We must change now – that is the right course of action

Dear comrades, friends and guests,

what I have to say to you today takes the form somewhat of a closing speech, I should tell you, and afterwards you should sing the ‘International’.
I’m going to make a second observation for the media: Oskar Lafontaine is probably going to leave during my speech. So that you don’t misunderstand this, it’s to do with the fact that he has a plane to catch, and has nothing to do with whatever I might be saying at that moment.
On Friday I was at the Catholic convention. I hope I am not offending you by saying this, but the culture was somehow similar.

And now, a little bit of criticism, which has nothing to do with the Bundestag faction’s report. I’ll talk first about the positive, and then about the not so positive: the two parties that we united just about one year ago have moved together, but are not yet truly together. So I’m telling you clearly, that after Cottbus we have to really unite immediately.
 
I’ve learned from some new experiences. Since 2002 I’ve known how hard it is to cope with defeat. Now I also know how hard it is to endure victory. I think we have to learn that. We’ve only been dealing with the issue of East-West problem for a year in the form of the Linkspartei.PDS and the WASG. I find it extremely interesting to hear the prejudices and the reasons for them. I will demonstrate this. What do the comrades from the old West say, when they talk about the old East? They say: “I think they are too one-sided”. And when I speak to comrades from the old East, and they say: “you can’t deny though that there are a couple of sectarians and nutters in the West”. I hear this, and I think: one lot object to one type of criticism, the others to the other type. We can’t reach each other, because essentially we want the other side to become like we already are. With things this way there can be no unification.

Let me briefly say something about history: you know that the Linkspartei.PDS was created out of the SED via a very complicated process of democratic reform. In the GDR it had always worked in coalitions with the block parties, who suddenly declared they wanted nothing more to do with it. That means from 1990 onwards there was a consensus to marginalise this one party. So it fought for acceptance. When one fights for acceptance, one develops certain odd characteristics. That comes from situations, for example, where some CDU bloke mentions you in a positive light, and then you’re proud in some way, because you don’t want to be marginalized any more.

In short: when one struggles for acceptance as successfully as the Landestag parties in the former East, one makes one or two compromises too many. What is so awful about just acknowledging that and saying: “on this matter we can certainly make amends”?

Now I’m moving on to the Left Party people in the old West: they are very different. Some have come from the SPD, some from the Greens. We even have some from the CDU and the CSU. However we also have a lot who weren’t in any party. And then we have some from little clubs. Well good. I want to depict it to you thus: let’s assume you are 19 years old. I’m telling you, you’re smarter when you’re 19 than ever again in your whole life. I know from personal experience. What I knew then is almost all gone. What I know now, I know a bit more deeply than I did then. That’s true. But it’s a limited spectrum. So, one is relatively bright. One is 19 and decides to be left wing. Then you join an organization that has 35 members, and you spend seven nights agreeing on a manifesto, fuelled by the worst red wine imaginable, a lot of cigarettes, and just a little bit of heavy petting. Seven days later you agree on a 25-page paper with hard arguments. You’ve finished off the American president, and there’s nothing left of the CDU, FDP, SDP or even the Greens. The media and German companies have been exposed. You’re quite proud of it too. But there’s one tiny problem: the President of the United States is so arrogant he doesn’t read any of it, and neither do the other parties. Not one newspaper writes about it either. The unions say nothing; the church says nothing – silence. At first, you’re angry. I understand that. But three weeks later, a Marxist-Leninist club from three streets away, boasting 45 members, appears and writes 35 sides to you, explaining you don’t know your arse from your elbow; that you’ve just regurgitated every piece of revisionist claptrap that there has ever been; that you have neither analysed deeply nor even really understood anything. You read this and you’re furious. The upshot is you have to spend another seven nights on the same red wine and cigarettes. Then the decision has to be taken whether or not to answer. Then there are controversial votes, which have to be repeated in part. Seven days later, you send 45 pages in response. And then you’re in a sect. It’s that simple. And now I just want to know if one or other of you is going to say: “that could never have happened to me”. I wouldn’t say that of myself.

