20 June 2020 is the day: Lenin statue will be unveiled in Gelsenkirchen!

“A postponement is not a cancellation,” Gabi Fechtner, MLPD Chairwoman, promised on 12 March. Just two days prior to the planned Lenin statue
unveiling ceremony, the MLPD had postponed the event to avoid exposing any participants to the danger of corona infection, which was
rapidly increasing at the time.

“We are happy to say that the wait is now over and the ceremony will take place on the 20th of June, 2020,” says Gabi Fechtner. The course of the
corona pandemic currently permits holding this ceremony while strictly observing health protection requirements. Gabi Fechtner: “With this we
also belatedly celebrate Lenin's 150th birthday publicly. On 20 June we also celebrate the 38th birthday of the MLPD, the only party in Germany that
carries Lenin in its name and applies his teachings to today.”

“Lenin was a master in working purposefully and successfully towards real, that is, revolutionary, solutions in world-historical crises. And today we are
experiencing the most dramatic crisis of capitalism since the Second World War. So it is high time to raise the first Lenin monument in West Germany
and hold a broad societal debate over revolutionary perspectives,” Gabi Fechtner explains.

Twice the courts, on application by the MLPD, put the city authorities of Gelsenkirchen in their place, who in all seriousness wanted to prohibit
the erection of a historical statue under the pretext of “protection of historical monuments”. Then the Christian Democrats called for an
online petition, Gelsenkirchen-“Horst says no to Lenin statue”. After several weeks it was buried, a failure. Instead of the targeted 2,200
signers, there were only 204, 165 of them from Gelsenkirchen.

Gabi Fechtner: “On 20 June we shall also celebrate this humiliation of anticommunism. We take this event as an occasion to conduct a broad democratic discussion over such questions as the current significance of the socialist alternative or the disastrous societal role of anticommunism.”
The ceremony inaugurating the Lenin monument will begin at 2 p.m. at intersection Schmalhorststrasse/Industriestrasse, Gelsenkirchen-Horst.

We ask members of the press to obtain accreditation in good time since for health reasons the declared number of participants is limited to
about 300. Only a part can be reserved for the regional, national and international press since many people from Gelsenkirchen and
delegations from all over Germany and from foreign countries will want to participate.

Of course, MLPD would be happy about words of greetings and visits. More information about the dispute over the Lenin statue, about Lenin,
the polemical discussion about him, and about the movement “Don't give anticommunism a chance” is available online at:

https://www.rf-news.de/lenin/collection_view

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