Linke on culture and media

The Left wants more money for the Kulturräume (regional cultural funding districts) to secure cultural institutions in rural areas. Village meeting places, fire departments, sports clubs and youth work should also get more support.

The Left wants more money for culture in rural areas. Theaters and museums should stay there. Villages should get meeting places, such as a shop with a café. Young people should have their own spaces. Fire departments and sports clubs should also get more help.

Where cooperatives or associations set up a village meeting place, the state should help pay for it; shops and restaurants could also become meeting places with postal and tourist services. Saxony should keep seeking money from the EU funds ESF and ERDF to preserve youth centers, sociocultural centers and clubhouses. For young people, the platform calls for self-run clubs, skate parks and legal graffiti walls. State funding for professional youth work is to rise.

The Left wants to protect Sorbian identity. Sorbian is to be expanded as a second official language and be learnable everywhere in Saxony, and Sorbian history is to be taught in schools.

The Sorbs are a minority in Saxony. The Left wants to protect their language and culture. People should be able to learn Sorbian everywhere in Saxony. Schools should teach Sorbian history.

According to the platform, protecting Sorbian identity also means examining the bans the Nazi regime imposed on the Sorbs. The role of Sorbian as a second official language would be strengthened further. Language courses would be available across the state, and the history of the Sorbs would become part of school lessons.

The Left regards culture as an essential public service and wants to fund municipalities and the Kulturräume (regional culture funding districts) so they can maintain and develop the cultural landscape. Funding is to rise automatically with wages and prices. Culture should be within reach for everyone, regardless of money or where they live.

The Left wants more money for culture in cities and villages. The money should rise each year with prices. Everyone should be able to enjoy culture. Clubs should also get protection and funding.

The plan includes a statewide development concept for arts and culture, keeping community and culture centers, and expanding public transit so cultural venues can be reached. Small grants and funding for guest performances are to grow, and applications and accounting are to become simpler and digital. The party wants to examine whether permanent institutional funding is more economical. Clubs and live music venues are to count as cultural institutions and receive institutional funding. The state's culture foundation is to receive more endowment capital.

The Left wants to introduce binding minimum fees for freelance artists and pay permanent staff at cultural institutions according to collective agreements. The platform argues that many people working in arts and culture can barely live on their work.

Many artists earn very little. The Left wants fixed minimum fees for freelance artists. Staff at theaters and museums should get union-scale pay. Everyone should be able to live on their work.

The platform names exhibition fees as an example for minimum fees. In-house wage agreements at theaters and orchestras, which usually pay less than the sector-wide scale, are to be ended. According to the platform, about 80,000 people work in roughly 10,000 companies in Saxony's cultural and creative sector, many of them below the poverty line.

The Left wants to make cultural offerings easier to access, for example through free admission, and to keep and fund music schools and youth art schools. Parents are to get financial relief for their children's cultural education. Music teachers are to be paid better.

The Left wants everyone to be able to enjoy culture. For example, admission could be free. Music schools and art schools for young people should stay. Parents should pay less for them. Music teachers should earn more.

Music and arts education in schools is to keep receiving support. Because demand is high, more music education is to be offered, especially in rural areas. Fees for freelance music school teachers are to rise and follow collective wage scales, and permanent staff are to receive appropriate union-scale pay. The platform sees cultural education as part of lifelong learning that also takes place in libraries and museums.

The Left wants to hand unused buildings and land owned by the state and municipalities to cultural initiatives. Important industrial monuments are to be preserved and, where possible, used as social and cultural spaces. The platform argues that projects often simply lack a suitable space.

Some buildings owned by the state and towns stand empty. The Left wants to give them to culture groups. Old factory buildings should be kept. They should become places for culture and meeting people.

The buildings would be provided through use or temporary-use contracts, with the state giving municipalities money for this. Important industrial monuments are to be recorded and carefully renovated; municipalities are to use their right of first refusal and receive state funds for it. Studio officers are to help artists find spaces and secure them long term. Cultural institutions of all kinds are to network more closely and be able to share resources.

The Left wants to fund the Foundation for the Sorbian People and other Sorbian organizations according to need. The financing agreement between Saxony, Brandenburg and the federal government is to run without a time limit and compensate for inflation.

The Sorbs are a minority in Saxony. The Left wants to fund their foundation permanently. The contract for this should have no end date. The money should rise with prices.

The Foundation for the Sorbian People is funded jointly by Saxony, Brandenburg and the federal government. The platform wants to turn the agreement, which has so far been time-limited, into a permanent one. Inflation adjustment is meant to keep the funds from losing real value.

