The left didn’t wait until election night to ask who was to blame for the party’s poor performance. The mistakes were not made in NRW, said the top left candidate Jules El-Khatib a few days before the election Sunday. Others would have to ask themselves questions.
The others, according to this interpretation, are those in Berlin, they are the party executive and the parliamentary group. The fact that the Left Party in North Rhine-Westphalia, with only 2.1 percent, clearly missed entering the state parliament could fuel the dispute within the party about the orientation of the content and about people.
The Left Federal Chairwoman Janine Wissler spoke of a “very disappointing, a bitter result” on the evening of the election. Your party is in a difficult situation. must regain trust and “be in the press more with clear messages than with arguments,” said Wissler on ZDF.
Then the chairwoman named figures that are very far removed from the actual election results of her party in North Rhine-Westphalia. Polls would show that a left-wing party in Germany has a potential of 19 to 20 percent. Now the question is “how do we reach this potential again”.
Five years ago, the left in North Rhine-Westphalia narrowly failed at the five percent hurdle. In the end, the party was missing just over 8,500 votes to enter the Düsseldorf state parliament. But this time the left has more than halved its 2017 result. In some election graphics, she is no longer listed individually on Sunday evening, but is already counted among the “others”.
The state association, which is considered divided, tried to put old conflicts behind it during the election campaign. In addition, the Left put representatives of the climate list on its state list, thereby preventing the party’s climate list from competing in this election. But the informal alliance with the climate protection movement did not help the left in North Rhine-Westphalia over the five percent hurdle.
NRW is also the state association that made the former Left Party leader in the Bundestag, Sahra Wagenknecht, the top candidate in the federal elections. From North Rhine-Westphalia, however, came the request to expel her from the party.
The application failed, but the arbitration commission in North Rhine-Westphalia accused Wagenknecht of having seriously damaged their party. Wagenknecht had accused the social left in Germany of self-righteousness and had also been harsh on her own party. While younger members of the left want to open the party more to the topic of climate protection, Wagenknecht’s supporters categorically reject this.
As a speaker, Wagenknecht can still fill marketplaces. However, she only appeared twice in the North Rhine-Westphalian election campaign, in Bochum and in Wuppertal. But even with Germany’s best-known left-wing politician as the driving force, the left in North Rhine-Westphalia only got 3.7 percent of the votes in the federal elections.
Bad news is piling up for the Left Party. First the heavy defeat in Saarland, where the party crashed and was kicked out of the state parliament, then the vain attempt to enter parliament in Schleswig-Holstein, and now the renewed defeat in North Rhine-Westphalia. The party made national headlines with its proximity to Russia, with a sluggish processing of
According to the party leadership, the federal party conference in Erfurt at the end of June should now send a signal that the party wants to reposition itself in terms of content and personnel. However, old conflicts about the program and people could then break out again. Party leader Wissler left open on Sunday evening whether she wanted to continue.
