In the East, the Left is barely a 10 percent party. There has been a loss of votes in the West as well. The leadership of the party has announced a repositioning.
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| [Bundestag Election 2021] |
The federal election of 2021 is a disaster for Die Linke, which will be debated in the next days and weeks. With an election campaign that received no support for the "red-green-red" government option, and in which the party leadership - and this should be emphasized, without opposition from the elected party executive, about whom rumors circulated lately that he was finished - Despite dubious surveys and cold responses from possible "partners," it was declared unequivocally just before election day that "it is of course anticipated that there would be at least exploratory discussions with the SPD and the Greens Party struck the hard wall of the real world."
As of Monday, the second vote result was nearly halved when compared to the 2017 Bundestag election, which had a nearly equal voter turnout of 76%. On the credit side, 2.27 million votes (4.9 percent) were cast, compared to 4.29 million in 2017. (9.2 percent). The Left is a ten percent party in the republic's east, with a further decreasing tendency, as seen by dismal results in historical strongholds such as Brandenburg (8.5 percent) and Saxony (9.3 percent). In Thuringia, too, where the prime minister and state party leadership sought not long ago to wrap themselves in the mantle of the "People's Party," the left landed at 11.4 percent on Sunday, putting them in fourth position after the AfD, SPD, and CDU.
With an average of 3.6 percent in the west, the left is far from the 5% threshold that Bavaria even cleared in 2017. Even in Hesse, where Copartier Janine Wissler was born, the party polled at less than 5%; it was only slightly higher in Bremen, Hamburg, and Saarland, all of which saw severe losses. North Rhine-Westphalia, the state organization of the party with the most members, lost more than half of its votes from 2017 and now has a 3.7 percent vote share. The nation's most populous federal state is once again dominated by a left-wing diaspora.
In the end, voters in the two Berlin seats of Treptow-Köpenick and Lichtenberg, as well as in the electorate Leipzig II, avoided the Left Party's total federal political crash landing. The party can enter the Bundestag with the number of seats that corresponds to its second vote result, thanks to the three direct mandates of Gregor Gysi, Gesine Lötzsch, and Sören Pellmann; the parliamentary group status is also preserved, as the party represents 5% of the MPs. An example of how thin the ice on which this parliamentary group will function can be seen in Lichtenberg, where Lötzsch earned 36,790 votes and the second-placed SPD candidate received 28,031. The Left Party was saved from political extinction at the federal level by a margin of about 8,000 votes (it was likewise 8,000 in Leipzig).
Petra Pau's success in the ostensibly "safe" Berlin district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf, where the PDS and the Left got over half of the first votes in the 1990s and 2000s, demonstrates that this is no longer true. With just 21.9 percent of the vote, the CDU candidate Mario Czaja defeated the Bundestag vice-president (minus 12.3 percentage points compared to 2017).
In a word, the loss of votes described here is catastrophic, with life-threatening implications if the trend continues. They can no longer be ignored, as the setbacks in the state elections in Saxony and Brandenburg in 2019 shown, which foreshadowed the outcome of the federal election in more ways than one. The next day, there was a short reference of "disaster" and "catastrophe," but no real assessment or discussion of the reasons took place.
There are no longer two sides to the election outcome, at least on the descriptive side. Tobias Pflüger, the deputy party chairman who failed to re-enter the Bundestag via the Baden-Württemberg state list, talked to jW on Monday about a "catastrophe." The faction had been "almost halved," which meant that »MPs and staff in key subject areas had vanished«. The party must pay special attention to the fact that it "is and will be part of the social battles within and beyond parliament" as part of the reform. Ulla Jelpke, the Bundestag faction's domestic political spokesman who did not run again, told this publication that she had "anticipated such a catastrophic outcome."
The "entire ingratiation to the SPD and the Greens in recent weeks" was so successful that the people "preferred to pick the original social-democratic-green." Parts of the party and parliamentary group leadership had made it plain even before the election that "they felt neither bound by the basic nor the electoral platform" in the discussion over Bundeswehr and NATO deployments abroad. To the core electorate, that was a terrible message. Kathrin Vogler, a member of the Bundestag, underlined that the Left has lost over a million votes to the SPD and the Greens, and that "despite the strong voter participation, it has even been handed to non-voters." "Without a tight partnership with the old and new social movements," the party's "reinvention" would fail: "A left party without a social foundation would always have to cower before the 5% obstacle."
The failure of the "left-wing" apparatus faction's political strategy in the Bundestag election is far too apparent and significant to be contained and covered up in the normal manner. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility of attempting it. Even after the initial prognosis, which put the party at 5%, Kopartechef Susanne Hennig-Wellsow told ARD on Sunday evening that the left was still "ready" to form a government, as if in a trance.
A few days later, Thuringia's state chancellor, Benjamin-Immanuel Hoff, dared to come out of hiding on Twitter, saying that the election result was the result of "a strategic decision that had been delayed for years, as a socialist party clearly in favor of a progressive one Design claim to be in government responsibility." In simple English, the party's political-programmatic adjustment for »Red-Green-Red« in the federal government should have happened considerably sooner and with much more severity.
In the next days and weeks, a crucial question will be whether the party's active right flank can impose Hoff's premises for the now-unavoidable discussion. For the time being, that option is available. The "reformer" camp is contradictory in its actions. On election night, Faction leader Dietmar Bartsch corrected Hennig-Wellsow, emphasizing, "Our role in the German Bundestag will be the opposition." Jan Korte, the former legislative director, talked of a "catastrophic result" early on and confessed that election failures were not publicly and properly evaluated.
Hennig-Wellsow and co-party leader Janine Wissler declared their intention to continue in office on Monday. "For us, it's about continuing to be accountable," Hennig-Wellsow added. The causes of the outcome, according to Wissler, were deeper and could not be rectified via personnel decisions. The party executive committee should meet over the weekend to review the election results and their implications. Hennig-Wellsow saw the "serious setback" as a "final chance" to move the party forward, she added. The left will have to "reinvent itself." As mentioned above, this can potentially be a threat.
At any event, during a news conference in the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus on Monday afternoon, the leadership of the party and parliamentary group displayed solidarity in an unusually light tone. Bartsch commended Wissler and Hennig-Wellsow for putting an end to the party's "quarrelling." “We are a parliamentary group,” he stated in response to a query from JW about if the scenario reminded him of 2002. Besides, this time I was a top candidate, not the campaign manager.
Source: Junge Welt(Germany)