He does so on two fronts: by announcing he will be a parliamentary candidate if national elections are held this September and by being a key player in the promotion of the new leftist alliance, featuring the PDS and the western-based Labour and Social Election Alternative (WASG).
WASG is spearheaded by Oskar Lafontaine, the ebullient ex-Social Democratic Party Chancellor-candidate and Saarland premier who created political shockwaves a few years back by resigning as finance minister from Gerhard Schroeder's cabinet, and by announcing earlier this year that he was quitting the SPD in frustration over the government's policies.
The Gysi-Lafontaine honeymoon will be "politically consummated soon when the leftist alliance agrees a new title for the party - likely to be "Linke Partei" (Leftist Party).
Gysi feels the new leftist movement offers the party a chance of becoming the nation's third biggest political force, ahead of the Free Democrats, Germany's liberal FDP party.
A buoyant Gysi predicts: "We will have a nationwide party, one which is acceptable to a growing number of people left of the political spectrum and the Social Democratic Party. If we succeed in that it will not be a case of us obtaining, say, six per cent of the vote at elections, but nearer to ten per cent.
"Its problem in the past had been that the PDS managed to pick up only around one per cent of the vote, from Schleswig Holstein to Bavaria. In the east we got taken seriously, but not over the country as a whole. That was our trouble.
"Overcome this and we will have real progress," he says, adding that such a development will lead to a more liberal "Zeitgeist" in the country, and to "political alternatives really getting discussed at last."
At the last Parliamentary elections, the PDS failed to get over the five per cent hurdle required to win full parliamentary representation due to the party's failure to gain much voter support in the west.
Now Gysi predicts it has a greater chance of profiting from the growing number of disaffected Social Democrat (SPD) and Green voters, who are bitterly opposed to the government's controversial Hartz IV labour reforms. <!--page-->
German opinion polls currently back up his predictions. The new leftist alliance will advance the Alliance vote, they say. Says Gysi: "It is not only unemployment that worries people in Germany. The catalogue of political irritations stretches much further, ranging from pension cut-backs to social-welfare hikes and rising health insurance costs."
With Lafontaine, Gysi sees himself as the joint architect of a movement left of the SPD "stretching across the whole of the country, east to west, north to south."
Wolfgang Wieland, a Green Party veteran, admits in Berlin that the leftist alliance will be competition for his party if elections are held this autumn - especially in big city areas. But he promises the Greens will conduct a very forceful election campaign "aimed at convincing voters we are the true party of the left," he says.
Wieland speaks with contempt about Gysi and Lafontaine, depicting them as laughable political figureheads. Gysi's brain x-ray gets published in the conservative mass-selling German daily, Bild, and Lafontaine reveals the level an intact brain can sink to as a columnist in that same newspaper, he says waspishly.
Gysi, accustomed to criticism from political opponents, dismisses such observations, saying they demonstrate the nervousness of the main opposition parties.
The 57-year-old lawyer-politician, after masterminding the creation of the PDS in 1989-90 following the collapse of the disgraced SED communist party, served as a deputy in the German parliament in the 1990s.
Later he became the Berlin city government economics minister, but resigned when questions arose about his alleged misuse of government air travel tickets, a charge he resolutely denied.
In the past four years Gysi has maintained a lower profile as a busy city lawyer, though he never severed his contact to the PDS or to Lothar Bisky, the current party leader who for years has been his political mentor.
It was Bisky who earlier this year urged Gysi to make a political comeback, convinced his charisma would help rejuvenate the party's sagging fortunes.
But when meeting with a group of accredited foreign journalists in Berlin, the former chain smoker admitted he'd recently had to rethink his life following serious health problems.
"I don't get so obsessed or worked up about issues as I used to a few years back," says Gysi, adding "I'm now much more laid-back."
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