FRAN HEATHCOTE believes that while the the Chancellor outlined some positive steps, the government does not appreciate the scale of the cost-of-living crisis affecting working-class people, whose lives are blighted by endemic low pay
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The meltdown of Die Linke
Bundestag member SEVIM DAGDELEN describes how the Left party’s pro-war stance has created an urgent need for a political force that fights for social justice and peace and pushes back against the catastrophic societal course set by the elites
(From left), Lukas Schoen, Amira Mohamed Ali, Sahra Wagenknecht, Ralph Suikat and Christian Leye arrive for a news conference to announce the founding of a precursor to a new party in Berlin, Germany, Monday October 23 2023
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is pouring €11.5bn into the Kiev swamp, blocking Trump’s peace plan, and pushing Nato right up to Russia’s borders – no matter if it costs hundreds of thousands of lives, warns SEVIM DAGDELEN
The 2025 Budget shores up the PM’s political position with headline-grabbing welfare U-turns, but with no improvements on offer to declining public services or living standards, writes MICHAEL BURKE
The unifying victory of Irish progressive forces in the presidential campaign should be a salutary lesson to the left in this country, argues MARY GRIFFITHS CLARKE
Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
A November 15 protest in Mexico – driven by a right-wing social-media operation – has been miscast as a mass uprising against President Sheinbaum. In reality, the march was small, elite-backed and part of a wider attempt to sow unrest, argues DAVID RABY
AT THE press conference announcing the new party project, Sahra Wagenknecht commented on the war in the Middle East. She condemned the terror attacks perpetrated by Hamas.
At the same time she described the Gaza Strip as an “open-air prison” and spoke of an “unbearable situation” while calling for a political solution with Palestinians having their own state within a two-state solution.
The chairman of the Die Linke (the Left party) parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, Dietmar Bartsch, criticised this immediately, saying: “I distance myself in the strongest possible terms from the term ‘open-air prison’ used to describe the Gaza Strip at the Wagenknecht press conference.”
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In part two of May’s Berlin Bulletin, VICTOR GROSSMAN, having assessed the policies of the new government, looks at how the opposition is faring
In the recent federal elections the far-right AfD was able to reach sections of the working class on issues over which the left is divided and unable to articulate a coherent position, a situation that is replicated in a number of other European countries, argues NICK WRIGHT
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With federal elections coming up in Germany in February, NICK WRIGHT takes a look at the class forces shaping the policies of the main parties, and sees little hope of a breakthrough for the left