Election of Bartsch’s successors
The left can make noise even without a car driver
By Lukas Wessling
February 19, 2024, 8:02 p.m
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After losing its parliamentary group status, the Left cannot prevent a vote on Dietmar Bartsch’s successor. The party proves that it doesn’t need Sahra Wagenknecht to argue and elects a duo that will now have to fill up trenches again.
The eternal bone of contention fell from the tree last year: at the end of October, Sahra Wagenknecht and her entourage left the Left. Now the man who tried for so long to somehow hold the camps together has faded into the background: Dietmar Bartsch, parliamentary group leader for six years, only wants to be a backbencher in the future. And yet the left happily continues to argue.
Now that they are no longer a faction, the remaining leftists in the Bundestag have elected a new leadership in a vote: the new leaders, Heidi Reichinnek and Sören Pellmann, only lead a group of 28 MPs. That doesn’t make their job any less important. On the contrary. After the breakup of the parliamentary group, you have much less of what is particularly valuable in the Bundestag to distribute: speaking time.
If the Left does not want to slip below the five percent hurdle in the next federal election and thus come one step closer to insignificance, it must use the remaining time. What is important for this is to settle the internal disputes and fill in the remaining trenches. Even after the faction’s split, after the farewell to Sahra Wagenknecht and her people, there are still enough of these trenches. This became apparent at the latest in the run-up to the election of the new group leaders.
Gender star or government participation?
The party could have agreed on a new leadership in the Bundestag before the vote and thus avoided the impression that it could not help but argue. But with Sören Pellmann and Heidi Reichinnek on the one hand, and Clara Bünger and Ates Gürpinar on the other, two dual leaders announced their candidacy. The latter stand for the so-called movement left and thus for a liberal migration policy, for ecological change and social emancipation. Opposed to them are leftists who uphold the party’s traditions: the connection to the working class milieu, the strength in the East. For this camp, government participation is more important than gender asterisks; here the left movement is considered too academic, too urban. Pellmann and Reichinnek represent this wing.
Pellmann and Reichinnek had already taken part in the election for party leadership in 2022. At the time they were defeated by Janine Wissler and Martin Schirdewan, but they received remarkable support. Even back then, her closeness to the MPs who later left the party together with Sahra Wagenknecht was emphasized; Pellmann was even considered Wagenknecht’s confidant.
The party executive committee met at the weekend. He wanted to prevent an open fight for the chairmanship of the group and therefore asked the candidates to reach an agreement before the meeting. According to the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, Bünger and Gürpinar were said to be open to a compromise in the run-up to the election, while Pellmann and Reichinnek were probably not.
Two extremely narrow victories
The refusal to compromise was worth it for Pellmann and Reichinnek. The new group chairmen narrowly won two battle votes: Left federal managing director Ates Gürpinar had withdrawn his application during the process. His competitor Bünger was defeated by both Reichinnek and Pellmann in two rounds of voting with only 13 to 14 votes each.
Pellmann and Reichinnek’s success is not a success for the party. You have a maximum of one and a half years left until the next federal election. Wagenknecht’s solitary movements took energy. For years, the left fought each other on the open stage, and at times the party was only seen as a dispute in the media. Wagenknecht was political capital and a mortgage at the same time. It brought in votes in elections, and in between times its own often drowned out the rest of the party. After Wagenknecht’s departure, the self-proclaimed peace party now has to find internal unity.
The Left must use the Bundestag stage to give those eligible to vote in Germany reasons to vote for them. That should be difficult enough with united forces. The newly sparked dispute will put additional strain on the new dual leadership. Pellmann and Reichinnek have to hold together a group that consists of winners and losers after this election.
The only chance lies in quick reconciliation
After all, the Left has succeeded in bringing about a generational change with the election of the new group chairman. At 35, Reichinnek could easily be the daughter of her predecessor, 65-year-old Bartsch. She entered the Bundestag for the first time in 2021. Her party colleague Pellmann, at 47, is also below the party’s average age.
Reichinneck is also successful on a platform that is popular with young people and on which the AfD in particular can score points: Tiktok. Her most successful contribution is a video with almost four million views, in which she takes aim at the “gender madness” of the right.
Pellmann is a Leipzig local politician who won the Left’s first direct mandate in Saxony in 2017. Pellmann also secured the direct mandate in the last federal election and thus saved the Left in the Bundestag with the strength of its parliamentary group. At the beginning of 2022, he was criticized for a statement that condemned the Russian war of aggression, but attributed the USA “significant co-responsibility for the situation that arose”. Pellmann later said that the classification was “a reaction that was not entirely well thought out in this situation.” All co-signers of this declaration later migrated to Sahra Wagenknecht’s alliance, except Pellmann.
Pellmann and Reichinnek must now be keen to get their opponents involved quickly. The inferiors must not see themselves as inferiors for too long. This is the only way the Left has the chance to show its presence in the Bundestag with substantive work and to create a basis for re-entry into parliament.