2024-07-08 02:36:23
The result of the European elections was a “heavy blow” – the Left Party itself sees this. At a crisis meeting, the leaders made it clear: They are not clinging to their chairs.
A change in leadership is looming in the Left Party in the autumn. Party leaders Martin Schirdewan and Janine Wissler made it very clear that they were not clinging to their chairs, it was said on Sunday after an emergency meeting of the federal executive board with the party’s regional leaders. A working group is to draw up a roadmap for a content-related, strategic and personnel setup with a view to the federal party conference in Halle in October. An orderly process is important, party circles said.
The Left Party received only 2.7 percent of the vote in the European elections at the beginning of June – about half as many as five years previously. “The result of the European elections was a heavy blow for the Left Party,” said a resolution after the meeting to review the election defeat at the weekend. “In summary, we must say: Our election strategy did not work.”
The Left Party had already performed very poorly in the 2021 federal election and the subsequent state elections. The federal executive board has long been criticized, including from the Bundestag parliamentary group. In recent days, former parliamentary group leaders Gregor Gysi and Dietmar Bartsch called for “structural, political and personnel renewal”. Saxony-Anhalt’s parliamentary group leader Eva von Angern urged Wissler and Schirdewan not to run again at the party conference.
The two have led the party together since 2022. Before that, Wissler served for a good year with Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, who resigned in April 2022. Schirdewan had recently indicated that he was considering stepping down in the fall. At the weekend’s meeting, there were self-critical tones from the party leaders and the state executive committees, saying that programmatic clarification processes had been left behind, it was said.
The resolution paper breaks down the weak points: The Left has tried to “place social justice at the centre” and to address climate justice, peace, flight and criticism of the arms buildup policy. However, foreign policy and migration have dominated the media debate. Representatives of the Left have not been able to get through.
After years of dispute over direction, the Left lost one of its best-known politicians, Sahra Wagenknecht, in October 2023. She founded her own party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, and achieved 6.2 percent in the European elections.
Around 430,000 BSW votes came from the Left, as the Left Party states in its resolution. 86 percent of BSW voters think it is good that the new party is simultaneously campaigning for more social welfare and less immigration. The BSW was able to “pick up on right-wing sentiments in the population” and is thus “part of the general right-wing social development.”
In the future, the Left should “articulate more clearly what a humane migration policy looks like as an alternative to isolationist policies.” The party must also become more visible in peace policy. The Left must continue to strengthen social justice as a core issue and sharpen its demands. As a first step, the party plans to examine the changes in its electorate more closely, learn from more successful left-wing parties in Europe and network better with left-wing movements and associations in Germany. A “discussion offensive” is to start over the summer.
The participants of the crisis meeting passed the criticism back to Bartsch and Gysi. It was not well received that Bartsch and his supporters had publicly encouraged a personnel debate, party circles said.
Bartsch had long tried to prevent Wagenknecht from splitting off and thus secure the Left’s parliamentary group status in the Bundestag. Sunday’s resolution states that this is why many questions had not been decided. “As a result, we appeared to many potential voters as having no profile or an unclear profile.”