LOOKING down from my window onto Berlin’s broad Karl-Marx Allee boulevard a week ago Friday, I saw hundreds and hundreds of green tractors moving in two disciplined lines towards central Brandenburg Gate.

Similar lines all over Germany were angrily protesting against government measures, based on budgetary or ecological concerns, but which cut farm income, especially for struggling farmers.

Hostile placards on the tractors denounced government ministers; a few added makeshift gallows with their names. On Monday they converged for a giant national protest.

In an overlapping action, a three-day rail engineers’ strike called for a 35-hour week for shift workers with no cut in pay. Freight traffic was hit hard, also new year’s holidaymakers and urban commuters, with city transport lines sharply curtailed. Small private lines settled, but unless the semi-independent state railroads and the powerful union can agree, a longer stoppage is due.

Last month 80,000 state employees — nursery teachers, office secretaries, rubbish collectors — walked out briefly and won wage increases. Even doctors closed down a few days to support medical assistants. And last Friday hauliers drove together through Berlin with their demands.

Things have really been stirring after the tough Covid times, with signs of new militancy trying to keep pace with prices on meat, cheese, fruit and vegetables — or the upward bubbling of petrol rates at the pump.

Bills for home heating and electricity are climbing frighteningly, and medical insurance rates are edging upwards. Spreading hospital privatisation, now at over a third, meant 34 hospitals going bankrupt last year, especially in rural areas, while medical staff are still short despite the influx from Asia or Africa.

In the schools, overworked, over bureaucratised teachers are quitting overfilled classrooms while college students, though public universities are tuition-free, must still shell out an average €900-1,000 a month for fees, food, books and, first of all, a room — if they can find one.

And while gentrified housing blossoms alongside grand high-rise office buildings, nearly a million affordable new homes are desperately needed but only a pitiful fraction are being built. High taxes, interest problems, costly material, strict regulations and bureaucracy are blamed.

But I must avoid a one-sided picture of one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Joblessness is not all too high, much of the population lives relatively well.

But things are very patchy in the East and raggedy around all the edges for pensioners. Immigrant or single-parent families, even when not hungry or cold, face worries about the prices, predicted recession and their children’s future.

A majority disapprove of the disunited, seemingly helpless coalition in power and turn to tractor marches or — as 22 per cent of German voters do — to a hungrily eager Alternative for Germany (AfD), now in second place nationally but leading in all five East German states, mostly at over 30 per cent, with three, Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, facing elections in September.

AfD leaders avoid visible goose-steps or raised-arm salutes, but old uniform colours often peek out from correct business suits. Thus far all other parties have kept to a seemingly irrevocable taboo against coalitions with the AfD.

But since its shock victories in a small town, two rural counties and then for mayor in picturesque Pirna on the Elbe (population 40,000), some Christian Democrats are reconsidering.

The expose of a secret hotel meeting of AfD men, neofascists, businessmen and two Christian Democrats devising plans, “after victory,” to expel millions of “foreigners” from Germany got huge media attention.

Quasi-official anti-AfD rallies were quickly organised in many cities and also at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Their rejection of xenophobia was impressive and inspired debate on whether to seek a court ban on the AfD or stick to the ballot boxes.

But somehow, amid genuine fears of AfD gains, some — like me — could not forget decades of German politics intertwining with war criminal corporations and banks.

Or influential far-rightists like Hans-Georg Maassen, president of the Federal Office to Protect the Constitution from 2012 to 2018, when he overexposed himself as a too-close friend of the AfD and had to be ousted, just one of multiple such scandals. Or the polite — even friendly — TV opportunities for AfD spokespersons.

The anti-AfD rallies edged out nearly all reports on the annual Luxemburg-Liebknecht memorial walk and march on January 14 and the international Luxemburg conference the day before.

The former was troubled again this year by a nasty baton and pepper spray set-to with the police, evidently because some marchers dared to use the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which is semi-officially verboten.

The conference, again organised by the leftist daily Junge Welt, was bigger than ever, with participants from all over Germany and elsewhere and as always a spoken message from the radio-journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, framed and imprisoned in Pennsylvania without a fair trial since 1982.

But this year’s conference, though totally agreed on opposing the three-party coalition government and the “Christian” opposition, displayed sharp disagreement on German leftist politics.

Hardly represented, if at all, were the “reformers,” the ruling element in the Die Linke (“the Left”) party. They are the ones who dreamed that by “getting along” with Nato just a little they might some day be able to join a national government.

They rarely engage in militant fights “in the streets” and cultivate ties with a few union leaders but all too rarely with working people. They stress the rights of immigrants and refugees but then worry about gender punctuation and the history of patriarchy.