What is the problem? The problem is that society in the old Federal Republic of Germany never had an expressed need for a force to the left of social democracy after 1949. But that need has come now. It affected the 2005 election results. Now I’ll tell my comrades from the old East: in this way a development began in the old West, which is decisive. Everything depends on this development! Now we are already in four Landestags. A top candidate says a couple of sentences in Hessen and is broadcast on Bavarian radio. Without knowing it. He’d already said lots of smart things before, without any of them being broadcast. It is another form of perception, and therefore entails another style of politics. So, when one lot say something doesn’t agree with the origins or with the thinking, the Lefties in the West can in turn accept it. That means when we say we have to change right now, and then we will be the new left, together, that is the right approach. If we only want one lot to become what the other lot already is, we’re not going to do it. I want to send you away with that thought.

Then of course certain structures are different. Those who are a little older and came from the GDR did not know any democratic structures there. They have developed these structures themselves. When you have developed them yourself, you’re especially attuned to democracy: has he been asked, has the committee met and so on. And somebody like Oskar Lafontaine has lived his whole conscious life inside democratic structures. He could always be voted in or out. That’s not of primary importance to him. For him, the key issue was: how do I bring something to pass? This makes him a bit different. And so I want to say to the people who always have to criticize him somehow: dear comrades, we should be grateful to him for the success that we wouldn’t have had without him! I’m telling you quite clearly: we can’t let ourselves be talked out of supporting Oskar Lafontaine by our political opponents and certain journalists. If we do that, it’s like we were all crazy. We’re not crazy. I beg you.

Then there is always of course the exciting question: government, or not? Is that the trap of great deception or not? Here there’s an east-west divide that has its reasons. If I’d been marginalized for so long, always working outside parliament and never made it into a state parliament, then I’d begin to glorify it and say: “yeah, that’s great. True opposition is always non-parliamentary. It’s good I wasn’t admitted into parliament.” And to a certain extent, that’s true. Mr Schäuble once said to me: in his opinion, we are not true to the constitution as long as we believe that the non-parliamentary movement is more important than the parliamentary. I said: “I don’t understand that at all, Mr. Schäuble. You also place non-parliamentary movements at the forefront.” Then he said: “what makes you say that?” Then I said: “when I think of the Deutsche Bank, the Catholic Church, they’re non-parliamentary powers”. There are more. Anyway, I just want to say: I know how it happens that one glorifies something because it is what it is, and because one has never had it another way.

Now I want to return to the East. At first we suffered a lot in the old East because we had very few members in the former West and got maybe 1 percent of the turnout after a plucky election campaign. We wished for better results. If we had had results a decade ago like we have now in Niedersachsen and Hessen, you’d all have been drunk for 48 hours. That’s the truth. Now something else is happening too: we used to have six heavyweight state associations, not one of which was in the old West. Now they’re becoming more influential and getting seats in Landestags, getting more members. When they get more influence, they of course make the old ones a bit less influential. That is the problem. I want to say to you: why do we enter a party? Not for masturbation, but to change society. And only when we are strong all over Germany can we change it!

Back to the question of government or not. We always pretend we have lots of room for manoeuvre. In reality we don’t have any at all. For example: there is an election in Brandenburg. Three parties are elected: CDU, SPD and us. The SPD say that they want to build community schools with us, they want a state sponsored business sector, want to award public contracts completely differently, and they find that we’re much nearer to them. So, they want to govern together with us. And then we refuse. We have a request: govern with the CDU. We have to say this if we want to stay in opposition. There, we remain pure and noble, and this is so vital to us that we turn down the opportunity to govern because of it. We can do that once. If we do it three times, we won’t be in the state parliament any more. I always say we make out we have scope that we don’t really have. But there’s also the opposite mistake. We enter government and become as neo-liberal as the other parties already are and make ourselves completely superfluous in a day. For this reason we should not dismiss this approach, but always say which political changes we expect. There can be compromises over time, the length of each step, but not over the direction. If we entered federal government and then say suddenly, well ok, the soldiers can stay in Afghanistan, well ok, we’ll keep Harz IV, alrighty then, well keep 67 as the pension age, we would suddenly be pointless. There are already four neoliberal parties – Germany doesn’t need a fifth! So it’s right for us to say that the SPD must make big strides in our direction. It must become socio-democratic at least. That’s not much to ask for from the SPD, since Schröder deprived it of its socio-democracy. That’s the truth, same today as before!

