a much greater extent.” Germany will assume “a leading role” in the further development of the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP).
Militarisation of schools and universities
“We are anchoring our Bundeswehr [Armed Forces] even more firmly in public life and are committed to strengthening the role of youth officers, who fulfil an important educational mission in schools,” it says on page 130 in the section on “Defence policy.” It continues: “We are committed to dismantling obstacles that impede dual-use research or civil-military research cooperation, for example.” We will “eliminate the deficit that exists in Germany in the area of strategic security research and advocate its promotion in the sense of a networked understanding of security.”
Reintroduction of compulsory military service
“We are creating a new, attractive military service that is initially based on voluntary service,” explain the coalition partners. The design of this service will be based on “the criteria of attractiveness, meaningfulness and contribution to the ability to grow.” In doing so, “the Swedish military service model” is being used as a guide and “the conditions for military registration and monitoring will be created this year.”
Development of a war economy and massive armaments industry
The planning and procurement system will be “reformed” and “new implementation paths” will be enforced for major projects and future technologies. In particular, “future technologies for the Bundeswehr” are to be promoted, including “satellite systems, artificial intelligence, unmanned (also combat-capable) systems, electronic warfare, cyber, software-defined defence and cloud applications as well as hypersonic systems.” This requires “simplified access and increased exchange with research institutions, the academic sector, start-ups and industry.”
The “special infrastructure fund” of €500 billion is also designed to prepare for war. “We are simplifying the definition of requirements and approval for military construction projects and creating exemptions in construction, environmental and public procurement law as well as in the protection and dedication of military land with a Federal Armed Forces Infrastructure Acceleration Act,” it says on page 132. The “concerns and infrastructure measures for overall defence” are to be “established as an overriding public interest and prioritised in implementation over other state tasks.”
The historic rearmament and war policy will be financed by equally historic attacks on the working class. “We will make a considerable contribution to consolidation in this legislative period,” it says in the section on “budget consolidation.” The agreement only mentions a few specific measures—such as cutting citizens’ benefits—but the role model is clear: the US, where the Trump regime is ruthlessly cutting social spending in the interests of the financial oligarchy and destroying all existing social rights.
The deeply anti-worker policy of the new federal government is based on the support of all Bundestag (Federal Parliament) parties. The Greens provided the CDU/CSU and SPD with the necessary two-thirds majority in the Bundestag to pass the war credits. The Left Party backed it in the Bundesrat (Federal Council). And the trade unions are also firmly on the side of the government. They reaffirmed their loyalty to the rearmament course and worked systematically in recent weeks to isolate the wage struggles at the post office, in the public sector and at the Berlin Transport Company, and to prevent a joint all-out strike by the working class.
The broad support for militarism and social spending cuts by all Bundestag parties and trade unions shows that the struggle against fascism, war and social inequality can only be waged through the independent mobilisation of the working class. In its statement on the formation of the government, the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) therefore called for “the establishment of rank-and-file committees in workplaces and neighbourhoods that will allow workers to take the fight against mass redundancies and wage cuts into their own hands and combine it with the fight against war.”
The statement continues:
We counterpose the international unity of the workers to the growth of nationalism, trade war and rearmament. The war can only be stopped and social and democratic rights can only be defended if capitalism itself is abolished and replaced by a socialist society in which people’s needs, not profit interests, take centre stage. The big banks and corporations must be expropriated and placed under democratic control.
This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site Here
The US federal debt [Photo: Federal Reserve Economic Database]
On Saturday, May 3, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) held the annual International Online May Day Rally. The event took place at a critical juncture in international geopolitics, which determines life-and-death questions of the working class—who, in recent weeks and months, have demonstrated growing militancy in their struggles against the capitalist establishment. WSWS posted both the video and text of the opening speech delivered by WSWS International Editorial Board chairman David North today (May 05). We are reposting the video here and we invite the workers, youth, intellectuals and all those who want to defeat austerity, fascism, dictatorship, genocide, war and social retrogression to seriously study this speech and the other speeches, and resolutely decide to join the international Trotskyist movement and build the ICFI as the only revolutionary leadership of the international working class to fight for world socialism.
Anidda, February 2, 2025, A discussion with Ashoka Handagama by Upali Amarasinghe, p19. ↩︎
‘[A]ntisemitism moved many thousands of “ordinary” Germans—and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.’ Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 9. ↩︎
In “My Thoughts on Handagama’s Rani,” published in Daily FT on March 281, Jagath Weerasinghe—artist, archaeologist, and cultural commentator—extends, rationalises, and legitimises the central reactionary thesis of Asoka Handagama’s recent film Rani. This is a film whose underlying narrative, presented in the guise of artistic subtlety and aesthetic ambiguity, represents a deeply ideological falsification of history. Weerasinghe’s endorsement of the director’s central proposition2—reproduced in Sinhala translation in Anidda on March 30 by Vidura Munasinghe—is emblematic of a broader trend among the middle-class intelligentsia and the pseudo-left, who serve as ideological apologists for the crimes of the capitalist state.
