Parties: A change in leadership is looming in the Left Party

A change in leadership is looming in the Left Party in the autumn. Chairmen 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 party executive with the state chairmen of the party in Berlin. A working group is to draw up a roadmap for a substantive, 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 earlier. It had already performed very poorly in the 2021 federal election and the subsequent state elections. This week, former parliamentary group leaders Gregor Gysi and Dietmar Bartsch called for “structural, political and personnel renewal”. Saxony-Anhalt parliamentary group leader Eva von Angern urged Wissler and Schirdewan not to run again at the party conference.

Criticism also of the critics

Wissler and Schirdewan have led the party together since 2022. Schirdewan had recently indicated that he was considering withdrawing at the party conference. 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. But there was also criticism that Bartsch and his supporters had fueled a personnel debate in public.

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. A large proportion of the votes came from former Left voters.