Dresden,Germany - Germany's opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD) inched slightly leftwards with a proposal to reintroduce an inheritance tax as the party on Sunday wound up a three-day conference to take stock of its recent electoral defeat. The party elected a new leader, career politician Sigmar Gabriel, 50, on Friday to replace Franz Muentefering, 69. In September, the SPD's popular support, which had hovered close to 40 per cent for decades, crashed to 23 per cent at the German general election.
Delegates overrode a recommendation from the new leader not to bind him on the issue of whether taxes should be extracted on the estates of rich people when they die. A majority said the party should firmly advocate such a tax.
Gabriel stressed it was too early to say if he would run for chancellor at the next election in 2013.
"It's not very bright to debate who will be candidate for chancellor just after losing a general election," he said on ARD television. "The SPD has to listen to society, develop a sense of the various life situations," he said.
The 500 delegates at the national conference in Dresden passed a multi-part resolution drafted by the new leadership which affirmed long-time centre-left policies, while admitting that "we made compromises in power that undermined our credibility."
But the conference rejected calls to make a reduction of Germany's retirement age from 67 to 65 a party policy. Labour groups had earlier assailed SPD support for a higher pension-entry age as its key mistake of the past four years.
Gabriel denied the party had actually moved to the left, saying its task was to capture the middle ground of German politics by propounding "the solutions of a popular party of the left."
He praised the party, saying it had made "a fresh start" and had avoided "tumbling into depression and feuding" after the poll loss.
The Social Democrats were in power for 11 years until they were unseated in September, first at the head of a coalition with the Greens and then in a coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel, who leads the German Christian Democrats.
She now has the pro-business Free Democrats as her coalition partner.