A scene in the film “Rani” by Asoka Handagama
The core thesis promoted by both Weerasinghe and the film is that the atrocities carried out during the 1988–90 period—enforced disappearances, state death squads, mass graves, torture camps, and extrajudicial killings, as well as the fascistic violence perpetrated by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)—were not the products of concrete political decisions, class interests, and specific agencies of state and party power. Instead, they were the result of a society in which “violence had become systemic and normalised.” Weerasinghe writes: authoritarian regimes perpetuate brutality “for political gain and self-preservation, creating an environment where violence is not only carried out by those in power but is also internalised, accepted, and even participated in by ordinary citizens. In such a climate, even those with moral integrity can find themselves complicit—whether through silence, fear, or the gradual erosion of ethical boundaries.”
This pseudo-sociological claim—that violence was embedded in the very fabric of society and was collectively enacted by the masses—leads to a profoundly reactionary conclusion: that there is a shared moral guilt for the crimes of the period, borne by everyone, without any class distinction. Rani—the eponymous protagonist, who is portrayed as initially a passive observer of the surrounding terror but who gradually becomes emotionally and psychologically implicated—and every other defenseless rural man and woman, the worker, the unemployed youth, who were terrorized for their lives both by the fascism of the JVP and by state repression, are depicted as responsible for and willing participants in the atrocities.
Was this culpability moral, political, or both? While Weerasinghe leaves no doubt that he intends to assign moral culpability to the masses—an implication clearly shared by the director—this vulgar theory leaves the spectator wondering who bears political accountability. That is precisely the issue at hand. The film and its director’s apologetics place the blame on the “ordinary” masses. Political responsibility follows moral culpability. Consequently, the oppressed are identified with the oppressor, giving rise to a vision of a society that is hopeless, anarchic, and devoid of historical or scientific grounding. This approach is crudely ahistorical, impressionistic, and unscientific—and it serves a definite class interest.
The capitalist state agents of terror, its political leadership, the military-intelligence apparatus, and the misdirected cadre of the JVP are equated, and these contradictory forces are placed on the same grounds as the poor and the working people, constituting a homogeneous society of “ordinary citizens.” They are all morally and indiscriminately dissolved into an amorphous, classless “we.” The final anecdote of the film, which Weerasinghe refers to, is founded upon this proposition and leads to the conclusion that the director wanted the viewers of his film to read into as the alternative narrative: the killing of Richard de Soysa was not necessarily ordered by President R. Premadasa, nor did it serve the interests of the latter or the ruling class. This is a liquidationist proposition that casts doubt upon many other suspected assassinations and abductions of the period, getting the political leadership of the state off the hook. In conclusion, this is where the “broader and more layered exploration of the underlying social and political realities,” which Weerasinghe claims the purported “fiction” allows its viewer to delve into, lands.
Such a political framework is not new. It has appeared time-to-time in bourgeois and petty-bourgeois historiography, where the responsibility for state crimes—pogroms, wars, genocides—is shifted onto “society” or “human nature.” One prominent historical analogue is Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), which absurdly claimed that the Holocaust was not the outcome of a historically developed political program of German imperialism and the fascist state of the Nazi Third Reich, but the result of a deep-seated, inherent antisemitism among the German people3. Thus, the “ordinary” Germans were willing accomplices in the Final Solution, the extermination of over six million Jews. Hitler was only the final executioner of this ideology. This deadly distortion of history has been widely discredited by serious historians, not only for its factual inaccuracy, but for the reactionary political implications it carries4.
Weerasinghe offers no sociological or historical research to substantiate his claims—nor does the director, who admits to conducting little serious investigation prior to the making of the film. However, similar arguments have been advanced internationally through certain psychological and sociological theories that lack rigorous empirical grounding. Chief among these are the studies of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose respective experiments on obedience to authority and simulated prison environments have been widely cited to suggest that ordinary individuals can become complicit in acts of cruelty under systemic pressure. Both studies have come under sustained criticism for methodological shortcomings, ethical violations, and issues of reproducibility. More importantly, when abstracted from their immediate experimental context and applied uncritically to complex social phenomena like mass political violence, these theories devolve into a kind of psychological determinism. They obscure the class forces and political programs that shape historical events and instead offer a right-wing, pseudo-scientific narrative in which atrocities are the inevitable result of human nature or diffuse social norms—thereby absolving the state and the ruling elite of political responsibility.
