The Left in Europe - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

the little man”. It scored its best election result in the parliamentary elections
of 15 December 1968, winning 13.8 percent of the valid votes. By this
time, however, the party had lost its structural influence. The Communist
trade union FLA (Freier Luxemburger Arbeiterverband) merged with the
Social Democratic trade union. On welfare policy the party loudly denounces
the government’s policy of social compromise, while its tradeunion
representatives have to share responsibility for it. In local politics the
actions of the Communists are scarcely distinguishable from that of their
Social Democratic rivals. The decline of the steel industry caused the
communist milieus in the south of the country gradually to disintegrate. It
was a measure of the esteem in which the older Communist Party leaders,
such as Dominique Urbany, Jos Grandgenet and Arthur Useldinger, were
held that the party’s structural difficulties and its inability to win over new
voter strata took so long to be reflected in the election results. 7
The democratic revolution in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the
Soviet empire hit the Communist Party of Luxembourg very hard. The KPL
had approved the crushing of the Prague Spring, had remained aloof from
the Eurocommunist ideas of the 1970s, and welcomed the Soviet intervention
in Afghanistan. Internally there was a long-lasting failure to abandon
democratic centralism. The faith in the Soviet Union or at least in the possibility
of an alternative to Western capitalism were identifying features,
and so for trade union-oriented CP members important criteria distinguishing
them from the Social Democrats. The intellectuals in the party were
convinced of the necessity of real socialism for the international balance of
power. For them their proximity to Moscow also kept them distinct from
the emerging Green movement. 8
1993: The first split
Luxemburg
In the course of the year 1990 it briefly seemed that the party might succeed
in launching a process of renewal. At the Rümeling Conference in
March and the Bettemburg Congress in December 1990 the Central Committee
was elected by secret ballot for the first time, and guidelines for a
renewal of the party were adopted by a sizable majority for the first time.
However, it proved impossible to continue this process, as it led to a hard-
7 Cf. CRP-Gabriel Lippmann: Projet Elections. Etude sur les élections législatives de juin 1999,
21.11.2000, p. 81; in : http://www.chd.lu/fr/organisation/documentation/espTele.jsp, accessed on
20.01.2009.
8 Cf. F. Fehlen: Ende oder Wende? Die Luxemburger KP vor der Zerreißprobe, in: Forum für Politik,
Gesellschaft und Kultur (118), March 1990, pp. 4-8.
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