It has been their compromising — denounced as “opportunist selling out” by some — which caused desperation, with many leaving the party and some hoping for a new, truly leftist, socialist party, one which recalled the names and perhaps a few of the teachings of mentors like Marx (and even Lenin).

Many saw Sahra Wagenknecht’s decision to break with Die Linke and form a new party as a fulfilment of such hopes. A wonderful orator and unbeatable debater, she was remarkably popular even in wide circles of conservative West Germany; the media often invited her because she attracted viewers and she held her own.

Most importantly, she wanted no compromises with Nato, and while condemning Vladimir Putin’s march into Ukraine, she explained it as basically a defence against mounting US-Nato advances.

And she attacked the total economic break with Russia, which was causing Germany’s sharp downhill slide and largely represented kowtowing to US economic pressures, always aimed at preventing any German-Russian coexistence, which is seen in Washington as contrary to the goal of world hegemony. She also stressed the fight for German workers’ gains (while dismissing gender debates as a distraction by professional or academic sectors of Die Linke). At last, said many; a party they could join with heart and soul.

On January 8 Wagenknecht and nine other Bundestag members quit the Die Linke caucus and founded a party temporarily named Sahra Wagenknecht Bundnis (Alliance).

This left Die Linke one delegate short of the requisite number for a caucus, thus reducing its speaking time, cutting rights to question ministers, to committee memberships and, sadly, cutting finances, meaning firing up to 100 staff members — aides, researchers, advisers, secretaries who may well become jobless. As for the 10 who quit, including Wagenknecht, they remain Bundestag members as an even smaller group.

The new party will hold its founding congress on January 26-27. With no state groups as yet, about 450 delegates will be chosen by the new leaders. Until then Wagenknecht will provisionally share the chair with Amari Mohammed Ali, until now co-chair of the Die Linke caucus in the Bundestag.

The congress will decide on a new name and write a programme, which is especially important since it wants to enter the European Union elections in June and the three state elections in September.

The new party, Wagenknecht stated, should have four basic principles: peace, social justice, economic reason and freedom. All her adherents supported a “foreign policy that once again relies on diplomacy instead of arms deliveries,” with a call for peace negotiations to end the Ukraine war and pursue peace and renewed trade with Russia.

On other points there were questions. While she called for higher taxes on the wealthy and plans for government-regulated price ceilings to protect consumers, the idea of state “supervisory bodies” to oversee companies” production activities and other proposals seemed to hint at a turn, or return, to old fair-and-square market economics like in West Germany’s post-war years.

There seemed little mention of a militant working people’s struggle. As for freedom, she wanted greater tolerance for ideological diversity, with no marginalising or ostracising people because of their opinions. Good sentiments, no doubt, but here, too, not much about that old “class conflict,” or about replacing the world’s billionaire powers with some form of non-profit socialism.

Most controversial in Wagenknecht’s programme has been her position on refugees and immigrants, not completely shutting the doors to Germany but keeping them less ajar, not beyond the ability to house, feed, school and integrate them, especially those coming not to escape repression but simply to find a decent living standard.

What was widely considered Wagenknecht’s hope to win over or win back non-fascist Germans who voted AfD because it rejected immigration sometimes seemed too close an approach to AfD words and thoughts, with too little loyalty to leftist internationalism.

Yet many of the small group of founders have themselves “immigrant backgrounds,” including the temporary co-chair Amira Mohamed Ali and the distinguished foreign policy expert Sevim Dagdelen.

The first polls are still confusing, some showing high figures for Wagenknecht’s new party, others with low ones. Die Linke results also vary. I see several possibilities in the coming elections.

Meanwhile, Germany, Europe and the world are facing giant, frightening menaces. One, ecological devastation and global warming, is joining with increasing conflicts and ongoing post-colonial exploitation and forcing more and more people to leave their homes and search elsewhere for survival, often in northern directions.

Another menace, closely related, is the diabolical mistreatment of these refugees who are fleeing drought, floods, joblessness, hopelessness and ugly slums to rabble-rouse working people in the more favoured northern countries and direct their anger about increasing domestic exploitation against the refugees instead of against the true instigators who, when it seems necessary, turn to violent suppression, with fascism cultivated as a possible last resort.

But the third giant menace has become most threatening of all. It is war — very dangerously so in connection with Ukraine. Despite the misleading media, this threat did not begin in 2022. Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg told a press conference:

“Since 2014 Nato has implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defence in a generation. With, for the first time in our history, combat-ready troops in the eastern part of the alliance, with higher readiness, with more exercises, and also with more defence spending … So when President Putin launched his full-fledged invasion last year, we were prepared.”

