"Old Labour, with a dash of Respect"

Via Lenin, the Guardian on the WASG:

The leftwing Work & Social Justice party, Germany's newest political force, is unlikely to win key parliamentary elections in North Rhine-Westphalia on May 22. But its 168 candidates are certain to compound Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's difficulties as his Social Democrats struggle to hold on to a state they have governed since 1966.

Promoting itself as Die Wahlalternative (the election alternative) to politics as usual, the WASG is the rough equivalent of old Labour with a dash of Respect thrown in.

The Guardian also mentions novelist Gunter Grass' recent article on globalisation as contributing to a "reviving leftwing ideological resistance", similar to that seen in France against the new EU constitution. The Left in Britain needs to urgently address the question of Europe - as the French Left has shown, it is possible (and necessary) to win an internationalist argument against the privatisers' charter that is the new constitution.

Grass' article is translated here; for an example of the pure blank terror that is creeping up on ideologues of the free market, see Brad de Long's fanatical misreading of the same, over here. A New Morning is a good German-English blog written by a WASG supporter.