Germany’s long election campaign, full of ups and downs, marked the end of 16 more or less placid years with Angela Merkel, 67, and her Christian double party, known as the “Union” (its Bavarian component stays somewhat separate). Until now it had joined up with the Social Democrats (SPD) as increasingly uncomfortable junior partners. But now, without Angela, her unlucky Union followers ended up with the worst vote in their history (24.1 %) and an embarrassing second place.

They were edged out by their SPD ex-partners, headed by Olaf Scholz, 63, with 25.7%. A pillar of the right wing of his party, he is burdened by shady corruption scandals from his earlier days as mayor of Hamburg and his recent years as Minister of Finance. But his confident, nonchalant personality and his party’s position as lesser evil won out after an amazing upward swoop from its hand-wringing debility and despondency less than a year ago.

But to head a new government a majority of the Bundestag seats is necessary. In the past this always required a twosome. But the big chamber, jammed with 735 deputies, is now split up among six (or seven parties if one counts the Bavarian “Christians” separately), making it almost impossible for even two parties to reach a majority; so Olaf Scholz now needs two partners for a threesome. If his attempts fail, the Christians would get the option, and if they can harness up such a troika, they might still get to drive the ruling sleigh despite their second pace in the voting. Their losing leader Armin Laschet is still pressing  a political defibrillator with such hopes, but many in his Union blame him for the defeat and now prefer to drop him and his dreams of reversing fate. In this case, fate depends on two smaller parties – the Free Democrats and the Greens – who must join three-player Skat with the Union or with the SPD.

The two always disliked each other. The Free Democrats (FDP), openly and unashamedly favor untaxed, unregulated big business and they downplay ecology. Perhaps due to a well-spoken leader who skilfully sold voters on pure “trickle-down” economics with “digitalization”, the FDP shinned upward to an unexpectedly high 11.5%.

The Greens long scorned such reactionaries. But now, increasingly conservative,  they have become  friendlier with sectors of big business, especially auto giants like Daimler and Porsche. After an amazing but very brief stay at the top of the ladder in the polls, they slipped back to a far more modest 14.8%, which was still the best in their history. So now, with the Free Democrats smelling a chance at some of those warm, comfortable, perk-laden cabinet seats they have done without for so many years, the two seem to be smoothing over differences and will most likely opt for Olaf. We should soon know their decision.

What about the other two Bundestag parties? The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has now chosen two co-chairs; one from the ranks of more rabid pro-fascists, the other from its cultivated all-for-democracy (“Who? Us Nazis?°) wing, only slightly embarrassed when the other wing betrays all too soon its genuine beliefs and plans. Although the rabid wing won alarming first places in two East German states (Saxony 24.6% and Thuringia 24%), on the national level they only just held on to a two-digit result (10.3%) – far too high but far less than they expected and down 2.3% from 2017. As yet, no other party dares to have anything to do with them.

Disaster for Die LINKE

The most important election result is hardly discussed in the media – and when it is, then with satisfaction or joy. It is, in fact, a truly sad result; DIE LINKE (The Left) came out worst of all the Bundestag parties, losing about two million votes, getting barely over half the 9,2 % it received in 2017 (when it became the leading opposition party) and coming close to losing its entire status in the Bundestag, which requires a vote total of at least 5% in the national vote. The Left, with only 4.9%, was just saved from total defeat by a special rule in Germany’s complex election rules, which I had better explain here:

When Germans vote they make two crosses on their ballots; first, for a candidate in their own district, second, for the party they prefer. The winner of the first vote gets a seat directly. The percentage a party obtains in the second vote determines how many seats it will receive, even if it doesn’t win out in a single district. Who gets these seats is decided by a list chosen by each party before the election; the more crosses obtained in that second column, the more of the nominees on the list will get a seat. If 5% is not reached nationally then none on the list get in, but only those – if any – who won out on their own in their own district. It’s a complicated system but does guarantee smaller parties a voice – if they can reach 5%.

Sadly, the Left missed that red line level – but was miraculously saved by a special rule; if three or more delegates of a party win out in their own districts – with those first crosses – then their parties and their proportionate lists are saved, just as if they had reached 5%. And, thanks be to God or some secular deity, the Left managed to barely squeeze through. Two candidates won seats in (East) Berlin and another in eastern Germany’s second city, Leipzig. Its 4.9% will thus get it 39 seats, far less than the previous 69, but enough to form a caucus with all of its rights, rooms, staff jobs and privileges.

