A Renewed Leadership

The newfound hope in Die Linke is partly connected to the renewed leadership of the party. Last August, Janine Wissler and Martin Schirdewan, coleaders of Die Linke, announced they would not seek reelection at the Halle party congress. The decision followed the severe setback at the European elections and came even before Die Linke lost more than half of its votes in September’s regional contests in eastern Germany, mainly to the advantage of BSW.

Wissler and Schirdewan declared themselves exhausted from spending so much time dealing with inner-party conflicts instead of mounting a left-wing challenge to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling “traffic light” coalition of Social Democrats, Greens, and the hawkishly neoliberal Free Democrats. Marketed as a “coalition of progress” for the post–Angela Merkel era, the current government has constantly been shelving social projects initially announced with much fanfare.

For instance, the mooted introduction of child benefits for low-income families has been sacrificed at the altar of balancing the national budget, while the coalition has discarded redistributive measures like reintroducing a wealth tax, abolished in 1997. Meanwhile, the government has successively given in to the demands of the center-right Christian Democratic Union and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) on immigration, most symbolically the introduction of police controls at all German borders in September, notwithstanding the nominally free movement guaranteed by the EU’s Schengen Area.

The new coleaders of the party, together with a significantly renewed party board, are Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken. Schwerdtner was the editor of the German edition of Jacobin until 2023, when she joined Die Linke and ran as a candidate for the European Parliament. In fact, she would currently be a member of this European assembly had Die Linke managed to repeat its 2019 scores. Meanwhile, van Aken was an MP for Die Linke in the Bundestag from 2009 to 2017. Until his election last weekend, he was working on foreign policy issues for the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, a political foundation affiliated with Die Linke.

Announcing his candidacy, van Aken mentioned that he had acquired diplomatic skills during his time as a biological-weapons inspector at the United Nations that could be useful to mediate inner-party conflicts. Such skills were already put to the test before the national party congress, in the negotiation of a joint resolution on the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, antisemitism, and racism. That a consensus resolution could be found and then supported by a comfortable majority was far from self-evident in the days before the party congress: there had been considerable fears that deep internal differences over the Middle East could derail the meeting.

Door-to-Door Campaigning

On the last day of the party congress, Schwerdtner and van Aken presented their plan for the coming months. They mooted a “preelection campaign” based on Die Linke members visiting a hundred thousand houses across Germany by February 2025 to get a more accurate idea of citizens’ main concerns. These worries should be reflected in the final election program, expected to be approved at the next party congress in May 2025.

Not coincidentally, the speaker that preceded the presentation of this plan was Nam Duy Nguyen. In September’s elections in Saxony, he was one of the two candidates elected in the city of Leipzig who secured Die Linke’s presence in the state parliament even though it won only 4.5 percent of the overall vote. Due to the particularities of Saxon election law, a party can fail to meet the 5 percent threshold to win seats but nonetheless be represented in rough proportion to its overall vote so long as it wins at least two local constituencies.

Nguyen and his vast team of supporters campaigned for months before the election, visiting homes in his central Leipzig constituency. On election day, he gained 40 percent of the votes, and Die Linke’s party list secured 20 percent in the same area. A closer look at the results shows how impressive the success was: it appears to indicate that Nguyen did not only benefit from Green or Social Democrat voters splitting their support in his favor, but also relied on a broader electorate.

The door-to-door campaigning in Leipzig was a very positive note for Die Linke in an otherwise very negative set of regional elections in September. It is thus only reasonable to explore its national-level transferability, as Schwerdtner and van Aken hope. Still, Leipzig is an idiosyncratic case. The city has the second-largest number of Die Linke members, after the capital Berlin, and it saw one of the biggest increases in party membership anywhere in Germany in 2024.

It is less clear how useful this model is in large, western cities where there are fewer Die Linke members, and its message meets with skepticism due to its distant roots in the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the reforming successor to East Germany’s ruling party. Perhaps equally difficult to reach for Die Linke, albeit for different reasons, are rural areas in the former East, where its membership has waned and Wagenknecht’s BSW is rallying support.

