GERMANY: The leader of Germany's ruling Social Democrats Franz Müntefering has launched a second stinging attack on big business, comparing opportunistic investors to "swarms of locusts".
Mr Müntefering attacked investors for "giving no thought to the people whose jobs they are destroying", singling out for criticism the Deutsche Bank chairman Josef Ackermann.
"When he announces . . . growing profits and 6,400 redundancies on the same day . . . that kind of thing depresses people and robs them of their trust in democracy," he said.
Mr Müntefering's polemic on the influence of big business on democracy provoked surprise, anger but also disbelief in Berlin yesterday.
Two days earlier, Chancellor Schröder pleaded the case in the Bundestag for lifting the EU arms embargo on China, despite opposition across Europe, the US and in his own government.
"China is not the China of 1989," argued Mr Schröder in his case for abolishing the embargo imposed after the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in China were crushed and its leaders imprisoned.
China is Germany's second most important non-EU export market, growing over 20 per cent each year for the last five years. Total trade between the countries is worth around €53 billion.
Mr Schröder said Germany "doesn't, cannot and will not deliver weapons of war" to China - a point secured in German law. But German critics of Berlin's arms politics say that argument misses the point.
"It's not about weapons of war. Satellite communications technology in the West, for example, has a huge lead on China, that's why Siemens is so interested in this," says Dr Peter Strutynski, a peace studies researcher at the University of Kassel.
He criticises Berlin for demanding greater moral responsibility from German companies towards their employees at home, yet having less interest in moral matters in government dealings with China.
"It is really a contradictory, two-faced argument," says Dr Strutynski.
"On the one hand you have Mr Müntefering articulating the old left-wing vocabulary to hold onto older Social Democrat voters. Then Mr Schröder has been pursuing a closer, strategic partnership to woo China."
German opposition politicians and newspapers dismissed the SPD's polemic yesterday as an attempt to distract voters from the government's problems ahead of a crucial state election next month.