This near total disaster, saved by a thin thread, is of great importance. Germany, the most powerful country in Europe, is intent on economic and military expansion on a scale second only to the USA (and/or China). In a quest for supremacy it still plays second fiddle to the Pentagon and Wall Street but is aiming at bass viol strength. All the German parties support these endeavors, all have ties, some very close, some more complex, with powers-that-be like Bayer-Monsanto, BASF, Daimler, Aldi, Krupp, Rheinmetall, the Deutsche Bank.

All but The Left, that is, with no such ties and alone in opposing a dangerous course which, despite good business with both, moves ever more belligerently towards confrontation with Russia, China or both. A few voices in the SPD have called for the removal of American nuclear bombs from German soil or opposed armed drones, but they were not the voices of Olaf Scholz or Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. As for the Green leaders, they are loudest in demanding that Germany “stand up” to Russia! In the Bundestag the Left has been alone.

Why did the Left lose?

Why, oh why has the Left lost so severely, reducing its solo voice to an even smaller whisper?

One reason, doubtless, was a red-baiting campaign by the Union’s Armin Laschet. In the last weeks of the campaign, desperate to regain party strength, he warned dramatically of a threatening SPD-Green-Left take-over which would plunge poor Germany into a Bolshevik hell like that still peddled daily as typical of the German Democratic Republic. But that was neither new nor successful. The pressures of the Corona virus also played a part, limiting efforts of smaller parties to reach voters.

Far more injurious were the endless quarrels among its leaders, gladly played up in the mass media, and often centering around the personality of Sahra Wagenknecht, the party’s finest orator and best known media figure but who, step by step, has broken with her former leading positions in the party. Whether this was based on personal animosities and jealousies, personal ambition, or genuine strategy differences, it boiled up during the campaign and did plenty of damage to the party’s image.

But for many on the left the main cause of defeat was the hope of some party leaders to join with the SPD and the Greens in a coalition government. For years this was only a tiny possibility, but when the Greens and the SPD gained so swiftly in the polls, it began to look as if they might look to the Left for the necessary delegate majority to harness up a troika team – and rule the German roost!

With this goal in sight, The Left electioneering turned more and more against the Christian Union and the  big-biz Free Democrats, while sparing the Greens and the SPD so as not to hurt their feelings, alluding only to mild differences which could surely be ironed out.

This, however, required a willingness to compromise on basic questions, while both SPD and Greens stuck to their guns – almost literally! Could The Left, if in the government, further oppose NATO and call for a wider and peaceful combination of European states – including Russia? Would it continue to reject deploying Bundeswehr troops to foreign conflicts or on foreign missions? If it did, it was insisted, they could be not be included in any governing coalition! Despite the agreed-upon Left party program this is where some of its candidates and leaders weakened: “We should not remain too hard-headed” – “We must distinguish between good missions and bad ones” – “We must weigh each mission individually.” Etc.

Those on the left in The Left said: “No means No! These are excuses, means of letting  the camel ‘put just one toe in the tent!’ To start with!” The Bundeswehr is a vital part of German expansion plans, a successor to German military aggression in Africa around 1900, in World War One and, above all, in World War Two. There can be no compromises on this issue; The Left should instead remain in opposition, save its political soul and forgo the pleasures and honors of a minor cabinet seat or two and a bit more respectability in western Germany, where – for transparent reasons – it is largely ostracized or ignored.

This policy of going easy on the SPD, the Greens and its own principles backfired disastrously. Voters who disliked or feared the post-Merkel Union did not so often vote for the far-right AfD (except in embittered Saxony and Thuringia) as for the SPD and the Greens, leaving the Left in the lurch – as a weak and hardly effective part of the Establishment. Its main candidate, Janine Wissler, did her best to counteract this trend but felt compelled to walk a narrow, rocky path in debates and interviews. And 600,000 former Left voters switched to the SPD!

On many economic issues and especially on war and peace the delegates of the Left fought valiantly in the Bundestag. But it was far too rarely visible in struggles in the streets, in the shops, fighting evictions or in other sectors of everyday life and struggle where people felt most affected. Their candidates were almost always intellectuals or, if from the working class, then from its white or pink collar sectors. Few even hard-hit voters connected the Left with their personal problems.

Some Exceptions – in Bremen, Leipzig and Berlin

There were exceptions. In Bremen the active Left was strong enough to get into the city-state government – and keep fighting! The Left delegate in Leipzig who saved the party from near oblivion, the teacher Sören Pellman, frequently went to market-places or wherever people gathered, spoke with them, tried to help them whenever he could, a conduct he recommended for others. He received an amazing 22.8% of the vote, far more than any other – or his own party!

