Sahra Wagenknecht, the Vice-President of Die Linke [The Left] – the party to the left of the Social Democrats – has this answer: “We must defend the free market against its perversion by monopolies and financial markets.”
Sahra Wagenknecht, who is in her early forties and a member of the Bundestag, has roots in Communist East Germany. One can imagine how her championship of the free market is being received by the old-timers.
In her tenth book, Freedom Instead of Capitalism, she attempts to show how the free market will lead to decentralized democratic socialism.
Die Linke was founded four years ago as a successor to the S.E.D., the party that ruled Communist East Germany for four decades. It has the support of about six percent of the electorate. Her background is that of the communist bohème: her mother worked for a state-run art distributor. Wagenknecht had never met her Iranian father. She addresses the members of her party as “comrades,” preaches “solidarity” and has been compared to Rosa Luxemburg. Thoroughly at home in the world of economics, which she says she understands better than many in the business community, she uses statistics with great skill in her public statements.
When the Berlin wall fell, she was reading Kant – in contrast to those, she says, who were in the sauna at the time – an apparent allusion to Angela Merkel – and her dissertation on Hegel has been published as a book.
Wagenknecht played a prominent role at the party congress in Erfurt this last weekend when its first formal program was adopted. After many vehement internal debates, the program takes a middle position between the reformers and the radicals. It proposes a far-reaching restructuring of society to achieve greater social justice, the nationalization of the banks, the limitation of military missions to humanitarian purposes, and the legalization, within strict limits, of hard and soft drugs.
Though the program did not explicitly champion the free market, it received Sarah Wagenknecht’s wholehearted approval.
Source: Die Zeit, October 23
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Germany has such interesting politicians. They even have ideas! Some of the ideas may be pie in the sky but at least it shows they are thinking.
How very true. Interesting – and beautiful.
And then in Chile there’s the political program of the charismatic 23 year old Camila Vallejo, whose family are Pinochet survivors.
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/10/24/Occupy-Movement-Chile/
The ladies in Canadian politics, alas, cannot compete.