DIE LINKE’s co-leaders Janine Wissler and Martin Schirdewan will step down at October’s party conference, they have announced.
Germany’s Left party executive met at the weekend, agreeing to a main resolution to conference that acknowledges it is in a “dangerous, existentially threatening situation.”
It polled just 2.7 per cent in June’s European elections, barely half what it needs to ensure re-election to the Bundestag and less than half the vote of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, whose eponymous leader led a breakaway from Die Linke last year, primarily because of the latter’s failure to oppose militarism and back peace demonstrations.
A report in the Morning Star’s sister paper Junge Welt said Die Linke barely touched on the issue of peace in its resolution, failing to recognise a key cause of its decline in support.
Ms Wissler argued in a recent online piece for Die Linke’s in-house magazine that the party should have forced a split with Ms Wagenknecht earlier, though it is unclear how this would have helped its polling.
In part two of May’s Berlin Bulletin, VICTOR GROSSMAN, having assessed the policies of the new government, looks at how the opposition is faring