A big example of successful contact with the people was in Berlin, where an active non-party group fought to get their initiative on the ballot: “Confiscate Deutsche Wohnen” – the company owning  110,000 apartments in the city and constantly forcing long-time tenants out so as to gentrify the buildings, causing an acute shortage of affordable apartments. The real estate giants would be recompensed at market rates for such confiscation, but the tenants, with city ownership, would be saved from any more rent increases and from evictions.

Happily, the Left supported the group; within a few months it helped in getting 350,000 signatures to put it as an “initiative” on the ballot. The Greens also supported it – but only in a luke-warm limited way. The SPD opposed it; it has too many ties to the real estate biggies who, greatly frightened of this new movement, threw everything they could muster against it – but lost. In a glorious victory – a lone bright spot in the election – the initiative received a fantastic 59% of the votes.

It must now be debated and ruled upon in the newly elected city-state legislature. Despite its betrayal, the SPD won the city-state election; its popular candidate will soon be the capital city’s first female mayor, who also opposes confiscation. Perhaps, if Die LINKE had pushed this issue more visibly, and on a national level, it might have had better results. But the issue is still very hot and can become  contagious – a good contagion  for a change!

The big questions are now: can the Left become a street and shop level fighter in coming struggles? Can it maintain its positions against armaments and military interference around the globe? Can it hold onto and spread its convictions that the billionaires and their monopolies are the biggest menaces to German democracy, to the environment and to peace? Can it mobilize a vigorous, rousing  movement, involving people of Turkish, Kurdish and other national backgrounds,  but especially all the underprivileged and most heavily exploited? Those are no easy tasks, but indicate, I believe, the direction the Left must take if it wishes to play a renewed, growing and vitally necessary role in adding strong stones while developing the world’s rapidly changing architecture.

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Note on a neighbor

It may interest some readers that in a recent election in Graz, Austria’s second largest city, the Communist Party won the most votes (28,8 %) and will be the strongest party in the city council, a pay-off for years of attention to the problems and needs of working class tenants.

At six o’clock in the evening on Sunday, the German public television stations ZDF and ARD published their first electoral projections as the polling stations closed. Die LINKE was facing the abyss as it fell below 5%, the threshold that keeps political parties out of the Bundestag unless they win at least three directly mandated deputies in the districts.

The German voting system is a double ballot: one for the district (personal) candidacy and one for the party. If the party vote is above 5% of the overall ballot, the seats for deputies in the lower house are then distributed accordingly.

The tension was evident in Die LINKE headquarters. There was silence in the places where the militants were gathered, worried faces, some tears and clenched fists. The projections from the first counts were not at all flattering and there were even some that showed 4.9% – a fateful situation that would mean the disappearance of any party to the left of the Social Democracy in the Bundestag. If anyone wondered, the Greens would not be that leftwing alternative.

However, at around ten o’clock in the evening, there was finally some good news. Although the projections still kept Die LINKE outside parliament in the vestibule of a Dantesque hell, it was confirmed that three direct candidacies were entering the Bundestag. Firstly, the immortal Gregor Gysi (73 years old) once again swept up the Berlin-Treptow-Köpenick constituency with 20% of the poll, well ahead of any other candidate. Secondly, Gesine Lötzsch kept her place for the sixth time in her direct mandate in Berlin-Lichtenberg. By contrast, die LINKE lost its direct mandate in other historically left-wing districts such as Berlin-Pankow or Berlin-Marzahn-Hellersdorf.

Last, but by no means least, as this confirmed Die LINKE’s participation in the forthcoming parliament, was the anti-fascist resistance in Saxony (which is otherwise dyed with the blue of AfD on the electoral maps). Sören Pellmann once again kept his seat for the second election running in the district of Leipzig II, extending his winning margin compared to 2017.

What happened to Die LINKE at the federal level?

Although the scare of being banished from parliament has now receded, the concern at how close it was has not diminished. The result is frankly, bad. And even with the results still hot out of the oven, there are already some clues as to what happened.

For less politicized people, it is clear that the 2021 election has been a pragmatic vote to try to oust the ruling CDU/CSU conservative party, now missing its leader Angela Merkel, German Chancellor for the last 16 years. The competition between Analenna Bärbock, leader of the Greens, and Olaf Scholz, of the Social Democrat SPD, to win the hegemony of the center to the left, has pulled many votes from Die LINKE over to these parties.

This becomes clear when one sees the double direction of the vote in Berlin, where Die LINKE held on to 14% (-1.6%) in the elections to the city-state’s house of representatives while at the same time only obtaining 11.4% (-7.3%) in the elections to the Bundestag within the traditionally left wing German capital.