I want us to learn to take a more pragmatic approach. I know our parties in the old East. You have to imagine, they have been in parliament in some cases for 18 years. They have been in the opposition for 18 years. They’re twiddling their thumbs a little bit. They want a new role. Those of you in the old West can only judge when you’ve been in state parliament for 18 years too. That’s gonna take a while. I just want you to be a bit more open-minded with each other, so that we can unite.
 
However, we don’t just have east and west, we have currents too. I think it’s good that we have these currents and working groups, also that they have different approaches. I ask only one thing: we should not organise any campaign around victory and defeat, but around the political direction of the party. That is something completely different. Sometimes it looks like a matter of life and death. However, it isn’t. We want to chance society, not knock the living daylights out of each other!
 
Now comes the thrilling issue of pigeonholes. This causes us problems as well. I was at the Hessen party conference, and I enjoyed it a lot. Two people spoke before me. One of them said: “I have to tell you, dear comrades, that I would ideally be a communist, but I don’t want you to think of Stalin or something. I’m thinking of Karl Marx.” Then the next one: “Yeah, I have to tell you too, ideally I would be a social democrat, but I don’t want you to think of Scharping. I’m of course thinking of August Bebel.” Before the third one could get up and tell me he was really a Trotskyist, but wasn’t really thinking of Trotsky but of someone else, I got up. I said: “you know, I’ve always thought the same way. I’ve always tried to find the pigeonhole for myself and told the media, who said perhaps I was a social democrat, ‘yes, but if so then like August Bebel’. I know all of that. I don’t think it gets us anywhere. They are twentieth-century pigeonholes we need to get rid of. Now we are the new Left of the 21^st century, and we don’t need them any more. We need to answer the questions of our century, and then we will become a new force!”

I would like now to say something about our unification: we still always ask ourselves: how many are from the Linkspartei.PDS and how many from the WASG? Is it all even etc.? I’ll depict something that moved me even more – no names of course – namely, that even in our party committee one notices how one side votes and how the other votes. Then somebody told me he voted against his own will, but didn’t want to let his people down.

Dear comrades, that was acceptable for the first year, but from now it’s strictly forbidden. Each person in the party committee must vote according to his or her convictions, nothing else! So must majorities be formed.

A further criticism: since the 16^th June 2007, since our unification, we have won 11,000 new members. How many are on the party committee? Not one. So now I’m telling you: that’s the last time, because we must promote especially the members who were never in the Linkspartei.PDS or the WASG. They express new things. They have become members of the Left Party, and so they should obviously be in the leadership too. We must act on this within two years.

I have already spoken of our victories. You know that whenever one is successful people struggle over the leading figures to discredit them for the party. I have spoken to Oskar Lafontaine and hope that we will learn from this for the future. He is a political giant and enormously important. I’ll tell you one more thing I’ve never said before: most parties would secretly be proud if they had somebody like Oskar Lafontaine. They’re just jealous. That is the whole problem. Now you’re witnessing a new campaign against me. On this, I say: even my political enemies, even some of the journalists cannot make something out of me that I never was. And what I was not, I do not accept, and I’m going to fight against it! That is clear.

In any society, changes demand a change in the mood of the time. If this does not change, one cannot change anything in reality. We have changed the mood of the time. I want to remind you of the time of the change from Kohl to Schröder, and how Mr Schröder then strengthened himself in the Federal Republic of Germany. The neoliberal age was born. Kohl had begun it: changed the pension formula, involved the sick in the payments. But he didn’t want to go much further. And just because he went these two steps, the people suddenly voted social democrat, to ensure social security. Then came Schröder and his radical neoliberalism. That led to disappointment, which led to the foundation of the WASG. At that time there was a neoliberal mood in the media. Almost all commentators said: this is difficult for the unemployed. This is difficult for the sick. This is difficult for pensioners. But it cannot be any different. It was the same on the talk shows. And now it is different. That is the decisive thing. Whether you watch “Anne Will” or “Hart aber fair” or look at the papers: the social question is being discussed on a scale we did not know years ago. And when it is discussed in this way, things are going to change. We have achieved this, because it is the issues that move people, who say: “we want change!” They are no longer prepared to take the neoliberal course, even as the current government practises it.

