Germany's Left Party on the brink of oblivion

Germany's socialist Left Party is set to make yet another attempt to reset itself in the autumn after its two co-leaders Janine Wissler and Martin Schirdewan announced they would not be running for re-election at a party conference in October.

Wissler and Schirdewan, who have been in office since 2021 and 2022 respectively, admitted at the weekend that they had failed to revive the party's fortunes after a devastating party split last year, when 10 MPs and over one hundred state parliament representatives left the party to join a splinter group led by the Left's most famous figure, Sahra Wagenknecht.

Despite being only eight months old, the 'Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance' (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht — BSW) is currently polling at around 9% nationally, while the Left Party is at 3%.

Schirdewan acknowledged the party leadership's failure to gain enough public attention on core issues — the cost of living, energy prices, and peace. "As the Left Party, we have not managed to pressure the government enough … I have to say that, very self-critically," he told the public broadcaster ARD on Sunday. "We have spent too long turning in on ourselves as a party, and that has to do with the fact that there were public arguments — we had a split not too long ago, and of course that has left its mark, especially in the public perception."

Facing destruction

The party itself has now admitted that it essentially has a year to save itself before the next national election in the autumn of 2025. "The Left Party is without doubt in a dangerous situation that threatens its very existence," the party leadership said in its leading motion for the upcoming party conference. "Many of those who have placed their trust in us for a long time and voted for us have the impression: You're preoccupied with yourselves and aren't there for us. We accept this criticism."

But Constantin Wurthmann, a political scientist at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, thinks the party will have to do more than simply change its leadership: It will need to find ways to appeal to its core working-class voters once again.

"The Left Party itself hasn't yet really made clear where it sees its place in the current party landscape," he told DW. "Recently it has tried to overtake the Greens on ecological issues, but has successively neglected a significant part of its core voters, who don't just live in urban centers."

Should the Left Party fail to get representation in parliament in next year's national election, it would effectively become little more than a regional party with a few strongholds in eastern Germany. But even there its support is dwindling fast: In the states of Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg, which will all elect new parliaments in the coming weeks, the Left Party is currently polling at roughly half of its vote share in the 2019 state elections.

That is particularly humiliating, given that the party originally grew out of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) that governed East Germany and still commanded much loyalty among the population even after the fall of the communist regime's one-party system. Only in Thuringia is there still substantial Left Party support, thanks mainly to the personal popularity of their State Premier Bodo Ramelow.

National demise

At the national level, the party's declining support goes back much further than the Wagenknecht splintering of 2023. At the 2021 Bundestag election, the party lost nearly half its vote share and took only 4.9% of the vote, only scraping into parliament by virtue of its three directly won seats. When 10 of its MPs left to form the BSW last year, the Left Party "faction" was downgraded to a "group," meaning it lost some parliamentary rights, such as committee participation and longer speaking times during debates.

The main point of difference with the new BSW remains migration — Wagenknecht's party wants more deportations of failed asylum-seekers, more border controls, and more restrictions on immigration. That is diametrically opposite to the Left Party's position, which pointedly chose ecologist and activist Carola Rackete, who once captained migrant rescue ships in the Mediterranean, as its main candidate for the 2024 European Parliament election in June. Though Rackete was elected to the European Parliament, the party took only 2.7% of the German vote — by far its worst-ever European election result.

On other issues, the Left Party remains fairly close to the BSW: Like Wagenknecht's party, the Left has called for more diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine, "instead of fueling escalation and a war of attrition," as Schirdewan put it last year — though it has always taken care to precede those criticisms with condemnation of Vladimir Putin and the Russian invasion.

Struggling to get noticed

Wagenknecht's departure left the Left with a more immediate problem than subtle arguments about policy positions — getting noticed. Wagenknecht was by far the party's most prominent figure; she is a fixture on German TV talk shows who knows how to formulate a rambunctious anti-establishment soundbite. Though she caused the party plenty of internal strife in the last few years of her Left Party membership, she consistently got the party a hearing in the media.

Without her, the party has struggled. Wissler was considered a good, media-savvy speaker, but she has failed to fill Wagenknecht's shoes. Her hopes of providing a new start for the party were hampered earlier this year when she was implicated in a scandal: Allegations of sexual misconduct were made against her former partner in the Hesse branch of the party during the time that she led it. She strenuously denied any accusation that she may have tried to protect him.

Now the Left Party faces a battle to save itself and has until October to find leaders who can find provide a new start. There is some hope: Even with its popularity tanking, the Left Party remains comparatively large, with over 50,000 members (around the same number as the far-right Alternative for Germany, AfD).

And in some ways, the Left Party simply faces the same problem as all the other major parties in Germany. As Wurthmann put it: "We have also seen that even the CDU hasn't managed to profit from the poor poll ratings of the coalition government, while the BSW and the AfD have done so," he said. "Clearly they haven't found the right answers yet."

Edited by Rina Goldenberg

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