For more politicized people, however, there are more clues. Die LINKE had neither succeeded in establishing its own profile in the campaign nor in making its candidates, Janine Wissler and Dietmar Bartsch, well known to the voters. This could have been because there was too much discussion about possible government coalitions and not about the program itself.

On the other hand, a certain Die LINKE politician called Sahra Wagenknecht has had her own very divisive effects on this election. The best-known Die LINKE leader has continued to monopolize the party’s representation on television, blocking any possible change of ideological leadership at least within the public mindset. Her lack of solidarity and her eagerness for the limelight is evident on all television stations, which are currently her last resort to defend political theses that are in the minority within Die LINKE ranks and which, moreover, have been unsuccessful. As a candidate of Die LINKE in North Rhine-Westphalia, she obtained a miserable 3.7% and has lost more than 50% of the electoral support. In Berlin, which would be the core of the left that she despises, the loss of support has been much smaller.

It is worth remembering the role that Sahra Wagenknecht has played in weakening Die LINKE in this last year. While the party was proposing a program where important issues such as climate justice, solidarity with migrants or feminist and LGTBI+ policies were opening the way, Sahra Wagenknecht published a book entitled Die Selbstgerechte, mein Gegenprogramm (the self righteous ones, my alternative programme), where she charges against Fridays for future, against the activism of social movements and makes a conservative and in certain aspects nationalist-worker retreat far removed from the theses supported by the majority and from a German society that is not the same as that of the 60s or 70s. Her stubborn effort to win support in the media for what she has lost in the party and not to accept her campaign’s results has also damaged Die LINKE in these elections.

Wagenknecht’s campaign has led to a wave of disaffiliations from the party, mainly in North Rhine-Westphalia, her stronghold, and has alienated possible new supporters from social movements. Her acolytes have also distanced themselves from Die LINKE by accusing the party of putting her in the moral dock, an inference only derived from the fact that Wagenknecht has toured the televisions as if she was a victim.

In Berlin, Die LINKE resists and the expropriation referendum sweeps through

While it is true that Die LINKE has lost some positions in Berlin, the constant mobilization of the militancy during the last year, against the background of Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen, the referendum to expropriate 240,000 houses from the big real estate companies, has kept Die LINKE with its own defined and combative profile in the German capital. In Berlin, it was the only party with parliamentary representation which clearly and unequivocally supported the referendum. The 14% it acquired in the state elections, although lower than desired, shows that mobilization, coherence and persistence are the best allies for the left.

However, Die LINKE Berlin has not managed to channel the full force of the expropriation movement despite being the only party to strongly support it. The referendum had a historic turnout of 75%, with a YES support of 56.4% and a NO of 39%, far from the tight results that the polls were suggesting. 1,034,709 people voted to expropriate the big real estate companies and now it is up to the Berlin chamber to decide whether to legislate or not.

Franziska Giffey, leader of the Berlin Social Democrats and (almost certainly) future mayor, has declared on several occasions that she does not want to expropriate, despite the fact that the referendum has a majority support among her voters, among the party’s youth and in a good part of the rest of the party.

The Greens in Berlin declared that they only wanted to convert the expropriation into law “as a last resort”, ignoring the fact that it is already the last resort, since the German Constitutional Court overturned the rent regulation, the Mietendeckel (rent cap), using the justification that Berlin did not have the competence to enact it. Die LINKE has found room here to continue defending the legislation of expropriation and socialization of housing, to exert pressure and to continue setting a coherent profile of its own that keeps militants and like-minded people mobilized.

After all, the combative wave generated by the expropriation movement is not going to be diluted from one day to the next, especially if the parties do not comply with the democratic mandate. In all this context, it is not known whether the left-wing coalition in Berlin will be renewed or whether Giffey’s SPD, the most conservative wing of the party, will turn to the liberals.

The elections, especially for those of us who live in Berlin and are members of Die LINKE, have left a bittersweet taste in our mouths. The worrying trend at the federal level has been compensated for by a decent result in Berlin and a very promising referendum result. Now it is time to draw the future of the left in Germany, to achieve the definitive generational change in Die LINKE, to strengthen the policies of climate justice and to defend the argument that we must change the capitalist system to save the planet. We must continue defending international solidarity and the right to asylum and migration, extend the right of the vote to people without German nationality, as well as continuing to denounce the social inequalities of a system that suffocates health workers, pensioners and young people who cannot find stable and quality employment.

Jaime Martínez, Izquierda Unida Berlín / Die LINKE. Steglitz-Zehlendorf

This article first appeared in Spanish in Mundo Obrero. Translation Jaime Martinez / John Culatto. Reproduced with permission