The New Left

DW-TV: According to opinion polls, the majority of Germans feel and think left-wing, although it's not defined what left-wing means. Do you take encouragement from that?

Oskar Lafontaine: Of course that's encouraging -- especially when you take into account that a wide range of polls this summer indicated that the political standpoints that our young Left Party has taken and the concrete demands that it has made are supported by a large majority of the people. In other words, that means the policies of the parties that are competing with us are not accepted by the majority of the people.

What standpoints do you mean?

They're very simple, you don't need to talk about philosophy to understand them, you just have to talk straight with people. One point is the legal minimum wage. It's a question about how much a person needs to earn in an industrialized country to feed himself. For a long time France has led the way on this. At the moment, the minimum wage in France is 8.44 euros ($11.72). We believe that what works in France can also work in Germany. Unfortunately the CDU [Chancellor Merkel's Christian Democratic Union] in particular is against this humane idea.

The discussion about the minimum wage also came about as a result of the pressure that globalization put on the German economy. Do you think globalization can be controlled in a national context?

It's never been possible to control globalization in a national context. It's an old wives' tale to say that globalization is something new. It existed in past centuries -- of course in a different form. It's always been the case that it was easier to source certain products abroad rather than here at home. The answer to globalization is high productivity and that's the direction we should be taking. Germany has already come a long way.

At the moment there's a big discussion going on about climate-change. Atomic power is not an issue in Germany. You've always opposed nuclear energy, do you still hold to that?

Because I used to be a physicist, I have to explain this in detail: I was not against atomic technology. I was not against luminous watch faces or against X-rays, but I am against electricity generated in its present form from atomic power simply because we don't have a solution for the disposal of nuclear waste. Atomic energy is a technology that can be badly abused. That's why we should get away from this technology. The answer is renewable energy. But we still need to have some technological breakthroughs in that area.

The newly founded Left Party that you lead appears to be establishing itself in Germany as the third political force. Will it stay that way?

Of course it's not possible to say that, but the way it's looking now, the other parties remain convinced that cuts in social services and reducing taxes for the rich lay the groundwork for economic prosperity. We will be needed and we'll have growing support as long as they foolishly maintain that path.

Do you have a goal? Do you want to change the government and the country?

We want to change politics. We've come part of the way to achieving that goal. The SPD [Social Democratic Party] and the Greens are debating intensively the reasoning behind military peacekeeping missions. The CDU and FDP [free-market, liberal Free Democratic Party] are doing the same. It's good that we have forced the other parties to have this discussion.

There was an astounding development during the summer. They were debating cut-backs and rolling back the welfare state. They called it reform because reform has positive associations but really it was about cut-backs. Now, they're talking about increasing payments for the unemployed, about increasing benefits for students and for children. Although nothing has been decided yet, at least they're changing the way they think and in that respect the Left Party has changed German politics.

A characteristic of your politics is the relatively categorical "No" to every form of military intervention. Does that apply to Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Kosovo and Bosnia?

We're against military intervention because we believe that you cannot kill people and at the same time say you are doing it to stop other people from being killed. That's the contradiction in Afghanistan, for example, where a growing number of innocent people have been victims of NATO bombs. We still support what [former German Chancellor] Willy Brandt said: "Renouncing violence should be the basis of German foreign policy" and "A war must never be started from German soil again."

The Left Party is the merger of a western German and an eastern German party. Are there still problems between the two parts?

There are different experiences between eastern Germans and western Germans and we won't be able to overcome those in a generation. But that doesn't just affect us, it also affects the other parties. People have overlooked that the CDU and the FDP -- two parties that compete with us -- have swallowed former East German parties and don't want to talk about it. We can learn from one another and that's apparent when it comes to social issues. Eastern Germans are much more aware of social justice issues than people in western Germany. But in the last couple of years, the topic has also become a hot-button issue in western German homes again.