Germany’s Far Left Party is Fading Away

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Germany’s Die Linke (The Left) Party, deeply divided over priorities, suffered a disastrous collapse in last September’s German federal election, winning just 4.9 per cent of the vote.

As this fell short of the five per cent threshold required to guarantee a proportionate number of seats in the Bundestag, it has clung on only because of a rule stipulating that a party with a majority in at least three electoral districts (out of 299) is entitled to form a parliamentary group.

But the erosion in support was spectacular for a party which had achieved 12 per cent in 2009 and 9.2 per cent in 2017. This time it received just 2.3 million votes, scarcely more than half its 2017 total of 4.3 million. And its parliamentary party has been reduced to 39 MPs from 69 in the last parliament, out of a total of 736.

Fifteen years after the old Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in East Germany fused with ex-finance minister Oskar Lafontaine’s split from the Social Democrats (SPD) to form a unified socialist force, Die Linke’s future as a viable party and leading force in the European left is hanging by a thread.

Die Linke united two distinct groups. One was trade unionists and former social democrats disappointed by their party’s change of direction; the other was the heir to East Germany’s former ruling party. Thanks to its roots in the eastern Lander (states), the PDS had passed the five per cent threshold in 2005 for the first time since German reunification in 1990.

Die Linke flourished because it filled a vacuum. That cycle seems to be over. It has been losing its strongholds, even in the eastern states, where its numbers have halved in ten years, from 20 per cent to 9.8 per cent.

The dominant explanation for the defeat, within party ranks, is that voters turned their backs on Die Linke because of its constant infighting and inability to speak with a unified voice. Most blame is leveled against Die Linke’s former parliamentary speaker Sahra Wagenknecht, who resigned from that position in 2019 following a long public feud with former party cochairs Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger.

Wagenknecht’s latest book, Die Selbstgerechten (The Self-Righteous), was a three-hundred-page attack on her political opponents and what she calls “lifestyle leftists,” for whom being left-wing has become a question of culture and taste rather than material or class interests. The book left many in Die Linke feeling betrayed and many party members refused to campaign for her.

But the party has indeed struggled to define its role in Germany’s political landscape. Is it a protest party devoted to fundamental opposition, or a left-leaning corrective to the Social Democrats? A platform for disenfranchised East Germans, or one oriented toward the progressive intelligentsia and activists?

The latest example of this ongoing indecision came in late August, when the German parliament voted to deploy the armed forces to evacuate German citizens and government employees from Kabul as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. As the only party to have consistently opposed the war in Afghanistan, Die Linke should have been well-placed to reassert its claim as the only credible antiwar party.

Instead, it resolved to abstain on the vote, a compromise reflecting divisions among its MPs, some of whom think the party should drop its opposition to NATO in order to be more in tune with the zeitgeist. Even this failed to hold, however, with five Die Linke MPs voting in favor of the deployment and seven against.

During the election, Die Linke’s leadership campaigned in favor of a “red-red-green coalition” – the colours of Die Linke, SPD and the Greens. The result of this policy of adaptation was a disaster. Over a million former Die Linke voters switched to the other left of centre parties.

So who did stick to Die Linke? A demographic breakdown reveals the party won only six per cent of union members, five per cent of workers, and three per cent of voters without a college degree, suggesting that the heaviest losses were among the most disenfranchised. Its message now seems to hold little appeal for its traditional support base in the former East Germany or among the working class.