I can well remember when it was decided in the Bundestag that pensions would be paid only from the age of 67. I had not yet spoken, the other parties had had their turn and said that the populist Gysi would soon come and say that of course he would rather keep retirement age at 65. Of course he won’t say how he would pay for it etc. Then I took my turn, and they were right. I did say that. But beforehand I said: “I’m interested in your relationship to representative democracy. That means, that different interests ought to be represented in the Bundestag. Four parties say pensions from 67: CDU, FDP, SPD and Greens. 77% of the population are against pensions from 67. That means they do not want these 77 percent to be represented with their argument in the Bundestag. The real scandal is that only one party represents these 77 percent in the Bundestag.” But they do not want the party that is articulating their interests. We have to combat this intensively.

What have we achieved? I said we have changed the mood of the times. I think that the majority against the war has increased in Germany. Not only regarding the Iraq War. I know how divided the society was over the war in Yugoslavia. I think that today the significant majority would be against it. One can never combat terrorism by means of war. That only encourages new terrorism. One cannot fulfil any humanitarian aims via war. That is the truth. For this reason we are the party of peace in Germany. When I hear how the American government is again considering a war against Iran, I can say only that such a war would alter the world to an extent we cannot imagine. What comes out of the American government is irresponsible claptrap. I hope they will choose a president who will go another way. One thing is clear: Mrs Clinton, as the first female president of the United States of America would be the event of the century, but Mr. Obama would be the event of the millennium. You know why too. As do they. We shall see. One more thing must also be made clear on this topic. They say that Iran wants nuclear weapons. Perhaps it does. Why? Because the nuclear powers have not in the least used the end of the Cold War to abolish nuclear armaments, but have instead established a principle: only atomic weapons make a country independent. Then we cannot attack. This is devastating. We have to abolish nuclear weapons! Then we can ensure that they do not exist anywhere.

I want to address the subject of Israeli-Palestinian relations. A wish: I know all too well how different the views of this are. I have spoken about this in the Bundestag on the occasion of the deployment of German troops in Lebanon; have always opposed the arguments that followed, without giving answers. I can express what I want quite simply: I think on one hand we are compelled to show solidarity to Israel because the Nazis committed appalling crimes against Jews. One has to want and feel that. On the other hand, we are compelled to show solidarity to the Palestinians, who have had reason to believe for decades that they are working off a portion of German guilt, and who have been oppressed for decades in contravention of their human rights, which is unacceptable. Thus we promote Israel and a viable Palestine. And when both sides note that we show solidarity with good reason to both of them, we can negotiate. All the other parties are more or less one-sided. I don’t want us to be like that. When we manage that we can play a new, maybe even pivotal, role in the Near Eastern Conflict.

I want now to talk about hopes. Bush is waging war in Afghanistan, Iraq and so on. But we can show a little pride that he’s lost his own back yard. There are more and more left-wing governments in Latin America – the Left is changing the world much more strongly than in Europe! That’s a fact! Of course the governments are different, and we have a critical stance to one or two. But there is Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Cuba, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela. Where is there something like that in Europe? There’s only something similar in Latin America! We must take inspiration from that. The world’s new Left is coming from there!

And now, European integration. I don’t have to repeat it. I just want to say we are interested in European integration, we want it. Only European integration can prevent new wars and new problems within the EU. That’s already reason enough. There are more reasons. The problem is simply that others are organising the EU in such a way that people can only perceive it as ever stronger in military terms, because the military is important to those in charge, and also as the deconstruction of their social fabric, as nightmare not welfare. The service directive, if it had come, would have meant a monstrous downswing. Of what significance the decision of the European court to annul the allocation law in Niedersachsen – come on, a CDU-led state?! They said: profit is more important than adequate wages. That is the quintessence of this judgement. And so we have said, they must at least alter the Lisbon Treaty and add basic social rights, as well as political ones, because political rights are useless if one has no social rights. We have to demand both. I want us to understand one thing: it is precisely because we desire European integration that we criticise the EU so much. The way it is organised at the moment is, unfortunately, strengthening the NPD, because it is gathering itself and telling people that we functioned better as a nation state than when integrated into Europe. Those who wish the NPD no successes must campaign for European integration – for people, who lead to more welfare and not the deconstruction of welfare! That is the critical point!

Since we’re on the subject of the NPD, one more thing: I think we have to learn to endure conflicts too. In principle, I oppose the banning of parties. But there is an exception, and it is the militant, neo-nazi NPD! We cannot accept it, and it must be forbidden!

