“We can only find the ways to communism if we get started and try them out, whether in the opposition or in the government,” Gesine Lötzsch, the Left Party’s co-president, wrote last week in the Berlinbased daily junge Welt.

Her comments about the reintroduction of communism in Germany triggered criticism from many of the mainstream parties.
There has been growing contact over the years between the Left Party and the State of Israel.

Petra Pau, a vice president of the Left Party and a Bundestag deputy, has visited Israel a number of times and supports a ban against German-Iranian trade in order to advance Israel’s security.

One of the party’s top leaders, Gregor Gysi, the son of a German Jew, has advocated the party stripping all vestiges of anti-Zionism from its platform and philosophy.

The party opened an office of its Rosa Luxemburg Foundation think tank in Tel Aviv in 2009 to promote its ideology. It also opened an office in Ramallah.

According to its Tel Aviv website, the Luxemburg Foundation “is a forum for dialogue between progressive forces, social movements and organizations, left-wing intellectuals and NGOs, in Germany, Europe and the wider international level.”

German academic Dr. Angelika Timm, a fluent Hebrew speaker who heads the foundation in Tel Aviv, was herself a scholar of Middle East affairs in East Germany and a proponent of the official, distorted East German veThe party opened an office of its Rosa Luxemburg Foundation think tank in Tel Aviv in 2009 to promote its ideology. It also opened an office in Ramallah.
German Left party calls for introduction of communism