Apparently everything is going as usual on the left. Just on the back burner. In the election, she lost around 150 offices and 200 employees in the building complex of the German Bundestag. With only 39 elected representatives instead of the previous 69, it is enough for three of them to step out of line – and the party loses its parliamentary group status and with it a number of rights. A renewal of the content is unlikely to be expected from this body.
Without insight and correction, however, the mistakes of the past are repeated. There is a broad response in society for left-wing issues such as more minimum wages, secure pensions and affordable rents – but not for a left-wing party. How can that be?
What the Left Party is today, it has become. Every third member of the parliamentary group has had responsibility as party chairman or parliamentary group leader, either in the state association or at the federal level – that is, responsibility for the miserable performance. And for the wrong track: of 4,297,270 votes in the 2017 federal election, 2,270,906 were left this year. If millions of people turn away from one party, that should be a reason for one or the other to resign. When then? That didn’t happen.
There are left-wing members of the Bundestag who have been in paid politics for more than thirty years. Dietmar Bartsch and Petra Pau stand for nothing in terms of content and lost the election in 2002 when the party was thrown out of the Bundestag. But without new people there will be no new politics. But grassroots life is utterly stunted; outside of its apparatus, the left is little more than an association of contributors.
This party has already reinvented itself once, in the early 1990s, under the acronym PDS. With the difference, however, that at that time thousands of highly educated unemployed belonged to their membership. People who were angry and wanted to return the favor for the devaluation of their biography, who kept in touch with other people who had been left behind and who somehow managed to channel the anger of the losers on the turnaround with their commitment, so that only very few voted to the right at the time.
Then later came the word of the “care party”. The comrades on the left of the desk may smile mildly at this, but in fact there was a time when their party was firmly anchored in the world of the unemployed, low-wage earners and single parents.
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