Just as Left MP Sören Pellmann (45) has finished his umpteenth interview, two men on a roller bicycle block his way and present a riddle. The man in the wheelchair section in front of the bicycle holds a protest sign, the man on the saddle behind him asks the question. ‘Mr Sören, an adapted home has a living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. What’s missing there?’
Tall-tall Pellmann thinks for a moment, bends over and looks over his thick glasses: ‘I’m sure you’ll tell me.’ A balcony, is the answer, followed by a plea for better national legislation for adapted homes. Pellmann listens patiently. Die Linke is there for the weaker in society, and Die Linke is always accessible. Also at her party congress this summer Saturday in Erfurt, in the heart of Germany, where Die Linke is looking for a way out of the deepest crisis since its existence.
Germany’s political left winger threatens to disappear. In the national elections in 2021, the party lost half of its seats and finished with 4.9 percent of the vote, just below the electoral threshold. Thanks to a back door in the German electoral system, they were able to stay in parliament in the nick of time. Since then, Die Linke has been dramatically slaughtered in three state elections. In Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia, the match was more than halved. In Saarland, Die Linke fell from 13 to 2 percent and immediately flew out of parliament.
How did we get here, and how do we get back on top? That is the all-encompassing question. But under those main questions hangs an almost endless list of sub-questions that show that Die Linke is struggling not only with itself, but also with a rapidly changing Germany.
Are we primarily there for workers affected by high gas prices, or for young people who joined us in the fight against climate change? Are we fighting capitalism, or are we fighting for the interests of our supporters within that system? Where are feminism and LGBTI rights on our priority list? What the hell are we supposed to do with the Ukraine war as Germany’s most pro-Russian party? And if we already manage to find a new course, how do we convince the voter? Because all that voter has seen from Die Linke in recent years is arguing.
Jerk to the right
Die Linke arose in 2007 from the merger of a disaffected group of (West) German Social Democrats with the PDS, the direct successor of the Socialist Unity Party from the former GDR. Remembering its name, the party has always been on the far left of the political spectrum. Die Linke sees itself as the representative of workers and the socially weak, advocate of people in former East German federal states, and socialist counterweight to the capitalism that the rest of the political system subscribes to. Against NATO, warm to Russia.
If the party does not recover, Germany will not only lose a piece of political furniture; it could also herald a shift to the right for politics as a whole. Especially because there are only six party combinations in the current German parliament: Germany has an electoral threshold of five percent, and one or two-seat parties like in the Netherlands do not exist here. So count with him, says the young socialist and teacher Carl Bauer (28), who mans an information stand on Saturday from the activist subgroup Bewegungslinke:
The government coalition consists of three parties. The FDP is a right-wing party. The Greens are an environmental party, but on a liberal basis. Although the SPD implements some social points, such as the minimum wage, it has been pushed very much to the middle. The coalition as a whole pursues a market-liberal policy. The opposition parties are the conservative CDU/CSU, the radical right-wing AfD, and Die Linke. If Die Linke were to disappear, then people who do not agree with the coalition politics can only shift further to the right.’
The latter is exactly what is happening in a number of eastern states, where the protest vote no longer goes to Die Linke, but to the radical right-wing, anti-immigration, and now also anti-corona party AfD. Elsewhere, too, parties are taking a bite out of Die Linke’s raison d’être. The Greens have, in addition to environmental politics, also feminist, gender and other identity politics. The SPD with social promises, despite Bauer’s criticism. Both parties benefit from the fact that highly educated left-wing Germans like to vote strategically. Less educated Germans vote less and less. Die Linke thus disappears further and further into the margins.
The core problem is: in recent years it has become less and less clear what Die Linke now stands for. Roughly speaking, there are three wings: the anti-capitalist fighters for the working class, the mainly West German Social Democrats who work for change within the system, and an increasingly assertive young guard who joined Die Linke out of love for its uncompromising fighting ethos but also its own priorities: feminism, gender identity, and above all the fight against climate change.
‘No to war, and no to guns!’
That combative multiplicity, like an anti-authoritarian collection grass roots organizations deeply rooted in society, has always been the strength of Die Linke. But now that German society is changing rapidly, Die Linke appears to have the greatest possible difficulty in responding with one voice. And ever since Russia launched a war on Ukraine, tensions in the already rift pro-Russian “peace party” have occasionally risen to boiling point.
Because yes, dear comrades, said co-party leader Janine Wissler at the party congress, in an attempt to clarify the party’s new Russia policy once and for all in front of hundreds of Left members: we know that this conflict has a history. . “But the Russian leadership bears the responsibility, and this criminal war of aggression has no justification. The Ukrainians deserve our solidarity!‘
Wissler isn’t the first to say it, and certainly won’t be the last. The only question is: how exactly do we put this into practice?
Die Linke advocates targeted sanctions against Putin’s circle of oligarchs, but rejects an energy embargo that harms the Russian economy as a whole and drives up German prices. The party is adamantly against the planned investment of 100 billion euros in the German armed forces, and against arms supplies to Ukraine. A solution must come from diplomacy – a strategy that most German parties have found cannot work without military coercion.
Yet the view of Russia is also changing within Die Linke, says Mario Candeias, political scientist at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. This research bureau is close to the party. “There is a minority of older, East German members who feel close ties to Russia. They have often studied in the Soviet Union, and their ideas are deeply rooted in anti-imperialism, against NATO, against the US. But their numbers are dwindling. Some are dying out, others are now realizing that Putin’s Russia is different from the Soviet Union.’
A broad middle management of the party now condemns the Russian aggression – but in context. A narrowly passed party resolution states that Die Linke “denounces any war, both the Russian army’s anti-international law war against Ukraine and Turkey’s brutal attack on Kurdish territory and NATO’s long-term war in Afghanistan.”
Climate Justice
If there is one thing that scares voters away from Die Linke, it is the constant internal war that the members wage with each other. According to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, eighteen percent of voters can imagine a vote for the party. But when push comes to shove, almost all those voters go elsewhere, shaking their heads. Aided by social media and fueled by one crisis after another—pandemic, inflation, war—the party’s traditional struggle culture spills over the plinths of headquarters to the talk shows and newspaper pages.
If Die Linke says that she is pro-vaccination, then you can be sure that the next day a prominent MP in a talk show questions the usefulness of vaccinations. If the party rejects weapons for Ukraine, a squadron reports that same day with the wish to discuss armament. At the party congress itself, former party leader Gregor Gysi hardly spokenor a party member rushed to the microphone to denounce Gysi’s disapproval of gender-neutral language.
Yet unity is possible, says Adelheid Rupp (63), a lawyer who switched to Die Linke eighteen months ago from the social-democratic party SPD. And she can explain how in one word: climate justice.
The young people who now enter politics usually worry about different things than the left-wing young people from Rupp’s youth. The unions are out, social justice is abstract. The new addition of Die Linke is about gender identity, or refugees, but above all: climate change. That seems very different from what concerns the older working-class generation, who in the middle of the afternoon start washing down bratwurst sandwiches with pints of beer.
‘But climate justice is precisely the theme on which we can find the connection in our party,’ says Rupp. ‘That means that with all environmental measures we ask ourselves: how does it affect the weaker members of society? The Greens want everyone to be obliged to buy an electric car, but what if you can’t afford it? We need to tell the elderly that climate is also about exploitation, and explain to our young people that we cannot save the world if the system stays the way it is. Within capitalism, the question is not whether we are taking good care of the environment, but: are we making a profit?’
And who knows, says Rupp, it may turn out that the existential crisis of 2022 turned out to be just a transition to a new future for Die Linke.