Özet:

One of the main characteristics of the European politics in the post-USSR era is the disappearance of communist parties. In this process, many former communist parties in the Western and the Eastern Europe were re-established under different names; however, only a few of them, which adopted different ideologies and organizational models, became stable actors in national party systems. In this context, in the reunified Germany, the successor to the SED, namely PDS, has served as an exceptional case to this situation as it survived under radically changing national and international conditions. In this study, the evolution of PDS will be analyzed in terms of structural political economic conditions, social mobilization, social protest dynamics and political institutional conditions. This research argues that both the unequal nature of the German unification and SPD's alienation to the demand for social justice by adopting the Neue Mitte approach triggered social dissatisfaction, and hence, led to a political change. Under these circumstances, PDS managed to gain the support of dissatisfied social democratic voters by the alternative populist left discourse and program resting on the principle of social justice, and afterwards, it entered a period of electoral breakthrough by its left alliance with WASG.