Wagenknecht not invited
Gregor Gysi celebrates his 75th birthday
01/16/2023, 07:18 am
Gregor Gysi is 75 years old. However, the left-wing politician does not want to think about retirement. In addition to his talk series at the Deutsches Theater and his career as a lawyer, he is looking to 2025. A position in the Bundestag would particularly appeal to him.
Around his 75th birthday, Gregor Gysi’s schedule doesn’t allow for a break. Politically in the second row, the left-wing politician remains otherwise as active as ever. Gysi goes on a reading tour with his books, continues his talk series at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and takes on legal mandates, such as those he recently did for the climate activists of the last generation.
On his birthday, the trained cattle breeder and lawyer looks back on more than three decades in top German politics. As the voice of the losers from reunification and reunification skeptics, the long-standing leader of the Left parliamentary group shaped the united Federal Republic like – apart from former Chancellor Angela Merkel of the CDU – hardly any other politician from the East.
Gysi was born in Berlin in 1948 as the son of the communists Irene and Klaus Gysi. His father was East German culture minister for seven years. After graduating from high school and parallel vocational training, Gysi studied law and practiced the profession of lawyer, which was rather rare in GDR times. The fact that Gysi did not have a career as an official is explained by doubts about the authoritarian course of the state party SED.
Distance to state power disputed
How great Gysi’s distance to state power actually was remains controversial. He defended himself against reports that he had cooperated as a lawyer with the Stasi. At least there was enough distance to the old leadership to be elected SED chairman after the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of 1989. Within months, however, the state that this party embodied was history.
Integrating the SED, which was burdened by deaths on the Wall and crimes by the Stasi, into the parliamentary system of the West was actually a hopeless undertaking. Nevertheless, Gysi and his comrades-in-arms succeeded. The successor party PDS and later the left were the people’s party, at least in the east, for many years.
In his autobiography “A life is too little”, published in 2017, Gysi reports on the twists and turns of his CV. With his own pun and a lot of self-mockery, he writes about his “skillful wanderings between duties”.
“From a certain age you have to take care of yourself”
Gysi makes no secret of the high price paid for his political successes – three heart attacks, a failed marriage, quarrels with once close companions. “I have this almost physical reflex to endure and resist,” says Gysi in the biography, with which he is also going on a reading tour this January.
He learned one thing in good time, Gysi said on the occasion of his birthday to “Stern”: “From a certain age you have to take care of yourself.” Swimming, cycling, table tennis and hiking are all part of his leisure program.
Gysi was always elected by people who are not close to the left – he always went into the Bundestag with a direct mandate. His last one, from autumn 2021, helped the Left Party to be back in the Bundestag thanks to a total of three direct mandates, although it failed to clear the five percent hurdle.
“Rejecting to Hostile”
Gysi had to accept a bitter personal defeat early in his political career: he threw down his only government office as Berlin Senator for Economics in a red-red coalition in 2002 after a few months and justified the step with his own misconduct in connection with bonus air miles.
Gysi retired to the second row of the left in 2015 after many years as parliamentary group leader. The series of talks with prominent contemporaries give him more pleasure than his constantly quarreling party, which is threatened by a split. Here he can live out his passion for arguing in front of an audience.
However, the decision to go into political retirement is far from over. In any case, in “Stern” Gysi left open whether he would run for the Bundestag again in 2025. He would be tempted by the position of senior president, which the longest-serving MP is entitled to. “It would be a certain satisfaction,” said Gysi, mentioning how “negative to hostile” he was when he entered the Bundestag in 1990.
Gysi wanted to celebrate on a larger scale with his parliamentary group, as he revealed to “Stern” – and give a private party. When asked whether Sahra Wagenknecht was also invited, Gysi said that his guest list included “rather personal friends”.