I want quickly to cover domestic policy. Schröder and Merkel have developed the domestic situation in Germany in a direction that is, of course, not in the least acceptable for the Left Party. Deregulation, privatisation, social deconstruction. The deregulation has reached such a scale because we are keeping so many people in temporary jobs, because modern slavery has been introduced in the form of short-term work, because low wages have become so widespread, because there are millions of jobs for 400 euros etc. This saps the energy of the unions and the workers. The bosses get temporary workers who cost half as much, and then put their own personnel under pressure to accept pay cuts. That is all deregulation. And none of the promises made in connection with it have been fulfilled. It is just about the deconstruction of rights – for this reason we are against deregulation, and consistently so!

 On the subject of privatisation, I want to make clear that this has to do with socio-political discussions. I’m not one for the state bakery, just to be clear. We already know where market economy makes sense and where, through competition, it leads to higher standards and lower prices. But there are three areas where we desperately need public ownership: first, in the armaments industry. As long as so much money is made through arms, wars will never stop. As long as we have them, they should at least be state-owned and never private. Secondly, in the case of monopolies. A state monopoly is always better, because it is politically regulated, than a private one, because it rips you off. People are already experiencing this. Four energy companies have feudally carved up Germany, and I think they call each other, agree on the prices, and then the citizens – and, incidentally, the businesses too – just have to cough up. That is just not acceptable! The third is the whole area of public services, where we need public ownership because other criteria take precedence. If you buy a hospital, that means that it has to pay for itself. Regardless of who among us is manager of a hospital, if it is private and we don’t want to go bankrupt, we are forced to consider what makes ends meet. Then you reach the point where you say: I get a case-based lump sum for a particular operation, and it is the same for a 22 year-old as for a 70-year old. However, the 22 year-old is only in hospital for three days, the 70 year-old for three weeks. So, one makes sense. So then I always ask: do we want people to have to think like that in hospitals? Those who don’t want it must be clearly in favour of public ownership, so that we achieve one thing – the treatment of patients according to their conditions and not the size of their wallets! That is the key thing we have to achieve!

The same is true for education. Education is so decisive. Equal opportunities in Germany – even only rudimentarily – are possible only via education and culture. And the access to them is becoming more and more difficult. These many different schools, these private opportunities, which are in some cases expensive – they are out of the question. The FDP always want to tell me everything must be arranged according to achievement. But there is a completely innocent group in society – newborns. Even the FDP cannot say they have failed in terms of achievement. That is simply not on, they have done nothing at all, they’ve only just arrived. But there is a chasm between their opportunities. We need to overcome that. We are not against the promotion of gifted children, but we say: the giftedness of the child of a professor should be promoted just as much as the giftedness of the third child of a single mother on benefits! We have to push this through! Therefore we have to overcome fees. Tuition fees are no more than social exclusion. If we have to face the fact that in percentage terms fewer working-class kids go to university than in the USA, that is a particular scandal. We must change that, and we’re going to change that!

State socialism failed. Oskar Lafontaine hinted at why – the deprivation of freedoms, the undemocratic structures and the unproductive economy of errors. However when I say that, I add one thing: there were still significant cultural and social achievements. There was more social equality even. For me, one thing is interesting now. I didn’t know how it would go in history. The GDR is gone and also everything beyond the pale about it, and which caused its failure, those things that nobody wants back. But the things that were good, which were washed away at the same time, work like yeast. That even reached Mrs. Von der Leyen in part. It works like yeast, even almost in Bavaria. I just want to say that it is interesting: what one achieved in a society once cannot be killed so easily, even by those opponents who thought they could just sweep it aside. In this regard too we showed our differences in our conditioning. We have to achieve this too. Reconstruction does not mean justification, but always means looking at structures in detail and saying, it failed here, and with good reason, but there is some good. The big mistake was that it was an accession, but not unification; that the West Germans were not allowed to take eight or ten better structures from the East in order to improve their standard of living. They were not allowed, and we are still paying for it.

