Fringe parties pitch to the angry and alienated

BERLIN - In a campaign often denounced as grey, the red balloons of the Left Party, the sunflowers of the Greens, the purple butterfly of the Violets and the buccaneers' hats of the Pirate Party are providing welcome splashes of colour for Germany's parliamentary elections this Sunday.

Outside rundown apartment blocks in Berlin's working-class districts or mingling among those enjoying the early autumn sun around the Neptune Fountain on Alexanderplatz fringe activists are pitching to those who feel disenfranchised by the big three parties camped firmly in the political centre.

These small parties are rooted in the far left or driven by single issues, from social inequality and environment degradation to nuclear power, the minimum wage and a withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan. In the case of the Pirates, the big deal is a reform of copyright and patent laws.

Bright their banners may be, and loud is their campaign. But most of the half dozen or so fringe groups will fail to gain more than the 5 per cent share of the vote that entitles them to representation in the federal Parliament's Lower House.

Yet those which succeed in crossing the coveted threshold will box beyond their weight. They may well reshape the traditional political landscape or push Europe's biggest country into another uneasy "grand coalition" of centre right and centre left.

If opinion polls prove correct, both the Greens and the Left Party, known in German as die Linke, are each poised to win enough votes to enter the Bundestag by a comfortable margin.

If so, they could thwart the efforts of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to cobble together a coalition of left-leaning parties and block Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats from teaming up with the business-friendly Free Democrats.

Polls predict the Left will score around 11 per cent of the vote, while the Greens could pick up around 10 per cent. At the 2005 elections, both parties netted just over 8 per cent of votes cast.

The Left Party is a loose amalgamation of the reformed former East German Communist Party, disaffected former Social Democrats and trade unionists.

The party has only been in existence since 2005, but its raucous anti-capitalism slogans have tapped into a groundswell among disgruntled voters in the west and former communist voters in the east.

Less than 18 months ago, when the winds of market liberalism blew their strongest, the Left's talk of social justice, higher taxes and nationalisation of the banking system barely caught a passing glance.

Today, the triumph of the stock traders and hedge funds has been replaced by humiliation. The doctrine of the corporate bottom line and hands-off regulation has been replaced by social conscience and the return of the state.

It's the best time to push radical left policies since the 1930s.

"Financial capitalism is destroying democracy," says Oskar Lafontaine, the Left Party's leader. "We've got a vision. We want a 'free people' economy. We want an overhaul of the burden-sharing."

Lafontaine, a former SPD Finance Minister, wants higher taxes for the rich, an expansion of welfare state that would cost the tax payer billions at a time when the budget deficit is hitting record levels.

Such policies - and Lafontaine's own invasive, unashamedly populist personality - have prompted the SPD to promise it will snub any federal alliance with the Left.

But the SPD already rules in coalition with the Left in the state of Berlin and conservatives are using the campaign's last few days to warn voters that a razor-thin outcome in the polls would make such assurances worthless.

Like the Left, the Greens are hoping to tap into the new generation of German voters, some born after the fall of the Berlin Wall and unattracted by the mainstream parties.

According to Infratest polls, only 8 per cent of voters aged 18 to 24 years back Merkel's conservatives, with just 9 per cent opting for the SPD.

The eco-warriors have been in the wilderness for the past four years, partly because their policies have been hijacked or exploited by the main parties. But for them, like the Left Party, favourable winds - climate change and the failure of the capitalist system - are now blowing.

hey are promising ecologically-sound growth, led by the endeavour to make Germany a low-carbon economy. ("Make the blue collar green" is their campaign slogan).

Their manifesto also speaks of scrapping nuclear power, abolishing both college tuition fees and compulsory military service.

Such pledges are alluring to many young voters, but older ones tend to be sceptical. Some say the Greens fail to honour pledges while in office, as they were between 1998 and 2005.

Others - the hippie-generation idealists who drove the Greens to prominence in the 1980s with such proposals as pulling Germany out of Nato or legalising marijuana - say the party has become soft and have migrated to the Left Party.

On the far right, the neo-Nazi NPD party seems headed for electoral oblivion, lacking a strand of popular support and under fire for allegedly sending hate letters to immigrant candidates.

The NPD has no seats in the Bundestag, but has representatives in two of Germany's powerful regional assemblies.