This kind of “defence” is currently being dramatically enhanced: “Nato is launching its largest exercise since the cold war, rehearsing how US troops could reinforce European allies in countries bordering Russia and on the alliance’s eastern flank if a conflict were to flare up with a “near-peer” adversary. Some 90,000 troops are due to join the Steadfast Defender 2024 drills that will run through May, the alliance’s top commander Chris Cavoli said last week.

More than 50 ships, from aircraft carriers to destroyers, will take part, as well as more than 80 fighter jets, helicopters and drones and at least 1,100 combat vehicles including 133 tanks and 533 infantry fighting vehicles. Cavoli said the drills would rehearse Nato’s execution of its regional plans, the first defence plans the alliance has drawn up in decades, detailing how it would respond to a Russian attack.

“Steadfast Defender 2024 will demonstrate Nato’s ability to rapidly deploy forces from North America and other parts of the alliance to reinforce the defence of Europe.”

In preparation for such events, German Social Democrat Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius told an audience: “We need a change of mentality. It is already fully under way among the troops … But very importantly, the change of mentality in society is also the right thing to do. We have to get used to the idea that the danger of war in Europe could be imminent, and that means that we have to become fit for war, we have to be able to defend ourselves and prepare the Bundeswehr and society for it.” Frightening words.

Are these men right? Does Russia really threaten Germany? Has it taken a single step in that direction since it moved all its troops out of East Germany in 1994, expecting the other side to follow suit, as promised?

That assumption proved very false as Nato, with its weaponry, moved closer and closer to Russia — aiming to surround it in Georgia and Ukraine, but always using those key words “defence” — “Russian expansion” — “Putin imperialism.”

I have become convinced that the major threat in today’s world is not from Putin, Russia, or China either, but from a giant steamroller aiming at world rule and trying to eliminate any and all obstacles. Its main motor since 1945 has been in the US, the list of its victims is long and bitter: Guatemala, Iran, Congo, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya are a sampling.

It is steered by a mighty conglomerate of Brobdingnagian giants, above all in the fossil fuel, chemical, armaments and hedge fund/financial sectors, but including others: fast food and beverages, seeds for farmers, pharmaceuticals, also mindbenders in media, publishing, films and, more and more dangerously, Amazon and the offspring of Silicon Valley.

The number of rulers in each field is narrowing, the value of their estates moves faster into the billion levels. There are billionaires in other countries as well, also in Russia and China, but Wall Street, the Pentagon (with Langley) are major masters.

The strategy of the US dynasts includes close ties with brethren in three junior partner countries. One, now very wobbly, is Britain. A second one is Germany, whose power is based on autos (VW, Daimler, Quandt), chemicals (Bayer, BASF), weapons (Rheinmetall, Maffei, Heckler and Koch) and the Deutsche Bank. Third of all, currently expanding most tragically, is Israel which, though small geographically, considers itself nobody’s junior partner.

The pictures and reports are so appalling, the excuses and defence of its mass murder so terribly out of proportion to the event which unleashed it — bloody as it was — that I can only wonder if those still supporting Netanyahu or generals who demand death for all Palestinian “human animals” even have a heart. Or if they have ever grasped the full meaning of the words “Never again!” — which apply to all human beings, yes, also to Palestinians.

But after five weeks of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, the director-general of the World Health Organisation already reported that children were being killed at an average rate of six per hour and that “in Gaza, nowhere and no-one is safe.”

In December last year, Joe Biden voiced worries about “indiscriminate bombing.” There are rumours he urges Netanyahu to avoid hurting civilians. But despite any misgivings or admonishments, the US has been sending, among many other items, thousands of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel — described in the New York Times as “one of the most destructive munitions in Western military arsenals … a weapon that unleashes a blast wave and metal fragments thousands of feet in every direction.”

“By mid-January 60,834 Palestinians were listed as injured in Gaza, an estimated 24,100 had been killed, about 70 per cent of them children, with an uncounted number buried under rubble.” I wonder how many of them had taken part in the October 7 raid.

About 100 courageous journalists have been killed in Gaza, mostly purposefully, by well-aimed Israeli bullets or missiles. Also buried are numerous talented or young hopeful artists, musicians, poets. I do not know if Khaled Juma survived. After an earlier bombing of Gaza, in 2014, he wrote this very short poem, which I will close with.

Oh rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos,
You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony,
Come back —
And scream as you want,
And break all the vases,
Steal all the flowers,
Come back,
Just come back…