CTK, 25 November 2007

Prague. The Party of European Left (EL) is opposed to the extension of the missile defence and U.S. military bases in Europe, EL's newly elected chairman Lothar Bisky said at the close of the EL three-day congress in Prague today.
It reacted to Prague and Warsaw's ongoing negotiations with Washington about the possible building of a U.S. radar installation and a base with interceptor missiles on Czech and Polish soil, respectively.
The EL associates 29 European left-wing and communist parties, most of which stand to the left of social democrats on the political scene.
The Prague congress was the EL's first ever held in a Central or East European country.
Bisky, a German MP and one of the two chairmen of the Left (Die Linke) party, replaced at the EL helm Italian Fausto Bertinotti (Refounded Communist Party, PRC), who had become Italian lower house chairman in the meantime.
Bisky, 66, is viewed as a politician who unified two left-wing parties in Germany, the PDS and the WASG which now form the Left, a party with voter preferences of up to 30 percent in certain East German regions.
Italian Graziella Mascia (PRC) was elected EL deputy chairwoman today.
"Europe needs neither an anti-missile shield nor an armament agency. This would only provoke further armament. Europe needs culture of peace," Bisky told journalists.
The EL also took a negative position on the EU reform treaty.
Mascia said the EL minds "the arrogance with which the EU approached the results of the referenda [on the then draft European constitution] in France and the Netherlands."
Mascia said the new reform treaty is but a cosmetic adjustment to the stalled constitution.
The EL has called on its members to gather signatures within a petition campaign in support of a referendum on the reform treaty.
The 470 participants in congress included Oskar Lafontaine, former German finance minister, Vojtech Filip, Czech junior opposition Communist (KSCM) party chairman, and Milan Neubert, who heads the Czech Party of Democratic Socialism (SDS), an extra-parliamentary entity.
The KSCM is not a member of the SL but has an observer status in it and it had significantly assisted in the congress' preparations.
The EL was established in Rome in 2004, at the initiative of Bertinotti's Party.
The EL associates leftist entities from Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and other countries.

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