Germany: How three old men hope to save the Left Party

Germany’s Left Party is struggling for survival. For many weeks, opinion polls have put them well below the 5% threshold for representation in parliament. Now, three of the party’s most senior and most popular politicians have decided to make sure their party is represented no matter how poor the overall performance.
On February 23, 2025, Germany will hold snap elections. Voters have two votes: one for a candidate in their constituency, the other for a party. This second vote determines the number of seats a party gets in the Bundestag. Any party that scores less than 5% fails to get representation.
However, an exception exists: If three party candidates win in their respective constituencies, the 5% threshold is waived.
This exception in electoral law came to the Left Party’s aid in the 2021 federal election when it garnered only 4.9%. However, because three Left Party candidates won their constituencies, the Left was allowed to fill 4.9% of the seats in parliament and send a total of 39 MPs.
The Left Party hopes to pull off this rare feat once again.
However, this is likely to be even more difficult this time, as the Party will probably lose a lot of voters to the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which split off from the Left Party in early 2024 and has since performed significantly better in regional elections and opinion polls.
Gregor Gysi, Bodo Ramelow, and Dietmar Bartsch, who are well past their retirement age, may now be the best hope for a party that dates back to the communist GDR (German Democratic Republic) and is now more worried about its future than ever before.
They call their renewed candidacy for the Bundestag “Mission Silver Locks.” An ironic reference to their average age of 70.
The most prominent among them is Gregor Gysi, who is turning 77 years old. He played a pivotal role in the successful transformation of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in East Germany (GDR) to the Left Party it is today. 
Gysi, a former lawyer and eloquent orator, has been a member of the German Bundestag almost continuously since 1990, winning his Berlin constituency eight times by a wide margin. 
Gysi believes that he and his party continue to be a much-needed voice in reunified Germany: “If arguments from the left are no longer heard in the Bundestag, debates will become a lot more limited,” he said, adding that the Left Party was still the voice of eastern German voters more than any other party.
This view is also shared by Dietmar Bartsch, Gysi’s decades-long comrade and confidant. The 66-year-old comes from the northeastern region of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the Left Party has been part of the state government since 2021 in coalition with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).
Bartsch has said that there is only one left-wing party in the Bundestag: the Left Party. “All the others tend to jockey for the center,” Bartsch said.
Bartsch, who holds a doctorate in economics, has been a member of the Bundestag since 1998 with only a brief interruption. He has also served as the parliamentary group leader and, as managing director of the Left Party, has organized numerous electoral campaigns.
Unlike Gysi, however, Bartsch has never won his constituency and got into parliament only via his party’s state list. A victory in his constituency would, therefore, be a first.
The third of the three most promising Left Party candidates is Bodo Ramelow, the head of government in the eastern state of Thuringia. 
Ramelow, who is also now 68 years old, recently lost in his state’s election but remains very popular. If he wins his constituency for the Left Party in the Bundestag elections, it would come as no surprise.
Ramelow was a member of the Bundestag from 2005 to 2009. Now, together with Gysi and Bartsch, he wants to help his badly shaken party back into the Bundestag.
There has been criticism of the candidacy of the three older men. The Left Party’s membership has an average age of 55 and only one-third of them are women. Critics suggest that rather than banking on elderly candidates to lead the party into the future, it should embrace diversity and focus on the younger generation in the big cities. 
This article was originally written in German.
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