Left Party | Federal Election: The Re-Formation of the Left Party

Although familiar faces such as Bodo Ramelow, Gregor Gysi, Sören Pellmann and party leader Ines Schwerdtner, who won their direct mandates by a large margin, are also entering the new Bundestag, the Left Party is on the verge of a real cultural revolution.

Ferat Koçak's first-ever conquest of a "western" constituency, namely Berlin-Neukölln, was spectacular. A veritable grassroots movement had formed around the Kurdish activist in recent months. Despite a sometimes fierce campaign by Berlin newspapers, which accused Koçak of anti-Semitism because of his criticism of Israel, the campaign managed to almost triple the left-wing first vote share in Neukölln to 30 percent - and that against relatively popular competitors from the SPD and the Greens.

Members of parliament who want to make the Left more extra-parliamentary are also being elected via the state lists. Among those from Hesse is Violetta Bock, who has been doing neighborhood work in the disadvantaged north of Kassel for years and who already made significant gains in the 2023 mayoral elections, bucking the Hessian trend. Luigi Pantisano from Stuttgart, who is regularly threatened by the extreme right because of anti-racist posts on social media, has a similar profile. Pantisano attracted national attention in 2020 when he almost won the CDU-run town hall in Konstanz in southern Baden with 45 percent of the vote.

Lea Reisner, a nurse who is involved in sea rescue and recently described herself as an anarchist in an interview , is entering parliament via the North Rhine-Westphalia state list. Stella Merendino, who works in a Berlin emergency room and has been active in the strike movements of recent years, is also a nurse. Merendino almost won the fifth direct mandate in Berlin: in the end, she was only one percentage point behind the Green favorite in the Berlin-Mitte district.

Another noticeable change is that the old east-west divide is being leveled out. In the western German states of Hesse, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, the Left was almost as strong with over 8 percent each as in Saxony-Anhalt with 10.8 percent or Saxony with 11.3 percent. The composition of the Bundestag parliamentary group is shifting accordingly: in 2021, around 40 percent of the MPs came from eastern Germany (including East Berlin), but now it is only a quarter. By far the largest number of MPs in the parliamentary group is sent by the North Rhine-Westphalia regional association, which was already believed to be dead after the trench warfare with Sahra Wagenknecht, namely 13.

The unexpectedly good results in the West mean that many young MPs are hardly known even within the party. For example, 24-year-old Luke Hoss from Passau comes from Bavaria. He comes from a family affected by poverty and has announced that he will limit his politician's salary to 2,500 euros. Almost as young are the trade unionists Charlotte Neuhäuser (26) from North Rhine-Westphalia and Zada ​​Salihovic (25), who have both made it their mission to fight against precarious employment.

It is also noteworthy that the importance of established professional politicians is declining. Cem Ince from Lower Saxony, who comes from a well-known trade union family in Salzgitter, works at VW. Mirze Edis from Duisburg is a steelworker at the Krupp Mannesmann steelworks, and Cansin Köktürk from Bochum, who left the Greens in 2023 because of the traffic light government's migration policy, works as a social worker in outreach family and youth welfare.

Three quarters of the new parliamentary group are new to the Bundestag. The latest development - that the social movement against the far-right has literally taken over the party through mass membership - will now also be reflected in parliament. This certainly brings with it problems: many MPs are inexperienced, and the temptations of professional politics have already changed many activists more quickly in the past than they themselves and, above all, their voters would have liked. But at the same time, the result is also an opportunity: the new parliamentary group represents the social left better than it has for a long time.