Only real Berlin political anoraks had heard of Susanne Hennig-Wellsow before last February, when she transformed a harmless bunch of flowers into a potent political weapon.
As a member of the state parliament in Germany’s central state of Thuringia, she had just witnessed a political earthquake: the local leader of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) had just been elected state premier in a secret pact with the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
Hennig-Wellsow was the parliamentary party leader of the Left Party, whose outgoing state premier had just been duped. Instead of congratulating the new FDP state premier, she tossed the pre-prepared bouquet at his feet and walked away.
Minutes later, cheeks flushed with outrage, she told television cameras: “There’s no doubt what happened here today was a pact with fascism.”
Days later, mounting outrage pushed the FDP man out again, while on Saturday, Hennig-Wellsow was clutching, rather than throwing, flowers.
The 43-year-old was elected to head the Left Party with new co-leader Janine Wissler, previously parliamentary party leader in the neighbouring state of Hesse.
Progressive coalition
Germany’s first women political duo has just seven months until federal elections, where their main priority is to use Angela Merkel’s departure from the political stage to break her CDU party’s hold on power. Their alternative proposal: a “progressive” coalition of the Left Party with the Greens and the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
An opinion poll last Friday gave the Left just 9 per cent support, and a three-way coalition at about 42 per cent. Even if the arithmetic gap to a majority is closed, the three parties have a lot of political ground to cover – and baggage to deal with.
The Greens are mulling an alliance with the CDU, while many SPD members will never forget the postwar years – their eastern members were forced into a marriage with the East German communists to form the Socialist Unity Party.
Since German unification in 1990, the SPD and the Left Party – in its various iterations over the years – have worked often at state level. But a federal alliance remains blocked by SPD wariness and a long-running identity crisis inherited by the new Left leaders.
Divisions
Theirs is a party with dozens of sub-groupings: anti-capitalist, socialist, Marxist, communist. Some welcome the party’s push to win younger, western urban voters – one in five members are now under 30 – while others say it will push ageing, eastern working-class voters towards the AfD.
The two leaders represent the party’s inner divisions. The 39-year-old Wissler is more anti-capitalist, telling the largely online party conference: “We want to push through a wealth levy and disappropriate where it’s necessary to protect the common good. . . this is not just about a bigger slice of the cake, this is about the bakery, the whole thing.”
As a leftist candidate, she was elected with 84 per cent support, while the pragmatic Hennig-Wellsow took 70.5 per cent.
The two women now have to resolve their conflicting positions on how close or distant a relationship to have with Moscow; and whether the Left’s traditional opposition to Nato and all military deployments also includes peacekeeping.
Hennig-Wellsow says pro-Moscow positions are the views of “some members, not the Left Party”, while on Nato and military missions, she insists the party programme is “rather flexible”.
Stable government
Elected an MP at 26, Hennig-Wellsow has form on making things happen. In 2014 she led coalition talks that ended with her boss, Bodo Ramelow, becoming Germany’s first minister president from the Left Party in 2014.
That record of stable government has robbed Left Party critics of one stick with which to beat her; another stick, the burden of the East German past, is weakened given the two new leaders were children when the Berlin Wall fell.
After years of repudiating Left Party advances, SPD leaders now agree that Germany needs a CDU-free coalition from September to shape the post-pandemic political agenda.
“The Left Party is caught up with inner-party battles,” said Saskia Esken, SPD co-leader, asked by Die Zeit weekly about a possible alliance. “But I remain confident, simply because the tasks ahead of us demand leftist answers.”