In the Sri Lankan context, this argument has especially reactionary consequences. It leads to the notion that the Sinhalese majority are collectively responsible for the 1983 pogrom against Tamils, and ultimately, for the genocide in Mullivaikkal in 2009. A section of the middle class of the country harbours this ideology, which was once starkly expressed by Pubudu Jayagoda, a leader of the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), who claimed that racism is deeply ingrained in the Sinhalese “society”5, reducing complex political phenomena to abstract moral failures of entire ethnic groups of conflicting classes6. This is not only unscientific and historically false, but it plays directly into the hands of the capitalist state and chauvinist forces, who exploit communalism to divide the working class on racialist lines to prevent unified struggle.
Marxism begins not with moralism, but with the concrete analysis of social relations and historical processes. The essential questions that must be addressed in any serious assessment of the 1988–90 period are the following: What were the objective causes of the JVP-led insurrection and its fascistic methods? What class forces were involved in the repression? What was the role of imperialism, the IMF, and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie in creating the social crisis that produced this violence? And above all, was there an alternative revolutionary leadership that could have mobilized the working class against both the JVP and the capitalist state?
The JVP uprising was not a spontaneous eruption of madness, nor was it the inevitable product of a culture of violence. It emerged from a deep social crisis rooted in the failure of the post-colonial bourgeoisie and the betrayal of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1964, which had entered into a class collaborationist coalition with the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). In the aftermath of this betrayal, tens of thousands of rural youth—disillusioned by the parliamentary left and devastated by the economic liberalization policies of the J. R. Jayewardene regime—were drawn to the radical rhetoric of the JVP.
The JVP, despite its populist posture, was never a Marxist organization. It rejected the class struggle, dismissed the internationalism of the Fourth International, and relied on petty-bourgeois nationalism and adventurist terror. In 1987–89, it launched a campaign of assassinations and fascistic violence that paralyzed the working class and the middle class. The response of the state was a campaign of ruthless repression. Death squads, torture camps such as Batalanda, and state-sponsored terror claimed the lives of an estimated 60,000 youth.
A scene of mass killings and daily-life in rural Sri Lanka in September 1989. Photo by Prasanna Hennayake
This was not a case of generalized ”ideology of violence” within society. It was class warfare, waged from above by the capitalist state to defend private property, intimidate the working class, and preserve bourgeois rule. It was facilitated by the political vacuum created by the betrayals of the old left and the inability of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), to politically break the working class and the rural poor from the grip of the petty-bourgeois JVP and other Stalinist and Maoist organizations in time to develop an alternative mass leadership.
However, it was only the RCL, the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world party of the working class, which alone insisted that the fascist violence of the JVP and the state terror could only be opposed by the independent political mobilization of the working class on a socialist and internationalist program. In November 1988, in order to mobilize the independent power of the working class, it called for a united front of working-class organizations to fight both state repression and JVP fascism, as an immediate practical measure. Instead of supporting this effort, the LSSP, the Communist Party (CP), Nawa Sama Samaja Party (NSSP), and Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC) aligned themselves with the terror of the UNP regime, which armed them against the JVP. This betrayal aided the state in unleashing mass repression on the rural poor of the South and launching its racist war against the oppressed Tamil people.
None of these dynamics are on the historical balance sheet of those who seek to “push” the contemporary youth “to the very edges of these established frameworks.”
Today, the pseudo-left has once again emerged as a shield for the ruling class, which has endorsed the JVP/NPP as its saviour. The JVP-led NPP is using its parliamentary position not to uncover or prosecute the war crimes of the past, but to bury them. Its recent tabling and debating of the Batalanda Commission report—gathering dust for over two decades—is a cynical gesture meant to divert public attention from IMF austerity measures. The NPP is objectively poised not to challenge the military, nor the UNP, nor the interests of imperialism. It fears that any real reckoning with the crimes of 1988–90 will expose not only the state, but the politics of the JVP itself.
The working class and rural poor must reject the “common guilt” thesis advanced in Rani and promoted by figures like Weerasinghe. They must demand justice based not on emotional reconciliation, but on historical truth and political accountability7.
Neither of these are possible within the capitalist state. It requires the building of a revolutionary socialist movement of the working class to finally break the grip of imperialism, overturn the legacy of terror, and unify the oppressed—Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim—on the basis of a common struggle against exploitation.
The film’s thesis, and Weerasinghe’s article by extension, constitute an aestheticized historical falsification, a rebranding of a reactionary historical revisionism in the garb of “critical reflection.” The function of art, if it is to be progressive, is not to obscure these truths but to clarify them. Rani fails in this most fundamental task. It replaces history with impressionism, class analysis with pseudo-science, and revolutionary clarity with reactionary confusion.
Anidda, February 2, 2025, A discussion with Ashoka Handagama by Upali Amarasinghe, p19. ↩︎
‘[A]ntisemitism moved many thousands of “ordinary” Germans—and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.’ Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 9. ↩︎
