Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s plans to make the German military the largest in Europe are “complete madness,” newly re-elected The Left leader Ines Schwerdtner said on Sunday at the far-left party’s annual conference.<\/p>\n
“This is complete madness, and we must oppose it,” Schwerdtner told delegates in Potsdam, near Berlin.<\/p>\n
Schwerdtner lashed out at Washington for the Iran war and its economic blockade of Cuba, saying her party has stood by those resisting US imperialism for decades.<\/p>\n
She further called for international alliances with communist and leftist sister-parties.<\/p>\n
“Our class struggle must be international, and so I tell you: Long live international solidarity,” she said.<\/p>\n
The Left, a successor to the Socialist Unity Party that governed communist East Germany, has made an impressive comeback in national politics in recent years and is polling well above 10%.<\/p>\n
Schwerdtner was re-elected on Saturday as co-leader alongside Luigi Pantisano, who secured just 53% of the vote and acknowledged that he needed to grow into the role.<\/p>\n
Looking ahead to key regional elections in the eastern states of Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and in Berlin in September, Pantisano pledged to increase protests against the social reforms of Merz’s coalition government.<\/p>\n
He accused the coalition, made up of Merz’s conservatives and the centre-left Social Democrats, of attacks on the lives of all, and rejected reforms proposed by a government-appointed pensions commission.<\/p>\n
“I will do everything, along with Ines here, to organize the resistance,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s plans to make the German military the largest in Europe are “complete madness,” newly re-elected…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[26875,35592,5,3210,4206,35593,35594,35591],"class_list":["post-40631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-communist-east-germany","tag-complete-madness","tag-germany","tag-ines-schwerdtner","tag-merz","tag-national-convention","tag-schwerdtner","tag-socialist-unity-party"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}