Back to Schröder. What did he do, what was the problem? The problem was that he did everything at once, in contrast to earlier times, dear comrades. He decided at once to lower corporation tax, from 45 to 25 percent, now with the Grand Coalition it stands at 15 percent. I’m not going to talk about the fact that this tax is over 30 percent in the USA, in Japan too, France as well; we’ll leave that to one side. He decided to lower the top tax bracket from 53 to 42 percent. And when he’d done all this, he turned to the pensioners, the sick and the unemployed and told them he had no more money for them! For this reason the Left Party is rising in the old West. Because people are saying, there’s something wrong with the structure here. He cannot make such concessions on one side and then, on the other side, tell us he has nothing for us. And when a social democrat chancellor does that, where will it all end? The CDU had big problems working out how to oppose his decisions! As a result something happened which we should not underestimate in its significance: the need for a party to the left of social democracy came about, which since 1949 had always been hindered by militant anticommunism. We are facing an exciting challenge. I have spoken about how the workers must take part too. And then comes the protest against all out suggestions, be it pensions or whatever – everything is unaffordable, you populists, you sit on your backsides and make nice demands, but you can’t pay for them.

Comrades! The average tax rate in the European Union is over 40 percent. The average! That includes Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Estonia, Lithuania, just so that you don’t get any wrong ideas. In Germany however it is on average over 35 percent. The most powerful economy in the EU is five percent lower in its taxes than the average! If we just had the average, we would have 120 billion more euros a year! That would finance all our demands! We just have to introduce fair taxation in Germany. One must be ready for that. I’m going to give you two examples, so that we make it concrete: if you have a firm in the USA that makes four billion euros, you pay 1.6 million euros in tax. In Germany you pay 168,000 euros in taxes. A ridiculous sum! In other countries there is a stock exchange tax. Not in Germany. If we just took domestic shares and their turnover in the last year, that was 5.5 trillion euros. And if we had a stock exchange tax of just one percent, that means an annual income of 55 billion euros! That is our resolution on investment in infrastructure already paid for. Just to make one thing clear: it is not true that the money isn’t there! They take care it isn’t there by cutting taxes in the wrong places and forcing the low earners and the average earners and the small businesses to pay too much! That is exactly what we want to change!

I know that your time is at a premium. I also know that if we want to sing together, I need to wrap up. I also know that you lot at the back are always so loud. I want to tell you one thing: as the GDR came to an end, state socialism had failed, and one day you must simply come to understand that. But I was the one who said: “that does not mean at all that the last answer of history is capitalism.” And that is clearer by the day! That is why I’m fighting for democratic socialism!

We know capitalism isn’t the last answer for three reasons. One: it always leads to war! This alone is reason enough to overcome it, because it wants to secure access to raw materials and economic interests as well by means of war.

Two: it leads to misery, hunger and crass social inequality. For this reason too it must be overcome! And the Greens, who are so pro-capitalist, must also say: the economic question can never be solved by capitalism. That is the third reason why it must be defeated. Perhaps there are more, but I wanted at least to name these three.

The next election is in Bavaria. There is a problem – there are not yet so many people who believe we’ll get into the state parliament there. I believe it though! There are different reasons for this, but I want to advise on one particular circumstance, because I find it very exciting. In Bayern, they have a strange electoral law. Hardly anybody knows this. It is the only state parliamentary election, where the admittance at five percent is calculated differently from in the other states. Otherwise you always have to get five percent of the second vote, and then you’re in. Not so in Bavaria, where they do this: they add the first votes cast to the second votes cast and divide by two. They decide if you’re in. So assume a party has six percent of the second vote and three percent of the first, that makes nine, divided by two makes 4.5 – oh dear, you didn’t make it. But if you do get in, you get six percent of the seats.

We need to make sure people know this in Bavaria – the people who give us their second vote must also give us the first vote, because we need them desperately. We want to get into the parliament in Bavaria! This is particularly necessary in Bayern because there is a State party there, which is always voluntarily elected. Despite that, I say: this cannot continue! Huber was the finance minister, responsible for the Landesbank. This Landesbank lost billions, because he played with investing worldwide without the slightest knowledge of what he was doing. He should be held responsible and not justified by a vote, because the citizens have to pay the debts!

It is also true that when we get into a western Federal State parliament, we will change Germany. But if we get in in Bavaria, we’ll change the world. So we need to campaign for this objective with ambition!

