| Tweet |
(回答先: 独に全国的左翼政党／合同へ２党が大会（しんぶん赤旗） 投稿者 gataro 日時 2007 年 6 月 17 日 10:30:01)
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/16/europe/EU-POL-Germany-The-Left.php
Germany's Left party launches itself as united force with call to restore welfare state
The Associated PressPublished: June 16, 2007
BERLIN: Germany's opposition alliance of ex-communists and leftist former Social Democrats, The Left, launched itself as a united party on Saturday with a call from one of its leaders to "restore" the welfare state and an attack on Western "double standards" in the fight against terrorism.
A conference Saturday completed the merger of the Left Party, the successor to the former East German communists, and Election Alternative — Work and Social Justice, a western-based group of ex-Social Democrats alienated by former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's economic reforms.
Delegates elected Lothar Bisky, a veteran eastern ex-communist, and Oskar Lafontaine, a former chairman of the Social Democrats who fell out bitterly with Schroeder and left his party for the Election Alternative, as joint leaders.
The two parties ran together in the 2005 federal election, taking 8.7 percent of the vote, entering parliament as the second-biggest opposition group and draining support from the Social Democrats. In a regional election in Bremen last month, they won their first seats in a western German state legislature.
"We can become much stronger," Lafontaine said in a combative speech to more than 700 delegates.
"We are the party of the social state," he said, charging that German leaders' reform efforts over recent years "have destroyed a secure social state that gives many in Germany support and security."
Chancellor Angela Merkel's left-right "grand coalition" has built on efforts by Schroeder's center-left government to trim expensive welfare comforts, for example by pushing through a gradual increase in the retirement age to 67 from 65.
"There must be a new force, The Left, which says, 'yes, we want to restore the social state,'" Lafontaine said.
The party leader also hammered home its strongly pacifist stance, which includes calls for the withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan.
"One cannot fight terrorism if one doesn't know what it is," Lafontaine said. "If we say that terrorism is the illegal killing of people to achieve political aims, then the double standards of the West must be ended — then (U.S. President George W.) Bush and (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair and many others who have to answer for wars in violation of international law also are terrorists."
"We are the new force that wants to reintroduce international law to German foreign policy," he said.
However, the chances of The Left having a say in governing Germany in the foreseeable future look very thin.
Lafontaine arouses strong antipathy among Social Democrats, whose leaders have said they will not contemplate a federal coalition with the party even as they struggle to energize left-wing supporters as part of the conservative Merkel's government.
Social Democratic Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in an interview with the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that his party "must take the Left party very seriously."
"We must take up the gauntlet ... we have the better arguments," he was quoted as saying. "Lafontaine's promises can only work if one builds a wall around the whole of Germany and shields it from the rest of the world."
Steinmeier also stressed foreign policy objections to working with The Left.
"Afghanistan, for example: a precipitate withdrawal of the military, as Lafontaine demands, would ... endanger relations with all our partners," he said. "With the Left party's foreign policy, our main allies soon would no longer be France and the USA, but Venezuela and Bolivia instead."
投稿コメント全ログ コメント即時配信 スレ建て依頼 削除コメント確認方法
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。
掲示板,ＭＬを含むこのサイトすべての
一切の引用、転載、リンクを許可いたします。確認メールは不要です。
引用元リンクを表示してください。