Watch the full video with our guest Katja Kipping, Co-chairperson of the German left party, Die LINKE.
The Corona-virus has hit the EU unprepared, but in different ways and with different effects depending on the countries. Most tragic were the effects on those countries whose healthcare and social systems have been emaciated by decades of austerity policies. Thus, the pandemic has increased inequalities not only inside the states but also between the Member States of the EU. This presents the parties of the radical left with a challenge and calls for a re-examination of their strategies.
Interviewee
Katja Kipping, co-chairperson of the German Left Party, Die LINKE, alongside Bernd Riexinger. She belongs to the German Parliament, the Bundestag, since 2005. In 2003, she had been elected chairperson of the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) the predecessor party of today’s Left Party.
Die LINKE was founded in 2007 as the result of the merger of the PDS and Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative (WASG). The party is represented in ten of Germany’s sixteen state legislatures, including all five of the eastern states. The party currently participates in governments in the states of both Berlin and Bremen, where it is a junior partner in a three-party coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens, as well as in Thuringia, where it leads a coalition with the SPD and Greens, headed by Minister-President Bodo Ramelow.