Members of Germany’s ailing far-left Die Linke (Left) elected new leaders on Saturday as the party hopes for a revival after a series of electoral defeats and a painful rift with a former party doyenne who hollowed out the parliamentary caucus.
The current leaders, Janine Wissler and Martin Schirdewan, are stepping down from the party leadership after the losses.
Journalist Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken, a former member of the German parliament, were chosen to replace them at the party congress in the eastern city of Halle on Saturday.
Die Linke entered a crisis after the party’s best-known figure, Sahra Wageknecht, quit to form her own populist party, called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW).
New leaders urge hope
Van Aken stated that he wanted to give the majority in the country a voice and tackle the ‘indecently rich’. Die Linke should offer a message of hope, he said.
“I no longer want to tell people how bad things are going for them,” Van Aken said.
Schwerdtner said the party needs clarity, focus and credibility. She also said she would like to re-establish Die Linke as a voice for former communist East Germany, a region that has largely lagged behind the rest of the country more than three decades after reunification.
“We are the opposite of fear, we are hope,” she said.
Schwerdtner was born in East Germany in 1989, but moved to the northern port city of Hamburg as a child and worked as a left-wing journalist. She did not formally join the party until the summer of 2023.
Van Aken, a 63-year-old biologist, was a member of parliament from 2009 to 2017 but resigned in a signal of his support for term limits. He said he currently has no plans to run for parliament again.
He said he learned organizing tactics while working with the environmentalist group Greenpeace, and also spoke Saturday about being a Catholic altar boy as a child: “What Catholics call charity, leftists call solidarity.”
Split left a weakened Die Linke behind
Wagenknecht’s departure at the end of 2023 followed repeated clashes with Die Linke colleagues over her anti-immigration views and traditional positions on certain social issues, such as gender policy.
She took much of the parliamentary party with her to form the BSW, causing it to lose its official status in the German House of Commons or the Bundestag.
Her party also performed well in three regional elections in eastern Germany last month, winning seats for the first time, while Die Linke suffered heavy defeats and even failed to participate in the Brandenburg state parliament.
Nationally, Die Linke scores a poll of 3% to 4%. Party leaders have set a goal of winning enough votes to retain seats in the Bundestag in the 2025 national elections.
Ramelow urges ‘new beginnings’
The central state of outgoing Thuringia Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow, a leading figure within the party that lost the regional parliament elections in September, urgently called for a new start within his party at the start of the conference on Friday.
“It really gets on my nerves that we’re so caught up in ourselves,” Ramelow said. He asserted that differences should be tolerated and that not every fool speaks for the party. Ramelow added, “I no longer have any desire to stick my neck out for every idiot who is on X.”
Ramelow said the party leadership must also be able to express strong words without immediately being attacked for it. He wished the new leaders, Schwerdtner and van Aken, strength.
“And I wish us the necessary strength to reorganize. For me, today marks a new beginning,” he said.
He claimed that the question was not whether you govern, but what you stand for, and took a veiled swipe at Wagenknecht’s populist politics.
“We don’t stand for populism. Populism is someone else’s business. Populism can’t buy you anything. We stand for tangible policies that help people every day.”
The approximately 500 delegates celebrated Ramelow’s speech with prolonged applause.