It is also true that the CSU is in such dire straits that they’re copying from us on commuter tax relief, income tax, tax free income, the abolition of the tax burden for average earners – those who have to pay so much so that those who earn more can pay less, that’s the way it’s done in Germany. It’s really an emergency for the CSU when they have to do this! And we mustn’t let them out of this trap. We have wonderful ideas. We have once again brought the motion to count commuter tax relief from the first kilometre – which Huber and Beckstein also promote. Now we need to make sure that we secure the first reading in the Bundestag in June. Then we want to make the second reading in September before the election in Bavaria. Then we shall see how the CSU politicians vote, who all voted no in November 2007. Now of course they can try, in their committees, to prevent the second reading. Then in the last weeks we must secure a current hour for them. We must also show somehow, that it must be so, because one thing bothers me – and this discredits politics and democracy in every respect: promising things before the election and then not following through on them! I’ll remind you of an example, for me the worst: we had a major issue before the Bundestag elections. Mrs Merkel spoke of two percent raises in VAT, and the SPD were against this and said: no VAT raise. The compromise they found was a three-percent increase! That is the biggest mickey-take that you can allow in our society!

Allow me to make two or three more observations that are important to me. I’ll return to privatisation: when you deprive politics of the opportunity to decide prices for energy, water and so on, you reduce the meaning of democracy! It makes no difference to energy prices whether Merkel or Lafontaine, me or somebody else is elected – we have nothing to decide. Them too, but the others took care of this. If we don’t want to go this way, we need public ownership so that politics remains independent and the choice between one or another makes sense for the population! So: we are the only ones who want more democracy, while the privateers want to reduce the meaning of democracy! That is the truth, and we need to tell the public.

Next year we have the European elections. We also have elections in Brandenburg, Saxony, Thüringen, Saarland, and in the Bundestag. It’s going to be very stressful, I know that already. But somehow I’m looking forward to those Sundays when the results are announced. I don’t know either – due to government involvement and so on – how many minister presidents we’ll have at the end of it, possibly four. Even if it were only two, we would have changed the world! I ask you, strengthen your sense of inspiration. Imagine, Oskar Lafontaine is going to be minister president again in Saarland, with the SPD as junior partner. I mean, the TV pictures alone – there are a couple of faces I’d like to see there. Imagine Bodo Ramelow is minister president in Thüringen – that is a classic, wonderful image for the Thuringians. Kerstin Kaiser might perhaps become minister president in Brandenburg, and André Hahn in Saxony. I mean, we’ve got somebody who could do it everywhere. The other parties are at the end of the road; they’ve ruined these states. So I think we have to go in with optimism and also with the demand to change things responsibly. If we don’t manage, we’ll be in the opposition. And that’s no bad thing, when you consider how in German politics we’ve changed things as the opposition.

Comrades! There is always protest in the population, which runs in different ways – I must tell you something about France and Germany, as a finish. How do we protest in Germany? The Confederation of German Trade Unions makes a resolution, let’s say in October, to have a protest rally in Berlin in March. Then there are two difficult weeks because the speaker list has to be agreed. Very difficult. When there is someone from the SPD there, the Left Party of course wants to have someone. If one doesn’t want to have them, one can only take trade unionists – very difficult all of it. But after two weeks the list is ready. Then the organisation: the location must be announced, you need a stage, which has to be leased, that’s all clear. Then you need buses to bring the protesters from Bavaria to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to Berlin, obviously. Then you need to take care of public toilets, drinks stands, there needs to be food too. Then the protesters need to be equipped with jackets and whistles. Then there’s a dance troupe of young women, who should not be overdressed so that they bring some good spirit to the protest, especially among the male protesters. And then we make a fantastic protest in Berlin! Strong speeches, everybody is happy, then we get back in our buses and go home. Then the confederation of German Trade Unions board meets a month later and says, that was actually quite good, let’s do it all again in October.

One can do all of that. Mrs Merkel is only very slightly impressed by it.

How is something similar done in Paris? The parliament resolves to abolish the two years employment protection for graduates. If the Bundestag did that and we went to a rally on Alexanderplatz, there would be about 200 pensioners there, thinking of their grandchildren. What happens in Paris? In Paris about 100,000 Frenchmen and Frenchwomen march through the streets for 13 consecutive days – nothing is organised, no toilets, no food, no drinks, no whistles. They walk the streets for 13 days, until the day Chirac says: “I didn’t mean it like that”. And away with the resolution.

I want to say to our people: you let them get away with too much! Only what you permit can happen in our society! In this respect we could be a little more French! We, the Left Party, must fight to win more people, who allow less to happen and who protest and campaign and through that achieve more peace, more equality, more social security, more freedom and much more of a future!