Germany's radical Left party Sunday adopted an election manifesto it hopes will win it more than 10 per cent of the vote when the country goes to the polls in September, according to dpa. A 200-billion-euro (280 million dollars) stimulus package designed to drag the country out of recession and create 2 million public sector jobs is a key element of the programme approved at a party congress in Berlin. The Left, formed in 2007 between the successor to East Germany's communist party and dissident Social Democrats and trade unions in the west, is the smallest of the five parties represented in the German lower house of parliament, the Bundestag. Delegates followed party chairman Oskar Lafontaine's call for the nationalization of private banks, a standard minimum wage of 10 euros and a reversal of the decision by conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's government to extend the retirement age from 65 to 67. "Only a strong left can prevent a worsening of conditions for workers, pensioners and social welfare recipients," he said at the opening of the two-day convention on Saturday. Lafontaine, a former Social Democrat and federal finance minister in the late 1990s, urged the party to show unity in the run-up to the September 27 elections, but avoided mention of differences between fundamentalists and pragmatists over the party's course. The Left is seeking an end to Merkel's four-year grand coalition with the left-of-centre Social Democrats, but also does not want her to form a new alliance with her preferred partner, the business- oriented Free Democrats. The Social Democrats (SPD) have ruled out a coalition with the Left, mainly because of its hardline foreign policy. The party called for Germany to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and wants NATO to be scrapped and replaced with a European security system that includes Russia. "We are not refusing to cooperate in government. It is the SPD which made the foolish decision not to cooperate with us and in so doing threw its own party programme in the rubbish bin," Lafontaine said. The Left had hoped to clear the 10 per cent mark in the European elections in early June, but instead polled a disappointing 7.5 per cent. Current surveys put them between 8-11 per cent. Merkel's Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats are hovering around 50 per cent, while the SPD is on 25 per cent and Greens on 13 per cent, opinion polls show.
