Talk:The Left (Luxembourg)

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[edit] formation...

1) This is not a party, rather a political group to which individuals or members of parties can adhere. 2) Whether the group is socialist is debatable. The simplest would be to say it's a leftist anti-capitalist group. 3) It was founded by individuals, many but by far not all of them members of existing political parties. Today the majority are not members of any parties. 4) Before the 2004 elections, after requesting a fixed quota of CP members (by far exceeding their representation) on the election lists a number of communist party members left the movement and the CP ran on a separate platform. Yet a number of other CP members remained with "déi lenk" and were later expelled from the CP (along with the CP's front runners in the City of Luxembourg elections).

It might be notable to mention that in 1999 André (Aender) Hoffmann was elected to parliament. Less then a year later, after re-elections in Esch-Alzette Hoffmann ceded his parliamentary seat to Aloyse (Ally) Bisdorf of the CP. At mid term then according to "déi lénk"'s statutes (requesting all mandates to be rotated) Bisdorf ceded the seat to Serge Urbany.

I would recommend someone create biographical articles on Hoffmann and Bisdorf (as well as René Urbany) as they are/were three of the most important personalities of the communist party of Luxembourg as well as the new left and left today.

Lastly, obviously I'm not neutral on these issues which is why I won't modify the actual article and just post some comments here. I am a member of "déi lénk" and have been almost since the start. I've run in three elections for the group and will do so again if asked. I also was not a member of any party before this (though I had voted for the CP in one elections and the greens in several others). The four points raised above all stem from my personal experience (while I was not at the founding congress I have read the original statutes and talked to numerous members who were present...). Enough said about that, after all I'm not here to promote myself (and under pseudonymn anyhow).

--Caranorn 14:39, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Responding to myself here, but wanted to leave a record. I felt I had to correct some of the errors I previously mentionned. I left the mention of socialist unchanged as it probably covers the majority of members. But I had to change the party part (public talk of Déi Lénk being a party was one of the reasons for the withdrawal of a large number of KPL members). Founded by individuals not parties. I could also have added that many of the founders were labour union members and labour union functionaries (particularly the rail road union, to a lesser degree the OGBL (I note there are no articles on local unions yet, I'm not too knowledgeable about their history so can't write those, at least not alone)). Just corrected the 2004 split slightly but not going into too much detail. I also added how it came that we had 3 MP's with a single seat (but again not too much detail as this was a statutary issue). I will try to write short biographical articles about Hoffman and Bisdorff (maybe also Urbany, though maybe a single article about the Urbany clan (Dominique Urbany MP and minister, René Urbany MP, Janine Frisch city councillor and Serge Urbany MP (and that doesn't mention René Urbany's son, wife, sister, Janine Frisch's husband, son and daughter (and I certainly forgot some, particularly as I don't know those who remained with the KPL)), though I will probably be going from personnal interviews.

If anyone has questions or suggestions let me know. As I already said I at first intended not to edit this page at all as I'm a member of Déi Lénk. But I could not leave the errors either.--Caranorn 21:53, 5 September 2006 (UTC)