Even before panic hit the financial markets the UK press was determinedly ignoring the big victory of German train drivers last week. Apart from the Financial Times, which knows its role is to pass on even bad news to the capitalist class internationally. The train drivers won an 11% pay increase!

The pay campaign started back in March last year. The main unions agreed to a 4.5% increase in July 2007. The smaller GDL train drivers’ union refused to go along with that settlement. They broke from the national negotiation and campaigned for a separate deal and a 31% pay increase.

In August, 95.8% of its conference delegates voted for strike action, starting with freight and then moving to hit passenger travel. The GDL victory was won despite legal action and the fact that the DGB, the German TUC equivalent, supported the 4.5% settlement. So now the big bureaucrats have got egg on their faces – militancy has paid!

The GDL launched a campaign of intermittent strikes and at one point last year both French and German railways were simultaneously hit by industrial action. Significantly there was substantial public support for the workers in both countries. The threat of US/UK neo-liberal reforms from newly elected Sarkozy in France and Merkel, elected back in 2005, isn’t as popular in Europe as we’re supposed to believe.

Deutsche Bahn, the German state owned railway is a massive operation. It has a net income of over a billion pounds and carries about 120m people over 21,700 miles of track. True to the high standards of British journalism the FT says it employs 400,000 workers and the The Times says 240,000. Hopefully a German comrade can enlighten us. I can see our Marxist press becoming the only place to go for accurate information!

But the real issue is that, surprise surprise, the coalition CDU/SPD government headed by Christian Democrat Angela Merkel wants to privatize the lot, however many jobs there are. Somebody should tell them about how brilliantly Maggie Thatcher’s privatization of rail has worked over here. (see Andy Viner’s article in Socialist Appeal 159 ).

There are other international lessons in this campaign. The German train drivers knew that they were getting worse treatment than their Europeans counterparts and that contributed to their campaign. According to the The Times, a 40-year-old German train driver with two children earns about €1,800 a month, compared with €2,420 in The Netherlands, €3,140 in Spain, €2,770 in France and €4,800 in Switzerland.

We are always being told by Gordon Brown how we need to be internationally competitive, here’s the other side of the coin. Is there any better case for international trade union co-operation and solidarity. This victory should give confidence to workers throughout Europe. Already German public sector worker have just put in an 8% pay claim. And the doctors are asking for 10%. Watch this space.

Shift to left in German elections

Yesterday’s results from German State elections, especially Hesse, were a blow to the Christian Democrats. They showed a shift to the left in the first electoral challenge to the CDU since Angela Merkel’s victory in 2005.

A reactionary campaign by the CDU’s Hesse State Premier Roland Koch, calling for deportation of ‘foreign criminals’, attacks on ‘multicturalist coddling’ of immigrants and harsher punishment for youth crime has badly backfired.

A few months ago he was expected to win easily. Former CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl joined in, saying to Bild magazine that “increasing crime committed by immigrants wouldn’t be stemmed by making it a taboo”. Instead the CDU got their lowest vote since 1966 in an important state, home to the European Central Bank and Frankfurt Stock Exchange, which they had held for a decade.

The CDU vote fell 12% to 37.8%, the SPD candidate won 36.7 and they both have 42 seats in the 112 seat parliament. The Free Democrats (traditional CDU partners) got 9.4%, the Greens 8%.

The new Left (Die Linke) party took 5.1%, just enough to get them into the state parliament. It is a coalition of West German left groups led by former SPD Minister Oscar Lafontaine and the PDS - the main remnant of the old East German Communist Party.

In the other election result yesterday from Lower Saxony the CDU vote also fell. But at 42.5 remains sufficient to form a coalition with the Free Democrats who took 8.2%. The Greens received 8.1% of the vote and the Left party 7.1%.

These election results will sharpen the debate within the SPD which is in a ‘grand coalition’ government with the CDU at national level. It has been shifting slightly to the left with talk about the need for social justice, partly in an attempt to stop a drift of votes to the Left party but also reflecting pressure from its own left wing.

Attempts by the CDU to mobilize on racism have been rejected. And the emergence of what amounts to a five party system shows Germany is entering a period of increased political instability.