This past week was one for the history books. The German parliament  amended the constitutional debt brake so as to enable unlimited military spending, irrespectively of how deeply into the red it will push the federal government’s budget. Meanwhile, none of that fiscal generosity is to be extended to investment in hospitals, education, firefighters, kindergartens, pensions, green technologies etc. In brief, when it comes to funding life, austerity remains part of Germany’s constitutional order. Only investments in death have been released from austerity’s constitutional clutches.

The underlying reason for introducing this stunning change to Germany’s constitution is simple: German automakers are now too uncompetitive. They can’t profitably sell their cars to civilians in Germany or abroad. So, they demand that the German state buys tanks that Rheinmetall will be making on Volkswagen’s disused production lines. To get the state to pay for this, the constitutional brake of government deficits had to be bypassed. Always eager to serve their Big Business masters, parties of permanent centrist governments were deployed to usher in this cynical constitutional change, one that annuls Germany’s post-war commitment to peace and disarmament.

To change the constitution, the centrist parties needed a two-thirds majority in both houses of Germany’s federal parliament: the lower house, the Bundestag, but also the upper chamber, the Bundesrat where each state is represented by its size and via the coalition state government ruling over it. While the centrist parties secured their two-thirds majority in the outgoing Bundestag, they faced a serious problem in the Bundesrat. Die Linke, the “left Party”, whom we congratulated for their good election result recently, had the opportunity to cause the state governments in which it was party to (as part of a state-level coalition) to abstain in the Bundesrat vote. That would have blocked the constitutional amendment and would have dealt a lethal blow to military Keynesianism’s insidious return. Alas, the leadership of Die Linke chose not to use their power, their vote in the Bundesrat, to do this. They, in short, joined the warmongering radical centrists in their dangerous, extremely costly rearmament folly.

The voters of Die Linke are, rightly, enraged, with some of them even calling for breaking up the state coalitions in which the party participates and expelling the officials involved. Already Die Linke’s failure to rise up against the genocide in Palestine, and the subsequent totalitarian treatment by the German state of those protesting the genocide, has tarnished Die Linke in the eyes of progressives not just in Germany but beyond too.

Nothing obliterates the ethical standing of a political party of the left more efficiently than a leadership overly keen to be ‘accepted’ by a radicalised centre constantly moving towards the xenophobic, warmongering ultra-right. It was terrible enough that the leaders of Die Linke felt the need to turn a blind eye to Israel’ genocidal apartheid project. Now, this week, they have taken the next step to political oblivion: they have used their votes in the Bundesrat to ensconce, for the first time since 1945, military Keynesianism in the German constitution.

Good night Die Linke. And good luck.

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