Red balloon: Germany’s Left party on the rise

Empty water bottles pile up in crates along the walls of Willy van Ooyen’s cramped office. Housed in a 1950s Frankfurt block, the “Peace and Future Workshop” is about as modest as political headquarters get.

Yet from this humble base, the veteran of the German pacifist movement steers an electoral campaign with a good chance of bringing about a change in the country’s political system virtually without precedent since the second world war.