http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7e5ecbcc-3c2d-11de-acbc-00144feabdc0.html
Outrage at poll that breached Berlin Wall
By Chris Bryant and Stefan Wagstyl
Published: May 9 2009 02:26 | Last updated: May 9 2009 02:26
For Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, the East German local elections of May 7 1989 were “the beginning of the end of the GDR”.
The fraudulent polls, staged 20 years ago this week, were a trigger for modest protests which, much to the surprise of those involved, led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet empire.
A few hundred East German opposition activists set a precedent that has been followed in other former Communist countries, most recently Moldova. Election protests replaced strikes as the most effective form of opposition to discredited governments and contributed to the downfall of once-powerful leaders, not least Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic.
As Andrew Wilson, of the European Council for Foreign Relations, a research centre, says: “A stolen election became a kind of trigger for moral outrage that could bring down a regime.”
This all seemed most unlikely when Egon Krenz, a senior official of the Party for Democratic Socialism (SED), appeared on East German television in May 1989 to announce that his party had won 98.85 per cent of the vote, after a 98.77 per cent turnout.
The near-100 per cent acclamation was not unusual in totalitarian East Germany. But for the first time hundreds of brave East Germans reacted by exercising their legal right to observe the counting of votes.
Electoral monitors fielded by churches and other groups proved the government’s figures were a sham: about 10 per cent of voters had voted against the regime by putting a line through every name on the list, while about the same proportion of the electorate had not voted at all.
On the evening of May 7 protests broke out and opposition groups began marking the seventh of every month with a rally at Alexanderplatz in central Berlin. “The point was to try and delegitimise the government by demonstrating that the election was a farce,” says Mario Schatta, a member of the influential Weissensee peace circle, which organised the protests.
Wolfgang Templin, a dissident leader who was deported in 1988, says the focus on voting rights succeeded because it represented a third way between a potentially dangerous uprising or strike and the likely ineffectiveness of calls for political reform. “It was an approach which focused on legality and openness … More and more people began to ask the decisive question: ‘Why can’t we decide ourselves? We want to choose’,” he says.
Historians argue about the starting point of the fall of Communism. Polish commentators point out that events in East Germany were preceded by the appointment in 1978 of John Paul II, the Polish Pope, who became an inspiration for anti-Communist protesters, the birth in 1980 of the Solidarity trade union and by negotiations over free elections, which began in February 1989. Many Russian experts say Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reform Soviet Communism from 1985 were crucial and came before any hint of regime change in eastern Europe.
Mr Templin says that just as GDR activists were inspired by Poland’s Solidarity’s calls for free elections, so Czechoslovak dissidents would later be encouraged by the East Germans’ campaign against voting fraud.
Later, post-election protests became a route to regime change. For example, in Serbia, in September 2000, public anger was prompted by efforts by Slobodan Milosevic, the president, to deny Vojislav Kostunica, the opposition leader, victory in presidential elections. Demonstrators seized parliament in a display of people power that forced Milosevic from office.
In Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, the president, ousted the veteran Eduard Shevardnadze after public protests against a parliamentary election in November 2003 that was widely seen as fraudulent. The demonstrators stormed parliament in what became known as the Rose Revolution and Mr Shevardnadze was forced to agree to early presidential polls, where Mr Saakashvili triumphed.
In Ukraine, efforts by Leonid Kuchma, the president, to ensure the November 2004 presidential election was won by Viktor Yanukovich, his favourite, backfired when widespread evidence of abuse powered support for Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition leader. Hundreds of thousands gathered daily in Kiev before Mr Kuchma surrendered to public pressure in the Orange Revolution and authorised fresh polls.
But election protesters have learnt success is not automatic. If the regime stands firm and the security services remain loyal, demonstrators cannot win. In Belarus, for example, President Alexander Lukashenko, the long-standing dictatorial leader, has squashed several post-election protests by demonstrators claiming fraud. In Moldova this year, opposition protesters took to the streets after parliamentary elections won by the ruling Communist party and accused the authorities of fraud. But the party saw off the challenge.
The Moldovan oppositionists’ case was undermined by the fact that observers marshalled by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation largely cleared the authorities of blame. The OSCE, a Europe-wide security and political rights body, has played a key role in determining election legitimacy since the early 1990s.
However, Russia has questioned its impartiality, accusing it of serving western interests and forcing it to pull out of monitoring Russia’s 2007 parliamentary polls and last year’s presidential election.
While Moscow’s actions do nothing to advance democracy, they show the authorities recognise the subversive power of elections in an authoritarian state. The lessons learnt in May 1989 have not been forgotten.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
