We congratulate the Hamburg comrades on the successful entry into the Hamburg Chamber of Deputies. The good electoral success shows that THE LEFT wins ever more backing by way of a credible and consequent course. Ever more voters wish for a clear alternative to the policy of Hartz IV, wage dumping, and the squandering of public property, and they do not let themselves be dissuaded from their vote by diffamations and anti-Communist rabble-rousing. By way of the now fourth regional parliament fraction in the old federal countries, the party THE LEFT has irrevocably become an all-German political force.

The approval for THE LEFT is not an accident. Millions of people now come to feel in all its brutality what unleashed capitalism means: work at miserable wages, lack of job training, demolition of social services, continued mass unemployment, tuition fees and a two-class health system are only some examples. No wonder that many no longer want to tolerate that. The neoliberal agenda that without any restraint has raised the interests of the company heads and the rich people to political dogma, no longer enjoys any support.

THE LEFT is facing the challenge to bring political alternatives and the possibility of an anti-capitalist perspective into the public debate and to encourage the people to common and solidary struggles. Therefore, we need a strong left opposition in the parliaments, but also and mainly more resistance outside of the parliaments. In order to stop a policy that hits the interests of employees in their face, we need labour struggles that also do not stop before raising political demands. In order to mobilise social resistance against neoliberal policy, we need to form broad alliances especially with the social movements. An important basis for our growing backing among the people and in such alliances is our credibility.

That a party out of the opposition can change politics, THE LEFT is proving it since its creation. It is nothing else but this pressure that at present in parts of the SPD has led to a rethinking with respect to the dealing with THE LEFT. It has shown itself that exclusion and diffamations cannot stop the successful course of THE LEFT. If the SPD were to draw the conclusion from that to depart from the Agenda 2010, Hartz IV, and the support of wars contrary to international law, this would naturally be welcome. However, we see no signs of such a change of course. What is more likely is that it is a matter of something else in the most recent strategic games: of extending the strategy so successfully practiced in the Berlin Senate to squash the left in the neoliberal embrace in the long term also in the old federal countries. At least the Berlin SPD has succeeded that way to lastingly destroy left-wing credibility and to cut the number of left voters in half. Similar results, even if not quite so dramatic in their extent, were already produced by the toleration in Saxony-Anhalt and the participation in the coalition in Schwerin.

From these experiences, there can in our opinion only be drawn one conclusion. No toleration or even coalition without a real change in policy. Social demolition, privatisations, personnel reduction and wage dumping in public services or tuition fees cannot be tolerated by THE LEFT in any constellation. Who stands for the neoliberal Agenda 2010 and international war-type inventions for us cannot be a serious partner.

THE LEFT will continue to gain in strength if it pursues its consistent opposition course against the neoliberal mainstream. Nothing would be more foolish than to now trip us ourselves. The statements by the Lower Saxony deputy Christel Wegner were used on the eve of the Hamburg election for an anti-Communist campaign. This occasion may now not be used to generally put into question inner-party pluralism as well as the practice proven in the past of open lists and broad alliances. Anti-Communism is a basic stupidity also of our era! It was and is being used by the political enemy to split the left and to divide it and to discredit the goal of overcoming capitalism. A LEFT that would yield to this pressure would lose its force of persuasion.

Already the elections in Hessen and even more so the Hamburg elections showed: anti-Communist campaigns hardly produce the desired effect any longer. The last thing the LEFT needs right now, therefore, are devout rituals of demarcation. We need to consequently and credibly stand for our substantial proposals and are elected for them. It needs to remain the case that the members of the LEFT can continue to elect autonomously at all levels whom they want on their lists. And the LEFT must remain anticapitalist in its basic orientation. Decisive were and are the property question and the war question. That also shows itself in the very concrete confrontations on anti-Capitalist developmental paths as they are waged at this point in Latin America. The demands of the Programmatic Corner Stones to transfer key industries into common ownership and to refuse any form of privatisation, should be held on to and expanded more concretely in the new Basic Programme. And: peace policy is essential for THE LEFT. War may never be a means of politics. Therefore, the rejection of foreign missions of the Federal Army must continue to be anchored clearly in the basic programme of the party THE LEFT.