Red Pepper News

No to the state of exception

The following statement is from various trade unions, left political parties and civil liberties groups in France.

Joint Communiqué, Paris, November 8th, 2005. Confronted by a revolt born from the accumulation of inequalities and discrimination in the “banlieues” (suburbs of Paris) and the poor areas, the French government has just passed a new and extremely serious threshold in the escalation of security measures. Even in May 1968, when the situation was a lot more dramatic, the public authorities did not use the extreme measure of declaring a state of emergency. The proclamation of the state of emergency is the answer to a revolt whose causes are profound and well known even at the level of state repression.

New ‘Left Party’ wins 54 seats in German Parliament

James O’Nions.  The Linkspartei, the new party to the left of the ruling ‘Red-Green’ coalition, has won 8.7% of the vote in Germany’s general election and a provisional 54 seats in the Bundestag.  The elections themselves have created deadlock with neither the social democratic SPD nor the conservative CDU able to command a majority, even with their traditional partners on board, the Greens (51 seats) in the case of the SPD, and the ultra neo-liberal Free Democrats (61 seats) in the case of the CDU.

Formed only in July, the Linkspartei is a fusion of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the east German communists, and the Labour and Social Justice Party (WASG), which was itself only recently formed by disaffected leftwing SPD members, trade unionists and some smaller leftwing organisations.  The WASG’s profile was given a boost when charismatic former SPD finance minister Oskar Lafontaine joined and became a leading spokesperson.  Now as the other parties attempt to make alliances to form a government, the Linkspartei is celebrating a result which  makes them both a serious force in German politics, and a leading light in the ‘left of the left’ across Europe.

On the streets of Thessaloniki

Yannis Almpanis writes: About 20,000 people demonstrated yesterday in Thessaloniki against the neoliberal policies of the Greek conservative government. It was the biggest national demonstration in Thessaloniki since the June 2003 EU summit.