Members of Germany’s ailing hard-left Die Linke (The Left) chose new leaders on Saturday as the party hopes for a revival after a series of electoral defeats and a bruising split with a former party doyenne that hollowed out the parliamentary caucus.
The current leaders, Janine Wissler and Martin Schirdewan, are stepping down from the party leadership following the losses.
The journalist Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken, a former member of Germany’s parliament, were chosen to replace them at the party conference in the eastern city of Halle on Saturday.
Die Linke was thrown into crisis after the party’s best-known figure, Sahra Wageknecht, quit to form her own upstart populist party, dubbed the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW).
New leaders urge hope
Van Aken declared that he wanted to give the majority in the country a voice and take on the “indecently rich.” Die Linke should offer a message of hope, he said.
“I no longer want to tell people how shit things are going for them,” said van Aken.
Schwerdtner said that the party needs to have clarity, focus and credibility. She also said she’d like to re-establish Die Linke as a voice for the former communist East Germany, a region that has largely continued to lag behind the rest 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 only formally joined the party in the summer of 2023.
Van Aken, a 63-year-old biologist, served in parliament from 2009 to 2017 but resigned as a signal of his support for term limits. He said he currently does not have plans to run for parliament again as a candidate.
He said he learned organizing tactics while working with the environmental activist group Greenpeace, and also spoke on Saturday of being a Catholic altar boy as a child: “What Catholics call charity, leftists call solidarity.”
Split left a weakened Die Linke
Wagenknecht’s departure in late 2023 followed repeated clashes with Die Linke colleagues over her anti-immigration views and traditional stances on some social issues like gender policy.
She took a large chunk of the parliamentary party with her to form the BSW, leading it to lose its official status in the German lower house, or Bundestag.
Her party also performed well in three regional elections in the east of Germany last month, gaining seats for the first time, while Die Linke suffered heavy defeats, even failing to enter the Brandenburg state parliament altogether.
Nationwide, Die Linke is polling at 3% to 4%. Party leaders have set a goal of winning enough votes to maintain seats in the Bundestag in 2025 national elections.
Ramelow urges ‘new beginning’
The central state of Thuringia’s outgoing Premier Bodo Ramelow, a leading light within the party who lost out in elections to the regional parliament in September, urgently called for a fresh start within his party at the start of the conference on Friday.
“It really gets on my nerves how we are so preoccupied with ourselves,” Ramelow said. He asserted that differences must be tolerated and that not every fool speaks on behalf of the party. Ramelow added, “I no longer have the desire to stick my neck out for every idiot who is on X.”
Ramelow mentioned that the party’s board must also be able to articulate strong words without being immediately 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 the question was not whether one governs, but what one stands for, and took a veiled swipe at Wagenknecht’s populist politics.
“We do not stand for populism. Populism is someone else’s business. You can’t buy anything with populism. We stand for tangible policy that helps people on a daily basis.”
The roughly 500 delegates celebrated Ramelow’s speech with prolonged applause.
