Neue Linke / Nuova Sinistra
| Neue Linke / Nuova Sinistra | |
|
|
| Party chairman | Alexander Langer (top candidate) |
| founding | 1978 |
| resolution | 1983 |
| Landtag mandates |
1/35 |
| Chamber of Deputies |
0/630 |
| Senators |
0/315 |
| Alignment | inter-ethnic , anti-elitist |
The Neue Linke / Nuova Sinistra (NL / NS) was a non-party electoral list from the environment of the South Tyrolean 68 movement , which was formed in 1978 at the instigation of the later top exponent of the Green parliamentary group in the European Parliament , Alexander Langer . From 1978 to 1983 she was represented in the South Tyrolean state parliament and therefore also in the regional council of Trentino-South Tyrol .
history
The NL / NS came into being a few months before the South Tyrolean state elections in 1978 as a result of an appeal in the Südtiroler Volkszeitung . The initiative launched by Alexander Langer made reference to the tragic death of the writer Norbert Conrad Kaser , who died in August 1978 at the age of 31 as a social and political outsider.
The list creation project achieved a relatively widespread impact in a short time, since in the course of the 1970s South Tyroleans of the 68 generation had already organized themselves outside of parliament. The unifying moment was formed by the attempts made for the first time within the South Tyrolean student body , the South Tyrolean cultural center and regional offshoots of state-wide groups such as Lotta Continua and Democrazia Proletaria to overcome the dividing lines between German , Italian and Ladin-speaking parts of the population in South Tyrol .
The state parliament list of the NL / NS included ten German- and 17 Italian-speaking, non-party candidates. This made it the first and to date only political opposition movement in South Tyrol that neither emerged as a split from the dominant South Tyrolean People's Party (SVP), nor as an offshoot of a state-wide Italian party. Nevertheless, the election campaign of the NL / NS was financially supported by the Italian Partito Radicale around the civil rights activist and then MP Marco Pannella .
The NL / NS received 3.65 percent of the vote and for their top candidate Alexander Langer one of the 34 state parliament mandates. A mandate rotation planned for 1981 in favor of the Italian-speaking list exponent Luigi Costalbano took place with a delay of several months and was at the beginning of emerging political divergences. While Costalbano left state politics at the end of the legislative period in 1983, Alexander Langer expanded the majority stream within the NL / NS for a second election in terms of content and personnel to the alternative list for the other South Tyrol (ALFAS), which turned out to be green towards the end of the 1980s -Alternative list could hold its own in the regional party landscape in the long term .
Content focus
The NL / NS originally saw itself as an anti-elitist protest movement against the political culture practiced by the longstanding regional government coalitions between the South Tyrolean People's Party (SVP) and Democrazia Cristiana (DC). She was largely inspired by the so-called New Left from West Germany as well as the Italian workers , students and civil rights movements of socialist and left-Catholic influences. During the years of the implementation of the Second South Tyrolean Statute of Autonomy (from 1972), it also articulated the constructive criticism of the SVP's policy of autonomy that other left-wing parties, especially the Communist Party of Italy (KPI), lacked.
On the occasion of the nationwide census in 1981 and the associated introduction of ethnic proportionality , the NL / NS formulated key points of criticism of the institutional separation of language groups, which had been anchored in constitutional law with the adoption of the Second Statute of Autonomy for South Tyrol in 1972. The cultural understanding of "interethnicity", shaped by Alexander Langer, suggested a stronger cooperation across language borders as an alternative and in this sense propagated a legal further development of the autonomy of South Tyrol from language group-based minority protection towards civil society based , regional self-administration .
The NL / NS's criticism of ethnic proportionality established a key element of identification of the alternative movement in South Tyrol, but after Alexander Langer's death in the mid-1990s it took a back seat among the South Tyrolean Greens in favor of ecological issues. The extensive debate on proportional representation, which was largely inspired by Langer's arguments and later carried on by various social groups, led decades later to a slight relaxation of the originally introduced legal provisions.
literature
- Joachim Gatterer: "Red mites in the plumage." Social democratic, communist and green alternative party politics in South Tyrol . StudienVerlag: Innsbruck-Wien-Bozen 2009, ISBN 978-3-7065-4648-5 .
- Marina Rizzo: Neue Linke / Nuova Sinistra. Un movimento interetnico in South Tyrol . Diploma thesis, University of Bologna 1987/88.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Joachim Gatterer: "Give everything, expect nothing!" The Communist Party of Italy in the province. A contribution to transregional contemporary history in South Tyrol . In: Hannes Obermair et al. (Ed.): Regional civil society in motion. Festschrift for Hans Heiss. Folio Verlag: Wien-Bozen 2012, pp. 301–324, ISBN 978-3-85256-618-4 , reference: p. 317.