Profit of The Left

When Gregor Gysi's party proposed him for the post of economics minister in Berlin's new government, Michael Glos, a conservative leader in the local parliament, quipped that it was like naming "an arsonist as fire chief." That's because the 54-year-old lawyer has for more than a decade been a leader of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to East Germany's Communist Party, whose legacy still haunts the eastern part of unified Germany. Gysi just shrugs at the barbs from his critics and makes the valid point that Berlin's finances were left in a mess after a decade of government...