The most encouraging feature of these elections is the strong continuing support German voters gave to the Green Party and to the new Left party, which had a stunningly successful electoral debut. Conversely, support declined for both Schroeder’s SDF and Merkel’s CDU.

The UK media (including, to its discredit, the BBC) have been busy propounding the reactionary view that a vote for Merkel, and consequently for attacks on the welfare state and on workers’ rights and rates of pay, and for reducing the taxes paid by the wealthy is the only rational choice. Sufficient Germans seem however to have drawn quite different and more sensible conclusions from observing the dire consequences for British society of embracing the neo-liberalism of Thatcher and her admiring successor, Tony Blair.

Ordinary Germans have nothing to gain by electing a government bent on emulating Blair and Brown\x92s abject surrender to globalised finance capital and the race to the bottom it enforces. Instead, they should demand that Germany and the European Union defends and strengthens the European social model, and insist that if transnational companies wish to continue to sell their goods in Europe, they will be compelled to site a fair part of their manufacturing, research and servicing in Europe, and pay European taxes rather than skulk in offshore tax havens.

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"We need to see what the winner’s attitude to our world-domination plans will be…"