Self-dissolution accomplished
The left faction no longer exists
December 6, 2023, 1:24 a.m
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Sahra Wagenknecht and nine other members of the Left Party have given up their party books, but they want to keep their Bundestag mandates. Now the inevitable end of the group follows. Parliament now has an unusually large number of individual representatives at times.
The left-wing faction in the Bundestag has been politically history since midnight. Your own resolution to dissolve became effective at 12:00 a.m. This means that all 38 affected MPs are considered “non-attached” for the time being. The background is the departure of Sahra Wagenknecht and nine other MPs from the Left party. You want to start a competing project in January.
This was preceded by years of conflict over direction. Wagenknecht’s colleague Christian Leye said that there was of course sadness when the group was dissolved. “In the group, but also in the party, there are people who I respect very much and, above all, value. In the end, however, it was a political decision: the majority of the officials on the left no longer faced the crises of the time .” Answers are needed to social division, economic decline, war and the rise of right-wing anti-democrats. “We are facing this, and that is good and right,” said Leye.
Group status applied for
The former parliamentary group members want to regroup in two different groups in the Bundestag: the remaining 28 MPs from the Left on the one hand and the ten MPs from the “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance” on the other. The Left has already applied for this to the Bundestag, and Wagenknecht’s group wants to do it next week.
Such groups generally have fewer rights than parliamentary groups in the Bundestag. For example, for small and large inquiries or to apply for a current hour, parliamentary group status or a majority of five percent of the MPs is required. Groups also receive less financial support from the state. The details will be regulated in a Bundestag resolution. It is unclear when the plenary session will decide on this.
The left-wing faction was founded in 2005 from members of the Left Party.PDS and the WASG, two years before the two parties formally merged. On October 23rd, Wagenknecht and nine other MPs announced that they were leaving the Left Party. But they wanted to keep their mandates. Since the parliamentary group would miss the minimum size of 37 seats without the ten parliamentarians around Wagenknecht, it decided in November to liquidate itself from December 6th. The so-called liquidation process could take months or years because all contractual relationships have to be wound up. This includes the termination of around 100 employees.