New Left (Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol)

The New Left / Nuova Sinistra ( NL / NS) was a non-partisan election list from the environment of the South Tyrolean '68 movement that in 1978 at the instigation of the later peak exponent of the Green Group in the European Parliament, Alexander Langer, formed. She was represented by 1978-1983 in the South Tyrolean Landtag.

History

The NL / NS was born a few months before the South Tyrolean Landtag elections of November 1978 as a result of a call establishment in the South Tyrolean People's Daily. Launched by Alexander Langer initiative took this much regarding the tragic death of the writer Norbert C. Kaser, who was 31 -year-old died in August 1978 as a social and political outsider.

The project list creation reached in a short time relative width effect, as had been organized in the course of the 1970s, the South Tyrolean interior of the '68 generation already in the extra-parliamentary space. The unifying moment made ​​it for the first time attempts have been made within the South Tyrolean Students' Union, the South Tyrolean cultural center and regional offshoots state- wide acting groups such as Lotta Continua and Democrats Proletaria to overcome in South Tyrol existing dividing lines between German, Italian and Ladin-speaking populations.

The Diet List of NL / NS included ten German and 17 Italian-speaking, non-partisan candidates. So she was the first and Political till now the only opposition movement in South Tyrol, which had arisen not as a splinter group of the dominant South Tyrolean People's Party ( SVP), acted even as an offshoot of a state-wide Italian party, although the election campaign of the NL / NS by the Italian Radical Party around was the civil rights activist and former member of parliament Marco Pannella supported financially.

The NL / NS reached 3.65 percent of voters and votes for their top candidate Alexander Langer one of the 34 parliamentary seats. A planned for 1981 mandate rotation in favor of the Italian-speaking list exponent Luigi Costalbano was delay of several months, and was embarking on emerging political divergences. While Costalbano resigned at the end of the legislature in 1983 from the country's politics, extended Alexander Langer the majority of flow within the NL / NS for a second choice inaugural content and personnel to the alternatives list for the other South Tyrol ( ALFAS ) claiming to be green at the end of the 1980s was able to maintain long-term - alternative list in the regional political landscape.

The focal points

The NL / NS understood originally as an anti- elitist movement of protest against the practice of political culture of long-term regional government coalitions between the South Tyrolean People's Party ( SVP) and Christian Democrats (DC). She inspired thereby significantly to the so-called New Left in the West German space as well as the Italian workers, student and civil rights movements such as Catholic socialist character.

On the occasion of the general government census in 1981 and the associated introduction of ethnic representation formulated the NL / NS key points of criticism of the institutional separation of the language groups that had been enshrined in constitutional law with the adoption of the Second Autonomy Statute for South Tyrol in 1972. The coined by Alexander Langer 'understanding of culture " Interethnizität " suggested as an alternative to more cooperation across language boundaries and propagated in this sense a juridical development of the South Tyrol autonomy from the said group-based minority protection in the direction of a civil society supported, regional self-government.

The criticism of the NL / NS on ethnic representation established a centralized identification moment the alternative movement in South Tyrol, however, came after the death of Alexander Langer mid -1990s in the South Tyrolean Greens in favor of environmental issues into the background. The full proportional representation debate that was largely inspired by the arguments Langer and later carried on by various social groups, led decades later to a slight relaxation of the originally introduced legal provisions.