GERMANY:Eight months after its formation, the first item on the agenda of Germany's new Left Party is the split.
The party's hardline communist wing has been cut loose after one of its members apparently defended the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Stasi, East Germany's feared secret police.
"The Left Party has bowed to the state doctrine of anti-communism," said Heinz Stehr, leader of the German Communist Party (DKP), which ran candidates on the Left Party ticket.
One of those candidates, Christel Wegner, won a seat in the western state of Lower Saxony last month, one of the first politicians to enter a western state parliament for the Left Party, an alliance of ex-communists and disaffected former Social Democrats.
But Ms Wegner caused uproar for describing the Berlin Wall at the weekend as "a measure to prevent West Germans continuing to enter" East Germany.
East Berlin's politburo erected what it called the "anti-fascist protection wall" in a secret operation on August 13th, 1961. Overnight, it halted a flow of East Germans to the West that had reached 2.5 million in 12 years. More than 125 people died in the following decades trying to flee across the border.
Ms Wegner said that Germany needed a Stasi-like organisation "because one must protect oneself against other reactionary forces using the opportunity to undermine such a state from inside".
Left Party leaders expelled Ms Wegner from the party yesterday and urged her to resign her seat.
"We acted to reverse electoral fraud," said Dieter Dehm, leader in Lower Saxony. "People voted for the Left Party, which recognises the democratic state . . . not gibbering that could be mistaken for justifying the Stasi."
In a statement Ms Wegner defended her remarks, saying that she had not called for an overhauled Stasi. "Rather, I said that every state has a secret service, that also applies to a socialist state," she said.
The Stasi had departments that performed regular secret service work and others that managed a wide network of casual spies; other departments specialised in kidnapping, intimidation and torture.
The swift reaction came as a surprise to some: her remarks are standard DKP positions and would raise few eyebrows among the Left Party's largest voter bloc, over-50s in eastern states.
But after winning seats in three state parliaments in recent months, the Left Party hopes to continue its election roll in Hamburg next Sunday. A fourth win would confirm the party as the fifth force in mainstream German politics.
Yesterday the Left Party announced it was splitting with the tiny DKP, which claims 4,500 members but has never passed 1 per cent support in state elections since its formation in 1968.
It is not the first time its members have embarrassed the Left Party.
Last year, Left/DKP MEP Sara Wagenknecht made headlines after a fellow MEP photographed her eating lobster in a Brussels restaurant. The story only emerged when, the following day, Wagenknecht's assistant borrowed the digital camera from the MEP and deleted the pictures.