Former Communists from East Germany set to return to power

[WestVirginiaRebel]

UK Telegraph:

The former communists who ruled East Germany are set to return to power – just days before the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Left Party, widely seen as the successor to the SED, East Germany's communist party, is expected to head the government of a German state for the first time since reunification, after the Social Democrats voted to enter a coalition with them in the state of Thuringia.

Many of the Left Party's leadership were senior figures in the old SED, which ruled East Germany as a single-party state. And the prospect of the party's return to power has caused alarm in some quarters.

The German President, Joachim Gauck, abandoned the role's traditional political neutrality to speak out against it.

"People of my age who lived through the GDR [communist East Germany] find it quite hard to accept this," he said, and questioned whether the Left Party "has really distanced itself from the ideas the SED once had about repression of people, so that we can fully trust it".

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