BERLIN — The German Left Party was thrown into crisis after the leadership demanded that controversial party icon Sahra Wagenknecht give up her seat in parliament because she is thinking about founding a new party.
“The future of the Left is a future without Sahra Wagenknecht,” party co-leader Martin Schirdewan said in Berlin over the weekend.
In a unanimous statement, the Left Party leadership called on 53-year-old Wagenknecht, the party’s parliamentary group leader from 2015 to 2019, to give up her Bundestag mandate, and demanded that she refrain from founding a competing party project. The Left Party is the smallest German opposition party, currently polling at 4 to 5 percent, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
Wagenknecht, who has attracted attention as a populist critic of the government — especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine — has often flirted with the idea of founding her own party.
Left Party co-leader Janine Wissler said over the weekend that “the party leadership made it very clear to her [Wagenknecht] two weeks ago that she should publicly and promptly distance herself from the plan to found a competing party.”
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Wagenknecht, a regular guest on German talk shows, let the ultimatum pass, and even added fuel to the fire in an interview with Welt on Friday, saying she was holding talks about founding a new party and hoped that something would “get moving.”
Despite the calls from the Left leadership to decide soon whether she would remain in the party, Wagenknecht reiterated her plan not to make that decision until the end of the year. She had previously declared that she would no longer run for the Bundestag on behalf of the Left Party, but herself did not initially want to comment on this weekend’s decision when asked by DPA newswire.
Former Left Party leader Bernd Riexinger welcomed the party leadership decision to demand that Wagenknecht give up her mandate. “Now the fun is over,” Riexinger told RND. Wagenknecht would “not have taken an ultimatum seriously,” so it is “the right time to create clear conditions,” he added.
Parliamentary group leader Amira Mohamed Ali spoke out against the leadership’s statement. She considered the decision a “big mistake and unworthy of a party that is committed to solidarity and plurality,” Mohamed Ali said Saturday evening.
Former leader Klaus Ernst and current chief whip Alexander Ulrich on Sunday called on the party leadership to resign en masse, accusing them of dividing the party and leading it into irrelevance, FAZ reported.
Sevim Dağdelen, a senior lawmaker, told Tagesspiegel newspaper that the leadership’s decision would further exacerbate the party’s course toward becoming a meaningless sect. “This path is self-destructive,” she said, adding that instead of dealing with the massive problems in the country, they are trying to force out a popular politician, dissolve the Bundestag faction and split their party.