Something completely beyond Die Linke’s control, but perhaps crucial for its otherwise promising immediate strategy, is the timing of the next parliamentary elections. While they are scheduled for September 2025, there are constant rumors that the perennial crisis of Scholz’s coalition (which in September sank to its lowest favorability rating yet, at only 16 percent) will provoke its collapse. Even this would not automatically trigger new elections, but the uncertainty remains.

There is also the possibility that repeat elections will be needed in the eastern states where government formation remains stalled after September’s regional ballots. If nothing unexpected happens, the next such election would, however, be in Hamburg next March. This is one of just four states where Die Linke obtained more than 5 percent in the European elections.

At the party congress, there were expectations that a good result in Hamburg (maybe with the help of national coleader van Aken, who is well-known in the city) could help to turn around the narrative about Die Linke being condemned to political irrelevance. Support in preelection polls is a value in itself. Recent elections in eastern Germany showed that, at a time of record-high results for the AfD, opponents of the far right think twice before giving their vote to a left-wing party that might fail even to enter parliament.

In their first press conference as party coleaders, Schwerdtner and van Aken announced they will only claim the average German’s salary, and give everything above this to a solidarity fund for people in need. They hope other party members might follow. This is a measure similar to the ones implemented by the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) and the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB/PVDA). Schwerdtner and van Aken have an obvious personal connection that is no guarantee of success when elections come (Wissler and Schirdewan remained friends throughout their period as coleaders) but appears to be a necessary condition for Die Linke in a time of crisis such as the current one.

Delicate Balances

There is a widely shared desire within Die Linke to focus on a few key topics that party members should know inside out and be able to present to voters. These have yet to be clearly defined. They could include a rent cap, or higher taxes on the rich to pay for a green and social economic transition.

In a country as diverse as Germany, not all problems are uniformly felt. Whereas tenants in large cities are burdened with rents that have risen much faster than salaries and so would benefit from a price cap, in rural areas (especially in eastern Germany) the problem is rather the closing of shops and health centers and the emigration of young people. Programmatically speaking, Die Linke must find a common thread that resonates across Germany while paying attention to the specific realities in each different area.

There are clearly delicate balances to strike. Die Linke needs to recover at least part of its reputation as the party that can best represent the interests of eastern Germans. A focus on unequal salaries across Germany (the average salary in the east is one-fifth lower than in the west) is very important, here. Still, only 15 percent of the voters live in the east. Moreover, the political field will be far more crowded in eastern Germany if BSW maintains its support there.

Many delegates in Halle considered the BSW’s support not well-built to last (currently it has 5 percent support in the west and 12 percent in the east, if we take the European elections as our yardstick). Cracks between Wagenknecht and regional leaders in Thuringia — one of the three eastern states where the BSW is negotiating its entry into government — have become self-evident. These party delegates I talked to were, however, far less confident about Die Linke’s possibility of winning back voters it has recently lost to the BSW, within the short term.

Important for the People

If elections took place tomorrow, Die Linke’s most promising route to stay in the national parliament would not be overcoming the 5 percent threshold (which seems too high a bar) but winning at least three local constituencies. This would still allow Die Linke to be represented in the Bundestag, in numbers roughly proportional to its overall vote across Germany. The party in fact relied on this already in the last federal election in 2021, when it sank to 4.9 percent support.

Gregor Gysi, one of Die Linke’s most prominent members and the winner of a constituency in eastern Berlin in 2021, announced at the party congress that he plans to convince outgoing president of Thuringia Bodo Ramelow and Dietmar Bartsch, former coleader of the party’s parliamentary fraction, to run in their constituencies. Die Linke could also have realistic options of winning two other constituencies in eastern Berlin and one in Leipzig.

Leaving aside these important but, ultimately, tactical considerations, a successful path forward for Die Linke will probably only materialize if it takes seriously what a party delegate told me last weekend. The key, he said, is not whether Die Linke is important as a party — but whether it is important to ordinary people.