New German left party overtakes Greens in poll

international | politics / elections | news report Monday July 18, 2005 18:37 by Johnny Cash - Death to Bourgeois Culture Fanclub

in the wake of respect, SSP, Portugeuse Left Bloc...

The newly-formed Left Party, composed of dissatisfied Social democrats and former East German communists, rallied in Berlin on Sunday with polls showing their voter support has overtaken the Greens.

Delegates at an extraordinary Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) congress supported the measure to join a splinter far-left party by 74.6 percent, easily reaching the two-thirds majority requirement.

With the move, the PDS will now be known, together with former Social Democrat chairman Oskar Lafontaine's Election Alternative for Social Justice (WASG) party, as "Die Linkspartei," or "The Left Party."

With only two months to go before the general election, opinion polls showed that The Left Party netting 10 percent of the vote, compared to 7 percent for the Greens, junior partners in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's coalition government.

The result would make the new party the third strongest political force in Germany after Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats with a support rate of 43 percent and Schroeder's Social Democrats (SPD) at 27 percent.

According to an Emnid Institute poll, The Left Party has a 23 percent support in the five states made up by the former Republic of Democratic Germany, while in the west it got nearly 10 percent of support, almost equaling with the Greens in most places.

The PDS were the successors to Erich Honecker's SED party thatruled former Republic of Democratic Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. After reunification, it has remained a political force in Germany's five eastern states.

By merging with Lafontaine's leftist splinter party, the PDS hope to turn The Left Party into a socialist force to be reckoned with should early elections go ahead in September, as widely anticipated. Pollsters have already forecast that the alliance could win 12 percent of the vote.

"This is an extremely important chance for us," leader of the PDS Gregor Gysi said




The coalition of the Christian-Democratic Union (CSU) and the Bavarian Christian-Social Party (CSU) remains the top political group for German voters, according to a poll by Infratest-Dimap. 42 per cent of respondents would vote for the alliance in the next federal election.

The governing Social Democratic Party (SPD) of chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is second with 27 per cent, followed by the coalition of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the Electoral Alternative for Labour and Social Justice (WASG) with 11 per cent, the Green Party (Grune) with nine per cent, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) with eight per cent.

On Jul. 1, Schroeder deliberately lost a no-confidence motion in the Federal Diet after a 151-296 vote, with 148 abstentions. German president Horst Koehler has 21 days to decide whether to call an early election. There is growing speculation that the ballot could be scheduled for Sept. 18.

In an interview with Berliner Zeitung published on Jul. 16, CDU chancellor candidate Angela Merkel said Germany would not commit troops to the Iraq coalition effort under her guidance, saying, "We would not have done that and we will not do that." Germany committed 2,200 soldiers to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.