The Left wants to reorient Saxony's remembrance policy and make the uniqueness of Nazi crimes and the Shoah its guiding principle. It considers it unhistorical that the memorials law equates remembrance of Nazi crimes with remembrance of the victims of Stalinism. Memorial sites are to get more money and specialist staff.

The Left wants to change how Saxony remembers the Nazi era. The Nazi crimes should be treated as unique. Memorial sites should get more money. They should be able to hire more education experts.

Funding for the Saxon Memorials Foundation and for institutional support of sites remembering Nazi crimes is to rise so that more academic and educational staff can do active educational work. The memorials foundation law is to be rewritten so new memorial sites can be funded without a separate change to the law each time. Museums and memorials are to be as accessible as possible, and inclusive tours led by people with disabilities are to be supported. The platform criticizes that whether students visit a memorial during their school years often depends on chance.

The Left wants to research and address Saxony's involvement in colonialism and create a dedicated place of remembrance. Checking the origin of collection items from colonial contexts is to become easier. People affected by racism are to be involved.

Saxony was also involved in colonialism. The Left wants to research this history. There should be a place of remembrance. Museums should find it easier to check where their items come from.

All museums are to get money for provenance research, which the platform also sees as a chance for new relationships with formerly colonized societies. Institutions such as the State Ethnographic Collections are to be supported in returning human remains and cultural objects. State employees, and teachers in particular, are to be offered training on colonialism. Volunteer initiatives are to receive easily accessible grants and expert help. The place of remembrance is to be developed together with people who have experienced racism.

The Left wants to preserve a diverse media landscape in Saxony and prevent further concentration. Local reporting is to be secured and media subsidies awarded more transparently. In the party's view, media policy should deal with all media, including private companies.

The Left wants many different media outlets in Saxony. A few big companies should not control everything. There should still be news from each region. It should be clear who gets funding for media.

Diverse offerings are to be funded and supported in the digital transition. Media makers are to get help involving volunteers from the regions in producing content. More noncommercial offerings are also to be created. A media dialogue with media makers is meant to advance these goals jointly.

The Left wants to preserve non-commercial community radio and local and regional radio and TV stations, which it sees as important for media diversity. Saxony's state media authority is also to review media providers' output regularly, and its assembly is to gain more rights.

The Left wants to keep small local radio and TV stations. This includes community radio without ads. Every county should have such stations. A public agency should check how well the stations work.

Every county is to have regional radio and TV alongside the local newspaper, complemented by non-commercial media that produce for TV, radio and the internet at once. When awarding funds, the state media authority is to apply the nationwide definition of non-commercial broadcasters; simply not airing ads would no longer be enough. A media monitoring system is to show whether broadcasters meet their license conditions and what journalistic quality they offer. A change in the law is to give the authority's assembly more rights and add further social groups to it.

The Left wants the state of Saxony to put more money into Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung, the regional film and media fund. It also wants cinema to become a cultural venue again in every region.

The Left wants to give more money to support films. People in smaller towns should also be able to see movies regularly. This should happen within five years.

The extra money is mainly meant to strengthen children's films, documentaries and animated films from Saxony and to expand development funding. Funding is to be tied to social and environmental standards at production companies. Within five years, every municipality with at least 5,000 residents should have regular film screenings.

The Left wants public broadcasting to keep a comprehensive mandate that also covers entertainment, feature films and sports. At the same time, broadcasters are to become more transparent and the MDR broadcasting council more diverse, which the platform says is needed to regain public acceptance.

The Left wants strong public broadcasting. The broadcaster MDR should not only show news. It should also show films, sports and programs for children. Broadcasters should work more openly. More different groups should sit on the broadcasting council.

Feature films, entertainment and live sports should not be left solely to private providers or paid services, and children's programming should not be cut. Short films, animation, documentaries and investigative formats are to get regular prime-time slots; ratings should not be the only yardstick. The Left calls for regular evaluations using outside experts and the views of fee payers, livestreams of all board meetings, ombuds offices and audience councils. The MDR interstate treaty is to be changed so that youth, culture, science, the arts, migrant communities and civil society are represented on the broadcasting council and women hold half the seats. Staff and freelancer councils and the editorial committee are to be able to put items on the agenda.

The Left wants to keep the broadcasting fee as a solidarity-based way of funding public broadcasting. People who receive welfare benefits are to be exempt as a rule, and the state is to cover the cost of those exemptions.

The Left wants to keep the broadcasting fee. People who get welfare benefits should not have to pay it. The state should cover the cost. Then the fee can go down a little for everyone.

According to the platform, the level of the fee should not depend on media-policy considerations. The Left sees savings if broadcasters no longer had to pay cable operators to carry their programs. If the state rather than other fee payers also financed the exemptions, the platform says the fee could fall by about 1.30 euros a month.